Pierre Trudeau
Pierre Trudeau, who has died aged 80, was, but for a break of 10 months, Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1984, and had claim to be the greatest Canadian prime minister of the 20th century.
Published: 12:01AM BST 30 Sep 2000
(Pierre Trudeau speaking at a fund raising dinner in Toronto, December 13 1983. Photo: REUTERS)
Bringing an infusion of glamour – even flamboyance – to government that led him to be compared to President Kennedy, Trudeau forced his countrymen to accept French as an official language from coast to coast, staved off Quebecois separatism and welcomed a flood of immigrants, transforming Canada’s ethnic constituency. He also removed control of its constitution from Westminster to Ottawa.
A small, disciplined man whose high cheekbones hinted at American Indian ancestry, he exuded an exotic charm that was enhanced by the art of image management. If Canadians were often exasperated by him, they were mesmerised by his personal charm, intellect and taste for expensive pleasures.
He enjoyed dancing with pretty girls in fashionable night spots, and seemed more at home with Barbra Streisand and John Lennon than with a Nova Scotia party worker or a prairie farmer. He married a flower child half his age, treated the monarchy with near-contempt and, spouting sociology, made the doubting of ancient institutions seem acceptable.
He also made a habit of giving play to his joie de vivre, often for the benefit of the cameras. On one memorable occasion, he performed a jig behind the Queen as he was accompanying her party into dinner. After his retirement, English-speaking Canadians looked back on him as the symbol of a golden era. Yet Trudeau’s years in office had left them less tolerant and less sure of themselves.
His fellow Quebeckers felt less Canadian and increasingly inclined to believe that their race would best survive in an independent state. Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal on October 18 1919, the son of an affluent French Canadian entrepreneur and his Scottish Canadian wife. He was brought up in a largely English-speaking household, but he went to the Jesuit College of Jean-de-Brébeuf and to the University of Montreal.
He then practised law. After the Second World War, in which he took little interest, Trudeau studied at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, Paris, and at the London School of Economics. It was at the LSE that he came under the influence of the Marxist theorist Harold Laski. Having returned to Montreal, Trudeau soon became involved in a bitter strike at the mining town of Asbestos. His role as the miners’ legal adviser cost him the university post he coveted.
Instead, he became a civil servant in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa. After two years he resigned and became the gadfly of Quebec’s Union Nationale government, writing essays which denounced the undemocratic roots of separatism, tweaked English Canadian political assumptions and hymned a multi-ethnic Canada.
He avoided, however, joining a political party, and in 1959 was at last offered an assistant professorship at Montreal University. But he became steadily disenchanted with the ruling Liberal Party and, having questioned the nationalisation of Quebec’s electricity companies, changed his mind about becoming directly involved in politics.
When the federal Liberals wanted to boost the Quebec representation in Parliament, they sought out the trade union leader Jean Marchand, who only agreed to stand for election if his friends Trudeau and the journalist Gerard Pelletier were also invited.
From the moment the three men arrived at Ottawa in 1965, Trudeau was the one who shone. Lucid, sophisticated, liberal, handsome and already familiar with the way things worked, he was soon chosen to be parliamentary private secretary to Lester Pearson, the prime minister.
As a racy bachelor who held a judo brown belt, wore leather overcoats and drove a sports car, Trudeau was viewed as the representative of the new generation. He achieved valuable exposure when the former (Tory) prime minister John Diefenbaker, jowls quivering, denounced him for appearing in Parliament wearing sandals and a scarf.
Notwithstanding, Trudeau’s obvious ability was such that after 16 months Pearson appointed him Justice Minister. While steering through an amendment decriminalising homosexuality, Trudeau remarked that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”. The phrase, borrowed from a newspaper article, struck a chord with the public, and people began to talk of his succeeding Pearson.
Soon afterwards the Government was defeated during a Budget debate, while the other candidates for the succession were away, and Trudeau was on the spot to rally the Government forces in the House. A whirlwind of enthusiasm, fed by an epidemic of journalistic hyperbole, parachuted him – to the astonishment of colleagues – into the Liberal leadership.
The election that followed was fought to the sound of screaming teenagers, whose presence at Trudeau’s rallies created Canada’s equivalent of Beatlemania. Trudeau achieved a comfortable majority and became Canada’s 15th Prime Minister.
Once confirmed in office, he started by taking a dispassionate look at the machinery of government. Experienced ministers were at first delighted at the daring of being asked to examine the necessity for Canada’s membership of Nato. But soon all noticed that the conduct of business was growing ever slower.
A stream of Montrealers arrived in Ottawa to establish the French presence there as never before and to mastermind the pride of the Trudeau programme – the bid to make French used in all federal institutions. It did not take the public long, however, to discover that the new prime minister had a short temper when challenged. In the Commons, the Opposition had the audacity to try to trip him up; he claimed that what he had said under his breath was “Fuddle duddle”.
His social theorising prompted an American senator to accuse him of Communist leanings. But despite his encouragement of immigration, Trudeau showed little inclination for radical action. He talked about creating a “just society”, but soon recognised that the days of big government spending were ending as the economy stagnated.
