Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  No one who knew Trudeau personally would ever have thought to describe him as arrogant. He was too shy to be prime minister, his old Brébeuf friend and rival Jean de Grandpré had told him. And people who knew him outside of politics knew him as humble, as generous, as thoughtful, as warm. An attentive lover. A loyal friend. A loving father. After his retirement, his children became the focus of his life. If he had not found a lasting love with a woman, at least he had found it with them.

  He had re-emerged into public life only twice after his retirement, both times decisively, to slay the monster of Meech and then the Son of Meech, Charlottetown. But the true monster he would fight, like Beowulf suiting up in old age to fight the unnamed dragon, would be the death of his son Michel, killed skiing in the Rockies in November 1998, when an avalanche swept him into Kokanee Lake. He was twenty-three.

  In the hero tales, there is always something to pay. The infidelity of Guinevere. Odysseus’s long journey home. Beowulf, mortally wounded, dies. It might have crossed Trudeau’s mind that Michel on the mountain, just as Trudeau himself had often done, had been pretending to be his father.

  I COULD NOT QUITE FATHOM, back in the 1980s, what Trudeau’s concern with the Charter was. I had assumed, in a general way, that we were already covered, and in fact we were. John Diefenbaker, of all people, had passed a Bill of Rights into law in 1961, and though the BNA Act overrode it, there were surely enough precedents in British common law, going all the way back to the Magna Carta and before, to cover most contingencies.

  But I had misunderstood. For a precedent there is always a counter-precedent; not so with a charter. There is only one. Below it, every law of the land, every by-law, every precedent; above it, only sky. The Charter, legal experts say, has revolutionized the legal and political landscape. Just as Trudeau envisioned, the power has passed from the hands of the politicians, who now must meet the standards of the Charter with every bill. Whether the power has truly passed into the hands of the people or simply into those of the legal establishment is an unanswered question, though for many people the Charter, across a wide range of issues, has given rise to the same sort of national pride that Trudeau himself once aroused.

  Not so much in Quebec, perhaps. In Quebec, the Charter has often been seen as merely the last stage in an erosion that went back to Trudeau’s first days in office, when what had started out under Lester Pearson as a commission on biculturalism got reduced under Trudeau to one on mere bilingualism. In place of the bicultural country, Trudeau gave us the multicultural one, a move that in English Canada was often seen as a cynical ploy to woo the ethnic vote and in Quebec as another attempt to divide and conquer. For Trudeau, however, the notion of multiculturalism, however much Made in Canada it seemed, likely went back to the tag he had pinned to his door at Harvard, “Citizen of the World,” when for the first time, perhaps, he had begun to understand politics in terms that went beyond his own narrow history and culture. That sudden opening of perspective would remain at the heart of his political vision, and of his notion of government not as the guardian of some sort of nationalistic ideal but as a practical attempt “to find a rational compromise between the divergent interest-groups which history has thrown together.” This was a task as necessary in China, with its myriad ethnic groups, or in Africa, with its arbitrary colonial borders, as it was in Canada or as it would be in the former satellites of the Soviet Union. The Charter was Trudeau’s attempt to encode this spirit of “rational compromise” in law so that the many could never trample the rights of the few.

  The Charter was also, clearly, his swipe at the ethnic nationalism he saw still lurking in the separatist movement. In this, however, he ran up against a contradiction. While the Charter seems fundamentally incompatible with any notion of “special status” that bases itself on shared history or shared ethnicity, the idea of “many” and “few” grows ambiguous in the case of Quebec, where the francophone majority will always remain an embattled minority within the anglophone sea that surrounds it. There has also been a development in Quebec Trudeau might not have considered, the birth of a new sovereignist party, Quebec Solidaire, that disclaims any ties to ethnic nationalism, and that in 2008 sent its first MNA, Amir Khadir, to the Quebec National Assembly. Ironically, it is a party that Trudeau himself might have founded. In place of the appeal to shared history or shared blood, it appeals to exactly the sorts of shared values—pluralism, feminism, environmentalism—that have become the clarion call of the post-Charter generation.

