Obituaries: Pierre Elloit Trudeau 1919 – 2000

When Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada for sixteen and a half years, died on September 28th of last year, I was more disappointed than surprised that his passing received scant attention from the American media. After all, it'd been more than sixteen years since he'd left the stage of international politics and very few of his policies had directly affected the United States. But having lived under Trudeau's government for nearly five years, I know that we have lost one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century.

The Canada that Trudeau inherited was deeply divided over the issue of language and culture. The French speaking people of Canada had long complained that the country's English speaking majority was slowly destroying their heritage, and a movement was afoot to split Quebec from the rest of Canada. When Trudeau, a French-Canadian, took office in 1968, one of his first accomplishments was the passing of the Official Languages Act, which made Canada a bilingual country. The law was unpopular in English speaking Canada and did little to appease the French, who saw it as a Band-Aid approach.

If the separatists thought they would have an easy go of it with a native son at the head of the federal government, they were mistaken. In 1970, Trudeau came down hard on the violent separatist group the FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front) in an incident that's become known as "the October crisis." When the FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and the Quebec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte, Trudeau didn't hesitate to invoke the War Measures Act. Civil rights were suspended throughout Canada, Quebec's borders were closed and the Canadian Army occupied the province. The police and army were given the power to search homes and arrest without warrant anyone belonging to the FLQ. Although Laporte was subsequently murdered, his body found stuffed in the trunk of a car, that was the last terrorist act that the FLQ committed.

After this incident, Trudeau refused to be hypocritical in his dealings with other countries. In 1971 he was questioned about his silence on the subject of imprisoned Ukrainian nationalists upon his return from a state visit to Moscow. His reply: "I didn't feel like bringing up any case which would have caused Mr. Kosygin or Mr. Brezhnev to say, 'Why should you put your revolutionaries in jail and we not put ours?'"

During his tenure as Prime Minister, Trudeau developed close ties with Cuba and became the first NATO head of state to visit the communist island since the Cuban missile crisis. In addition he legalized homosexuality, instituted wage and price controls, helped pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and oversaw the installation of the first Canadian Constitution. He also appointed Jeanne Sauve as the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons (in 1980) and as the first woman Governor-General (in 1984).

But throughout his career his major preoccupation was Quebec. In 1973 he told television network CTV that he had two reasons for getting into politics: "One, to make sure that Quebec wouldn't leave Canada through separatism, and the other, to make sure that Canada wouldn't shove Quebec out through narrow-mindedness." Ironically, in the years after he stepped down as Prime Minister he made many political enemies in his French speaking home province by refusing to support the Meech and Charlottetown accords, which would have granted special privileges to Quebec. He said that he found both accords "insulting" because they implied Quebecers needed extra protection to survive.

However, it wasn't Trudeau's political accomplishments that helped to usher in a new era and a new identity for the Canadian people, but his dashing and charismatic personality. The young and handsome Trudeau was swept into office on a wave that the press called "Trudeaumania," prompting authors Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond to call him "the greatest pop star this country has ever produced." As a rule, Canadians had always felt as if they played second fiddle to their powerful neighbor to the south, and they saw that in Trudeau they had not only a Prime Minister who was right for Canada, but a leader who was respected throughout the world. While the U.S. was suffering through the embarrassment of Nixon and was mired in the muck of Vietnam, Trudeau was leading Canada to a position in the center of the world's diplomatic stage.

Canadians also found a certain perverse glee in the fact that their PM was commanding attention from the American press because of the beautiful and famous women he dated, women like Barbra Streisand, movie star Margot Kidder and classical guitarist Liona Boyd. "Clinton's women were all bimbos, all close to the ludicrous and the bizarre," wrote CBC Newsworld Online columnist Larry Zolf. "Trudeau's women were all from the best classes; they were all beautiful and attractive and devoted to Trudeau." With Trudeau at the helm, it suddenly became sexy to be a Canadian.

There are many more stories about Trudeau and his time at the helm of the world's second largest country. Like the time he made fun of Queen Elizabeth behind her back, or the instance when he was accused by two opponents of mouthing an obscenity during a parliamentary debate on unemployment. Then there was his marriage to Margaret Sinclair, thirty years his junior, which ended in an embarrassing scandal, with her flying from Ottawa to New York for trysts with Mick Jagger at Studio 54.

Pierre Elliot Trudeau set the tone in international politics for an entire generation and, in many ways, embraced an alternative approach to world leadership. Even at his funeral a Trudeau-style diplomacy was at work, with both Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter serving as pall bearers. As John Lennon said after he and Yoko spent forty minutes in the Prime Minister's home, "If there were more leaders like Mr. Trudeau, the world would have peace."

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