From the beginning he envisaged a goal far beyond the mundane pragmatism of party politics. “By building a truly just society,” he promised dubious Liberals, “this beautiful, rich and energetic country of ours can become a model in which every citizen will enjoy his fundamental rights, in which two great linguistic communities and people of many cultures will live in harmony and in which each individual will find fulfillment.” He was sworn in as prime minister on April 20. Three days later he asked the governor general to dissolve Parliament and call an election for June 25, 1968.
The swarming that had begun even before the leadership convention became known as Trudeaumania. Partly it was timing. Trudeau emerged on the federal political scene just as the swaggering postwar baby-boom generation, the first to be reared on television, got the vote. Trudeau’s taut, sculpted face with his glittering eyes and implacable stare was ideal for television. As media guru Marshall McLuhan, a friend, pointed out, he had “the perfect mask — a charismatic mask . . . the face of a North American Indian.”
His appearance, his mannerisms, his eligibility, his ambiguities, and his dangerous flair lured boomers like moths to his charismatic flame. Communications theorist Don Tapscott suggested in an interview that baby boomers, who had grown up with television, looked to the box to find leaders they could follow. By that reasoning, Trudeau — “the command and control, top down, great visionary” — was the quintessential man of his time. “We were passive recipients in a one-way, one size fits all, one-to-many medium, where the messages could be architected and controlled,” said Tapscott, identifying himself as a boomer. “It was about the powerful central authority pushing something out to passive recipients. Trudeau, with his gunslinger mode, was a great master of that.”
At times, especially in the middle of his long political career, Trudeau’s connection with Canadians attenuated into Trudeauphobia as his economic policies failed to ameliorate the recession driven by the OPEC oil embargo in the mid-1970s, or when the West bristled about the forced sharing of gushing oil revenues under the National Energy Program in the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, with the first sovereignty referendum defeated, the constitution patriated, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined, he seemed to lose interest in Canadians and politics, and they with him, as the deficit soared close to $40 billion and interest rates spiralled. As economist Sylvia Ostry told Maclean’s after Trudeau’s death, “He was highly intelligent and intellectual: he read all of his briefing documents, including the footnotes. He just wasn’t interested in economics. He listened to everything and understood it. But in the end, he had one priority: national unity.”
He wanted an international platform for his final crusade: a world without nuclear arms. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but the momentum fizzled, largely because of the opposition of those dogged Cold Warriors Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Ronald Reagan of the United States. But the link with Canadians was never severed, even after he left office on June 30, 1984, moved back to Montreal with his three sons, and joined the law firm Heenan Blaikie.
Most of us who lived through those years, and even those who were too young to be startled by a Canadian prime minister pirouetting saucily behind the Queen’s back at a Buckingham Palace reception, impressed by his dignity in dealing with his flamboyantly rebellious wife, or shocked by reports of him giving the finger to protesters at a B.C. whistle stop in what came to be called the “Salmon Arm salute,” carry contrary images of Trudeau in our heads. Here are five evocative moments from his life.
The Defiant Prime Minister
THE 1960S WERE tumultuous times, no more so than in 1968. In France, students were marching through the streets of Paris; in the United States the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart, especially after the military launched the Tet Offensive in January and civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered in April and Senator Robert Kennedy in June. Canadians watching TV reports of rioting and looting south of the border knew they weren’t immune. Quebec separatists had been blowing up mailboxes and delivering package bombs for years in their terrorist campaign to secede from the rest of Canada, a movement that would gain political strength and credibility in 1968 with the formation of the Parti Québécois.
Trudeau confronted the fear of politically motivated violence when he insisted on appearing at the annual Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade on the eve of the federal election he had called for June 25, 1968. Trudeaumania had swept much of the country, but in Quebec he was hated by many for his pro-federalist stand, a situation he had inflamed with his belligerent and uncompromising remarks. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau advised him to stay away from the parade and so did others, but he refused. Trudeau, along with other dignitaries, including Mayor Drapeau and the archbishop of Montreal, Paul Grégoire, sat on a reviewing stand on Sherbrooke Street across from Lafontaine Park. A group of hardcore separatists led by Pierre Bourgault of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN) started heaving bottles and shouting, “Trudeau au poteau” (Trudeau to the stake). More than forty police and eighty civilians were injured and nearly three hundred rioters arrested.
Several dignitaries fled and two RCMP officers threw their coats over Trudeau and tried to force him to the floor of the reviewing stand. He shook them off and sat upright, staring defiantly at the protesters, his eyes flashing as he sent an unmistakeably tough message to voters across the country watching the late-night news. Here was a politician willing to stand up to the separatists. By the time the ballots were counted the next evening, he and the Liberals had won a majority government, the first since Louis St. Laurent’s victory in 1953 and John Diefenbaker’s landslide triumph for the Progressive Conservatives in 1958.
If Trudeau’s performance on the reviewing stand made a difference in the outcome, his message was heard loudest in Quebec (56 seats), Ontario (63 seats), and, surprisingly, in British Columbia (16 seats). It was the first of five federal elections that Trudeau fought in his nearly two decades in public office. He won four of them.