  A few years ago, not long after the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a Charter challenge against Canadian marriage law, I served as one of the best men at the same-sex marriage of two friends at Toronto’s City Hall. The first act of my friends as a newly and legally married couple was to serve as the witnesses for the couple who came in behind them. They had come from Quebec, where the same-sex challenge had not yet wound its way through the courts. It would be hard to imagine a stranger pairing: one was a railthin, blue-eyed Russian from Siberia who stood six-footseven and spoke not a word of English and only a smattering of French; the other was a pudgy Haitian from Port-au-Prince who stood maybe five feet in heels. Konstantin and Widy. They had driven five hours that morning from Montreal to say their vows—and would drive five hours back immediately afterwards to a waiting reception. They were clearly in love.

  Back during the 1968 leaders’ debate, Réal Caouette, leader of the Ralliement créditistes, joked that Trudeau’s Criminal Code amendments might lead to a situation where “a man, a mature man, could in the future marry another mature man.” Caouette had his joke while Trudeau, awaiting his response time, smiled civilly and held his tongue. In 1968 what Caouette was proposing was so far from the realm of the imaginable that it constituted a reductio ad absurdum, a rhetorical device Trudeau would have recognized from his Brébeuf days. In his response, Trudeau passed over the rhetoric and stuck to the substance, with impeccable logic, making Caouette’s views seem suddenly a thing of the past.

  Trudeau himself surely could not have envisioned back then, any more than Caouette could have, the scene I was part of in that city hall reception room. Yet in a real sense, he was responsible for it. Nearly forty years further on, I still felt his shadow at my back.

  TRUDEAU DIED ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2000, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. Arrangements had been made for him to lie in state in Ottawa, then to be taken by train to Montreal to lie at City Hall before a funeral at Notre Dame Basilica. Organizers were unsure what the public’s response would be to the death of someone who had left public life more than sixteen years earlier. They had their answer. One of them wrote:

  From the long lines on Parliament Hill, to the school children lining the tracks in Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec, to the crowds that met his casket when it arrived in Montreal, to the line-up to say goodbye at City Hall, to those who stood patiently outside the Cathedral during the funeral service, and finally, to the millions of Canadians who followed the events across the country on television, the response was dignified, emotional, and massive.

  He had been hated and loved, but mostly respected. At his eightieth birthday, his son Alexandre, in a rare interview, had talked of the lesson his father had learned from the Jesuits.

  “You take what you are and you thrust it out as hard as you can. And what’s left is what’s true.”

  Trudeau was buried in the little town of Saint-Rémi-de-Napierville, his family’s ancestral home. He had wanted to run there instead of in Mount Royal when he joined the Liberals in 1965, but Marchand had told him he couldn’t win. Now, however, the town was happy to have him.

  SOURCES

  Annau, Catherine, dir. & wr. Documentary. Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the 70s Generation (National Film Board of Canada, 1999).

  Borins, Sara, et al., eds. Trudeau Albums. (Toronto: Penguin, 2000).

  Brittain, Donald, dir. & wr. Documentary. The Final Battle: 1977–1985. (National Film Board of Canada/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994
).

  Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC Digital Archives. Available at: http://archives.cbc.ca/search?x=1&q=Pierre+trudeau &RD=1&RTy=0&RC=1&RP=1&RA=0&y=18&th=0.

  Clarkson, Stephen, and Christina McCall. Trudeau and Our Times, Volume 1: The Magnificent Obsession (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), and Volume 2: The Heroic Delusion (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994).

  Cohen, Andrew, and J.L. Granatstein, eds. Trudeau’s Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999).

  Couture, Claude. Paddling With the Current: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Étienne Parent, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Canada. Trans. Vivien Bosley (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998).