In 1971, Trudeau married Margaret Sinclair, a high-spirited beauty whose father had been a Liberal minister in the 1950s. Although the match boosted his stock with the electorate, friends believed that he was searching for the elixir of youth. Trudeau’s determination to defend the federal powerbase and the Commonwealth had led to growing dissatisfaction among Quebec separatists, and in 1970 they kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and Pierre Laporte, the Quebec Minister.
Trudeau treated the crisis with deadly seriousness from the start. He ruled out talks with the kidnappers, and invoked the War Measures Act to use troops alongside police in the hunt. Cross was released unharmed, but Laporte was found dead. Margaret Trudeau later revealed that when told about the death her husband had burst into tears.
Following the election of 1972, Trudeau was lucky to survive as leader of a minority government. For the next two years he showed a new-found interest in Parliament. He was seen standing respectfully at the Queen’s side during royal visits. He jettisoned unpopular policies. When the New Democrats withdrew their support over a budget measure, the electorate rewarded him with a majority in the subsequent poll.
The next Trudeau administration was an unhappy affair. Senior colleagues resigned. As the economy collapsed, an unwise promise to “wrestle inflation to the ground” led him to adopt price control policies which seemed little different from Tory proposals on which he had poured scorn.
Public exasperation with his Official Languages policy increased steadily , and in Quebec City a separatist government was elected under René Lévesque. Even his marriage failed. Margaret Trudeau, who had borne three sons in rapid succession, had changed from a shy and beautiful appendage to an occasional embarrassment, and then to an abusive guest at official functions.
Public quarrels charted the deteriorating relationship. As he went into the 1979 election, Margaret, who was trying to establish herself as a photo-journalist covering such subjects as the Rolling Stones, brought out her memoirs Beyond Reason, which revealed the prime minister’s inability even to control his wife.
When the results came in, Trudeau did not do much worse, in terms of votes, than in 1972, but the Tories had the most seats. For the next 10 months Joe Clark, a young Tory from the prairies, soldiered on until his minority government was defeated over oil pricing three weeks after Trudeau had announced his resignation as Liberal leader.
Trudeau rescinded his decision, and the electorate welcomed the little lustre he brought back into government. After being re-elected, he launched into the Quebec referendum, in which the separatist leader René Lévesque sought quasi-independence. With the aid of a huge advertising campaign, a biting tongue and some woeful economic warnings, Trudeau won the day as 60 per cent of voters rejected Lévesque’s motion.
Trudeau now convinced himself that he must do something that Canadian prime ministers had been trying to do for 50 years -repeal the British North America Act, the written part of Canada’s constitution which had lain on the British statute book at Westminster since 1867. He proposed to replace it with a substitute drafted by Ottawa.
When the provinces jibbed, he assured Margaret Thatcher in London that there would be no trouble. Yet as the months passed, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee at Westminster noted vociferous opposition in Canada. Eskimo and Indian leaders arrived in London in traditional dress to appeal to the Queen; Mrs Thatcher bridled at the idea of the charter of rights which Trudeau had attached to the proposed substitute document. All were offended by Trudeau’s republican hints.
As the atmosphere grew tense, Mrs Jean Wadds, the High Commissioner in London, accused the British of tapping her telephones, while the High Commissioner in Ottawa, Sir John Ford, offered to resign after being accused of encouraging the opposition. In the end, though, opposition to the proposals faded, and the House of Commons in London passed the measure with some relief.
The Queen went to Ottawa where, watched by an ecstatic Trudeau, she signed the new Canada Act. But from this point on, the end was in sight for Trudeau. There were doubts about the viability of the new constitutional arrangements he had made, and lingering feelings of resentment.
In the western provinces there was fury over Trudeau’s energy policy, which had reduced Alberta’s oil profits; a disastrous budget infuriated businessmen; and trade unions no longer trusted the prime minister. In 1984, to the relief of his party, Trudeau stepped down to make way for John Turner, an old rival, who led the Liberals to their greatest defeat of the century.
Trudeau returned to legal practice, on Boulevard René Lévesque in Montreal. He kept up his interest in Canadian politics, speaking out against the Meech Lake Agreement, which proposed entrenching Quebec’s special status within the Canadian confederation.
He also wrote articles regretting the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in 1993 he produced, with Ivan Head, a volume of memoirs. He went on to publish The Canadian Way: shaping Canada’s foreign policy 1968-84 (1995) and Against the Current (1996). On holiday, he enjoyed brushing up his Spanish on visits to Cuba, where he would see Fidel Castro.
Pierre Trudeau’s capacity to charm did not desert him; after his divorce in 1984, a young political adviser registered him as the father of her daughter. But his last years were blighted by increasing frailness and by the death of his youngest son Michel in an avalanche in 1998.
He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1984 and a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1985. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he was sworn of the Privy Council of Canada.
Published September 30 2000
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1357368/Pierre-Trudeau.html