The Bellicose Prime Minister
EVEN BEFORE TRUDEAU went to Ottawa, small and disparate incendiary groups, inspired by revolutionary movements in Algeria, Cuba, and other despotic states, had been terrorizing the citizenry under the guise of freedom fighting. Their specialties were Molotov cocktails, bomb blasts in mailboxes, vandalism to monuments of Anglo heroes, and infiltration into labour disputes in foreign-owned factories. In the spring of 1963, a war veteran on the eve of his pension was killed and an explosives expert maimed as he tried to defuse a bomb in a Westmount mailbox. Early in 1969, bombs ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring close to thirty people.
Then, on October 5, 1970, a Front de libération du Québec cell kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross at his Redpath Crescent mansion on the southern slopes of Mount Royal, issued a manifesto urging the people of Quebec to rise up against their oppressors, and demanded concessions for Cross’s release, including freedom for twenty-three “political prisoners,” $500,000 in gold, and broadcast and publication of the FLQ manifesto.
Trudeau refused to negotiate, although the manifesto was read in French and English on radio and television. Police raids on suspected troublemakers began on the morning of October 7. Two days later, on Saturday afternoon of the Thanksgiving weekend, another FLQ cell abducted Quebec labour minister, Pierre Laporte, while he was playing touch football in a field across from his home in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. The following day, under coercion from his kidnappers, Laporte sent a “Mon cher Robert” letter to Premier Bourassa, begging for his life. At Quebec’s request, Trudeau sent in the army to patrol the streets in the search for Cross and Laporte, transforming Montreal from the hippest city in Canada into a film set for a war movie. He also ordered the military to patrol significant sites in Ottawa.
Then, as Trudeau was bounding up the steps on the way to his office in the Parliament Buildings on the morning of Octob
er 13, he encountered a covey of journalists with microphones, tape recorders, and television cameras. One of them, CBC reporter Tim Ralfe, scrummed him about the trade-off between armed security forces in the streets and the potential risk that prominent people might be kidnapped. The debate went back and forth with Trudeau the civil libertarian — but also the prime minister charged with maintaining “peace, order, and good government” — arguing that it was “more important to get rid of those who are committing violence against the total society and those who are trying to run the government through a parallel power by establishing their authority by kidnapping and blackmail.”
Ralfe refused to concede his larger philosophical point about what risks are reasonable in order to live in a democratic society. That’s when Trudeau lost his patience. Hands on hips, his nostrils flaring, he shifted into attack mode and snarled, “There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of a soldier’s helmet.”
Other leaders might have walked away from the cameras. Trudeau, ever competitive, continued to joust verbally with the reporter. Ralfe, no doubt sensing the terrific sound bite he had for the evening news, pushed for more: “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?” To which Trudeau snapped his famous riposte, “Well, just watch me.”
In fact, we couldn’t watch him, because the decision about what to do next was taken behind closed doors. Cabinet documents and books released by researchers who have had access to Trudeau’s papers all indicate that the decision to impose the War Measures Act, last invoked after Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939, was not a unilateral move by the prime minister but the result of ongoing discussions and consultations, over most of a week, with his own Cabinet, the government of Quebec, and the municipality of Montreal.
Early in the morning of October 16, after formal requests from Quebec and Montreal, the federal government imposed the War Measures Act, giving the state extraordinary and draconian authority to suspend civil liberties and arrest and hold people without charge and without access to legal counsel. Within forty-eight hours the police had reportedly carried out more than 1,500 raids. More than 250 people were arrested, including the singer Pauline Julien, the poet Gérald Godin, and the journalist Nick Auf der Maur. By the end of the year, the total arrested had risen to 468, of whom 408 were released without charges being laid.
Later that same morning, Trudeau announced in the House of Commons that the government had imposed the War Measures Act; he made a televised address that evening to the nation — one of the few times when he read from a script. The following night, Laporte’s body was found at Saint-Hubert Airport in the trunk of a car belonging to Paul Rose, one of the kidnappers. He had been strangled with the gold chain carrying a small crucifix that he wore around his neck.
Many believed he had been murdered in retaliation for the War Measures Act. Margaret Sinclair, who was secretly dating Trudeau, wrote later in her tell-all memoir Beyond Reason that she had been in bed with him at Harrington Lake when the phone rang at one a.m. with the news that Laporte’s body had been found. She heard him crying after he put the phone down. “I watched him grow old before my eyes. It was as if Laporte’s death lay on his shoulders alone: he was the one who wouldn’t negotiate, and he was the man who would now have to take responsibility for the murder of an innocent man.”
At the time there was widespread approval of the government’s action. As an indication of the prevailing mood, reporter Tim Ralfe was formally and publicly reprimanded for his aggressive questioning of the prime minister, and a letter was placed in his file by CBC executive news producer Peter Trueman — actions the broadcast executive later regretted.