  Craig, Brenda, Craig Oliver and Ian McLeod, prods. & wrs. Documentary. Pierre Trudeau: A Canadian Affair. (McIntyre Media, 1999).

  Dufour, Christian. A Canadian Challenge / Le défi québécois (Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books, 1990).

  English, John. Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919–1968 (Toronto: Knopf, 2006).

  ——, Richard Gwyn and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, eds. The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith Behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004).

  Grigsby, Wayne, wr., and Jerry Ciccoritti, dir. Drama. Trudeau (Big Motion Pictures, 2002).

  ——, wr., and Tim Southam, dir. Drama. Trudeau II: Maverick in the Making (Double Shoot Productions, 2004).

  Gwyn, Richard. The Northern Magus. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1980).

  Kidder, Margot. Personal Interview. September 3, 2008.

  Laforest, Guy. Trudeau and the End of the Canadian Dream. Trans. Paul Leduc Browne & Michelle Weinroth (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).

  Lalonde, Marc. Personal Interview. July 17, 2008 and August 4, 2008.

  Lévesque, René. Memoirs. Trans. Philip Stratford (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995).

  McKenna, Brian, dir. Documentary. Pierre Elliott Trudeau: Memoirs, Volumes 1–3 (Les Productions La Fête, 1994).

  McKenna, Terence, dir. & wr. Documentary. Black October (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2000).

  Nemni, Max and Monique. Young Trudeau, 1919–1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada. Trans. William Johnson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006).

  Pelletier, Gérard. Years of Impatience 1950–1960. Trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1984).

  ——, Years of Choice, 1960–1968. Trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1987).

  Radwanski, George. Trudeau. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978).

  Roux, Jean-Louis. Nous sommes tous des acteurs (Montréal: Éditions Lescop, 1998).

  Société Radio-Canada. Les Archives de Radio-Canada. Available at: http://archives.radio-canada.ca/recherche?q=Pierre+trudeau& RTy=0&RC=1&RP=1&RD=1&RA=0&th=1&x=13&y=12.

  Southam, Nancy, ed. Pierre: Colleagues and Friends Talk About the Pierre They Knew (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005).

  Trudeau, Margaret. Beyond Reason (New York: Paddington, 1979).

  ——. Consequences (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982).

  Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968).

  ——. Pierre Trudeau Speaks Out on Meech Lake. Ed. Donald Johnston (Toronto: General Paperbacks, 1990).

  ——. Memoirs. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993).

  ——. Against the Current: Selected Writings 1939–1996. Ed. Gérard Pelletier (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996).

  ——, comp. & ed. The Asbestos Strike. Trans. James Boake (Toronto: James Lewis & Samuel, 1974).

  ——, and Thomas S. Axworthy, eds. Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years (Toronto: Penguin, 1992).

  ——, and Jacques Hébert. Two Innocents in Red China. Rev. ed. Intro. Alexandre Trudeau. Trans. I.M. Owen (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, 2007).

  Wright, Robert. Three Nights in Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro and the Cold War World (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2007).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I would like to thank John Ralston Saul for trusting me with this project and for guiding me through every stage of it. My thanks also to Diane Turbide at Penguin for her editorial input and support and to David Davidar and everyone at Penguin for the tremendous energy and enthusiasm they have put into this series.

  George Galt was my first reader, and I thank him for generously sharing with me his own insights on Trudeau and for saving me from some embarrassing errors. Two lengthy conversations I had with Marc Lalonde were important in deepening my understanding of Trudeau, as was a conversation I had with Margot Kidder. John Fraser was kind enough to allow me access to the University of Toronto’s library services for my research. Steven Hayward and Katherine Carlstrom provided both material and moral support. Rowley Mossop and Stephen Henighan gave me sufficient provocation to keep the spectre of my ignorance always before me. Erika de Vasconcelos, as always, bore the brunt of my many inefficiencies. Finally, Bob Jackson and Uli and Thomas Menzefricke provided sanctuary at two critical junctures without which this book may never have been written.

