This Day in Canadian History (Pierre Trudeau Becomes Prime Minister)

April 20, 1968—"Canada's JFK," Pierre Elliott Trudeau, became Prime Minister, beginning 16 years (except for a nine-month interval) in which he would leave an imprint far more on his country's institutions than his American predecessor had the opportunity to do in his "Thousand Days." In the process, he took a country that had been somewhat more conservative than the U.S. and transformed it into one a good deal more liberal.

If you're an American of a certain age, you're likely to remember Trudeau as a kind of character from a Moliere comedy, a middle-aged husband utterly unable to control a pretty wife only half his age. This, it turns out, is deceptive, for reasons going beyond the fact that a tragedy was being played out, unbeknownst to either the country or the principals themselves, offstage. (Margaret Trudeau’s misdiagnosed bipolar disorder was revealed a few years ago.)

That Trudeau should be known for far more than his difficult private life was borne home to me when I was visiting his country more in late September 2000, when news of his death from prostate cancer sparked an outpouring of retrospectives. I realized then what a major impact he had on his country.

Differing Views of Trudeau’s Legacy
If you're an American liberal from the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party, Trudeau-influenced Canada is likely to seem everything America should be but isn't, a paradise of access to inexpensive medical care and liberated attitudes toward sexuality. If you're a conservative, the nation will appear more like either a piece of Scandinavian governmental flotsam found on North American shores or, more likely, Massachusetts moved north, enlarged and taken to its natural extreme.

Whatever your ideological inclinations, 40 years later, it is impossible to imagine either Canada’s current institutions or atmosphere without gauging his record as prime minister or, earlier, minister of justice under predecessor Lester Pearson. Canadians were correct in naming Trudeau, in a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. poll, one of the “10 greatest Canadians.” (One of the few things liberals and conservatives can probably agree on is that a subject of one of my earlier posts, Wayne Gretzsky, deserves his inclusion on the same list.)

As the comparison to JFK indicates, the 1960s were a big decade for political charisma. Everybody wanted it.

In the U.S., the Democrats spent the rest of the decade pining for the second coming of Kennedy, including enduring tragedies involving both his surviving brothers. Conservative Republicans looked to former movie B-lister Ronald Reagan as a new hope emerging from the West Coast who could bring them back from the Goldwater disaster. Even at the municipal level, the search for this quicksilver quality continued. Bostonians thought they’d found it in Kevin White, New Yorkers in John V. Lindsay. It was columnist Murray Kempton’s apt description of Lindsay that captured the special appeal of these men (and, for that matter, Barack Obama today): “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”

Trudeaumania
“Trudeaumania” was yet another manifestation of this phenomenon, even before he assumed power. Teenage girls squealed at the sight of him. Autograph hounds even chased him across Parliament Hill grounds! The general election called after he won control of the Liberal Party leadership not only secured a solid majority but cemented his image as the ascot- and cape-wearing, celebrity-dating style maven, as he conducted a legendary “kissing campaign.” (This latter tactic is the one element of the Trudeau style that American politicians of all stripes wouldn’t mind importing—which might be one reason why politics has in recent years been defined as “show business for ugly people.”)

The new Prime Minister was brilliant, and like other such people his tendency to demonstrate it all the time struck many as arrogant. In a photo from February 1968, showing him listening at a conference to an aggrieved speaker advocating independence for Quebec, Trudeau didn’t even attempt to hide his amused contempt.

At other times, this arrogance could be self-destructive and stupid. “Why should I sell your wheat?” he asked farmers from the West—a remark they would recall in delivering one drabbing after another to the Liberals in that region. His inability to hide his annoyance with American leaders needlessly strained relations. And he executed a pirouette once behind Queen Elizabeth II—something that even I, a committed anti-monarchist, regard as singularly immature, insulting and superfluous, since the British royals are essentially toothless.

Trudeau’s Two Greatest Legacies
Two achievements toward the beginning and end of his time in office--keeping his country united and providing it with a written constitution –might constitute Trudeau’s greatest legacies.
A bilingual President, he served as a symbol for French speakers who wondered if Quebec really had a place in an Anglo-dominated country. His ethnicity might have also given him credibility in that province as he reacted to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte (a terrorist organization dedicated to Quebec independence) by invoking the War Measures Act in October 1970.

The act, which provided the government with emergency powers in the event of “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended,” strikes this American observer as reminiscent in intent to America’s Patriot Act. Its invocation was especially unusual in view of the fact that Trudeau’s ardent civil libertarianism as minister of justice.

While most of the public heartily endorsed Trudeau’s use of the measure at this time, it is possible in retrospect to ask if he had resorted to it too readily. Under its provisions, more than 450 people were arrested without charge, with most subsequently released with no charges pressed. Civil libertarians asked at the time if Trudeau had overreacted. I believe they have a legitimate point.

Those looking to Canada as a bastion of rights need to rethink how justified that really is in the light of Trudeau’s actions. Only two government officials were threatened (Cross was eventually released, Laporte murdered) in the October crisis. In contrast, the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. resulted in the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. The threat was far more apparent and wide-ranging.

Unlike George W. Bush, Trudeau escaped large-scale condemnation over time for his actions for several reasons, I think: his Justice Ministry record, his eloquence in pushing for “the Just Society,” and the ratcheting up of tensions by the Quebec separatist movement, which created a large pool of support for any actions he took to quell disturbances. But like Bush, his actions—and occasional overstepping—during a crisis left a precedent that future leaders could invoke under far less justifiable circumstances.

In 1980, Trudeau decisively faced down the threat of Quebec separatism again, winning a referendum on the issue. As part of his campaign, he vowed to provide province and country with a new constitutional order, one that would not depend on amending it in Britain. Two years later, Queen Elizabeth II assented to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entrenching a Bill of Rights into the Constitution of Canada, severing Canadian dependence on the British Parliament, and codifying federal-provincial relations.

Over the course of more than a decade, the record of any leader is bound to be mixed. Such was the case with Trudeau. In his stress on broad geopolitics and attention to lifestyle issues (the state, he famously said, “has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”) and sometimes merely fitful attention to bread-and-butter economic issues, he sounded at times like an American blue-state politico. And, as I’ve just noted, his handling of the October Crisis is not beyond criticism.

But he kept his nation whole and gave it a written body of laws and greater autonomy than it had known before. When he is written up in the history books—as surely he will—those are the achievements that will be recalled and honored.