The bill passed 190 to 16 in the House of Commons, with the only concerted opposition coming from Tommy Douglas and most of his NDP caucus. When Douglas suggested that the prime minister was using a sledgehammer to smash a peanut, Trudeau replied that “peanuts don’t make bombs, don’t take hostages, and don’t assassinate prisoners. And as for the sledgehammer, it was the only tool at our disposal.”
Whatever people said later — and many did renounce the War Measures Act, including some of those sitting around the Cabinet table — polls taken at the time showed overwhelming support for the actions taken by the federal government. Indeed, both Douglas and René Lévesque, who had also opposed the War Measures Act, were pilloried, and Lévesque, who had founded the Parti Québécois two years earlier, failed to win a seat in the 1973 provincial election.
As for Trudeau, he never changed his mind about negotiating with terrorists and never conceded that there was a link between the “six kids trying to make a revolution,” as James Cross labelled his kidnappers, and Trudeau himself as a vocal revolutionary in the 1940s. Of course, Trudeau never acted out his ultra-nationalist agenda and never resorted to violence like the FLQ cell members who murdered Laporte. There can be no doubt, however, that Trudeau destroyed violence as a tactic for sovereignty. After the October Crisis, the struggle for independence was fought with words and arguments, not bombs and abductions.
The Prime Minister Takes a Wife
“TRUDEAU MARRIES VANCOUVER Girl, 22” blared the headline in large type on the front page of the Globe and Mail on March 5, 1971. Below it was a photograph of the prime minister boogying with Margaret Sinclair, one of the five daughters of Lester Pearson’s former fisheries minister, James Sinclair. The headline, along with the picture, which had been taken during their first public date in 1969, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, conveyed the bewildered tone of editorialists and readers. What will he do next? was the rhetorical question. The best reaction came from former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, when he suggested that Trudeau had had two choices: marry Sinclair or adopt her.
Pictures of the wedding, which had taken place the evening before, followed, with the dark-haired bride wearing a hooded caftan that she had made herself during a course put on by the Singer sewing machine company. The pair had met in Tahiti the Christmas of 1967, when she was nineteen and he was deciding whether to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Before they married, she converted to Roman Catholicism. She bore him two sons, Justin and Alexandre (Sacha), on Christmas Day two years apart, in 1971 and 1973, which somehow made the union both more improbable and yet somehow preordained by a higher order. Michel completed the trio with his birth on October 2, 1975.
Isolated and alienated in Ottawa, where she had few friends, trapped by the protocols and security regulations attendant on the wife of the prime minister, exhausted by the demands of three small children, Margaret Trudeau was bored, lonely, and feeling ignored by a husband who was away all day and worked long into the night on what she later called those “damned brown boxes.” In one of their fights she ripped out the hand-stitched letters in La raison avant la passion, the prized French version of artist Joyce Wieland’s famous quilt, which he had bought and hung on a wall at 24 Sussex.
The public was curious about this flower child with the hedonistic past, and Trudeau and his advisors found a way to slake its thirst: showcasing his young wife on the campaign trail in the 1974 election. “In 1972, my campaign never really got off the ground,” he told reporters, “but this year, I’ve found the secret. I have a train, and I have Margaret.” She travelled with him and introduced him to huge crowds, once going so far as to say at a rally in Vancouver: “He’s a beautiful guy. He taught me a lot about loving.” Afterwards, she said she had felt “used.”
In following his heart, Trudeau had married a naive and narcissistic — she would later be diagnosed as bipolar — young woman less than half his age. For a time it seemed that the dashing (and ageing) bachelor had found a way to harness the beauty and energy of the baby-boom generation, but marriage wasn’t
an affair, it was a lifelong commitment. She was certainly not ready for that, and he wasn’t willing to give up his day job.
After humiliating him with obscene outbursts at diplomatic functions, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in Toronto, dancing lewdly and drunkenly at Studio 54 and other New York discos, and having affairs with, among others, Senator Ted Kennedy, Margaret Trudeau finally fled. The couple separated in 1977 and divorced in 1984. He never complained publicly about his rebellious wife, expressing compassion for her in interviews, but he drove a hard bargain: he got sole custody of their three sons and she got little if any alimony. “I’ll win in the end,” she told him, “because I’m going to live longer. When the boys are grown up, I’ll still be around.” Little did she realize that she would ultimately need them to keep her life in order and that his legacy would grow with time.
He never remarried, although in May 1991, when he was in his early seventies, he had a daughter, Sarah, by lawyer Deborah Coyne, a constitutional advisor to then Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells.
The Prime Minister as Architect of Modern Canada
IN 1973, TRUDEAU said on the CTV program W5 that he had entered politics for two reasons: “to make sure that Quebec wouldn’t leave Canada through separatism” and “to make sure that Canada wouldn’t shove Quebec out through narrow-mindedness.” In a way he tried to remake Canada in his own image — bilingual, rational, and confident of its rights and responsibilities — and he succeeded perhaps better than he could have imagined. Those goals underlie official bilingualism, the push to promote francophones in the civil service, the Charter, his vision of a strong federalism, and his obsession with patriating the Constitution, which more than a century after Confederation remained an act of the British Parliament that could be amended only by sending a request to Westminster.
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