  By far my largest debt, however, is to my sources. Given the format of this series and the absence of traditional footnoting or endnoting, it has not been possible in every instance to credit those sources with the thoroughness usual in more scholarly works. The online digital archives of both the CBC and Radio Canada proved invaluable during my research, providing a sampling of material related to Trudeau that spanned nearly fifty years. Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall’s Trudeau and Our Times, Volume 1: The Magnificent Obsession and Volume 2: The Heroic Delusion remain central to my understanding of Trudeau, and are very much present in this work. Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau, 1919–1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada provided me with crucial insight into aspects of Trudeau’s formation hitherto largely unknown. Finally, John English’s Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919–1968 served as my roadmap in my negotiation of the first half of Trudeau’s life. In his exhaustive analysis of the Trudeau archives and in his integration of archival material with other existing sources and his own original research, English has set the standard for future work on Trudeau. I am grateful to him for his book and for his generous permission to quote excerpts from it without fee. I am also very grateful to the Trudeau estate for their permission to quote without fee from Trudeau’s Memoirs and from archival material that appears both in Citizen of the World and in Young Trudeau.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1919 Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau is born on October 18 in Montreal.

  1921 Pierre’s father, Charles, gives up his law practice to found a string of service stations he will sell to Imperial Oil in 1932 for $1.2 million.

  1932 Trudeau enrols in the new Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal.

  1935 Charles Trudeau suffers a fatal heart attack while vacationing in Florida.

  1940 Trudeau completes his studies at Brébeuf at the top of his class. After failing to win a Rhodes Scholarship, he enters law school at the Université de Montréal.

  1942–43 Trudeau takes part in an underground revolutionary sect known as les X.

  1943 He graduates from law school and completes a year of articling at Hyde & Ahern in Montreal.

  1944 Trudeau enrols in a master’s program in political studies at Harvard.

  1946 After graduating from Harvard, Trudeau works at a gold mine in Abitibi, then begins a year of study at the Sorbonne.

  1947 He begins a year of study under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics.

  1948 Trudeau embarks on travels that take him through Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

  1949 After his involvement in the Asbestos Strike, Trudeau is turned down for a teaching job at the Université de Montréal and becomes a junior clerk at the Privy Council Office in Ottawa.

  1951 Trudeau quits the civil service and devotes himself to the journal Cité libre, founded by him and his friend Gérard Pelletier in 19
50.

  1956 Cité libre publishes The Asbestos Strike, a collection of essays edited and introduced by Trudeau.

  1960 The June election victory of Jean Lesage’s Liberals over the Union Nationale marks the beginning of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.

  1962 Trudeau publishes “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” attacking the new Quebec nationalists and their growing separatism.

  1965 Trudeau is elected to the federal Liberals, along with friends Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand.

  1966 He takes a position as Lester Pearson’s parliamentary secretary.

  1967 Trudeau is appointed justice minister and introduces controversial revisions to the Criminal Code that bring him national prominence.

  1968 Trudeaumania carries Trudeau to the Liberal leadership in April. In a June election, Trudeau’s Liberals take 154 of 264 seats.

  1969 Parliament passes the Official Languages Act, establishing English and French as Canada’s official languages.

  1970 The FLQ kidnap British trade commissioner James Cross and Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte from their Montreal homes. Laporte is killed after the Trudeau government invokes the War Measures Act.

  1971 Trudeau, aged fifty-one, marries twenty-two-year-old Margaret Sinclair after a secret courtship. On Christmas Day, Margaret gives birth to son Justin. Two more sons will follow, Alexandre (“Sacha”), born Christmas Day 1973, and Michel (“Micha”), born October 1975.

  1972 After a lacklustre campaign, Trudeau’s Liberals are reelected with a slim minority.

  1974 The Liberals regain their majority in a July election with the help of “the Margaret factor,” taking 141 seats to the Conservatives’ 95.