Pierre Trudeau

• 1. Introduction

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  Pierre Trudeau walked into the 1968 Liberal leadership convention having been a card-carrying member of the party for barely three years. His opponents had served the Liberals for decades. Yet on the fourth ballot, 51 percent of the delegates chose him, and within weeks the streets of Canada were full of people mobbing him like a rock star. The press called it Trudeaumania. The question that follows is obvious: who was this man, and how did he so completely reshape a country?

  Trudeau's full name alone signals the layers inside him: Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, born on the 18th of October 1919, in Outremont, Quebec, to a French-Canadian father and a mother of mixed Scottish and French-Canadian descent. He died on the 28th of September 2000, at eighty years old, after a career spanning three and a half decades that touched everything from the bedroom laws of ordinary Canadians to the constitutional architecture of the nation itself.

  His tenure as the 15th prime minister of Canada, from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, lasted 15 years and 164 days, placing him third among the longest-serving prime ministers in Canadian history, behind only John A. Macdonald and William Lyon Mackenzie King. He won four federal elections. He remains, as of this recording, the most recent prime minister to accomplish that. And his eldest son, Justin Trudeau, would later serve as prime minister from 2015 to 2025, the first time in Canadian history a child succeeded a parent in that office.

  To understand Pierre Trudeau is to understand a man built from contradiction: a wealthy inheritor who championed the working class, a French Canadian who fought Quebec nationalism, a civil libertarian who invoked sweeping wartime emergency powers in peacetime. Those contradictions are exactly where the most revealing parts of his story live.

• 2. A Privileged and Restless Education

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  Trudeau's father, Charles-Emile Trudeau, had assembled a small empire by the time Pierre was fifteen: a gas station chain called B&A, profitable mines, the Belmont amusement park in Montreal, and the Montreal Royals, the city's minor-league baseball team. When Charles-Emile died on the 10th of April 1935, in Orlando, Florida, each of his three children inherited $5,000, a considerable sum at the time, and Pierre was left financially independent before he had finished high school.

  His mother, Grace Elliott, devoted much of her widowhood to the Roman Catholic Church and charities, travelling frequently to New York, Florida, Europe, and Maine, sometimes with her children in tow. Trudeau, already in his late teens, was directly involved in managing a large inheritance. Financial pressure was never a factor in his choices.

  At the Jesuit Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, the prestigious French-language secondary school that educated elite francophone families in Quebec, the head of the college recorded that over Trudeau's seven years there, from 1933 to 1940, he had won a hundred prizes and honourable mentions and performed with distinction in all fields. Trudeau graduated in 1940 at the age of twenty-one, having applied for a Rhodes Scholarship in his final year and written in his application that he had prepared for public office through public speaking and publishing articles in the student paper, Brébeuf. He did not win the scholarship.

  On the advice of Henri Bourassa, the economist Edmond Montpetit, and a Franco-Manitoban priest named Father Robert Bernier, he enrolled in law at the Universite de Montreal. He graduated in 1943 and, in late 1944, began a master's degree in political economy at Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration, which is now the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

  Harvard was a revelation. It had become, Trudeau later wrote, a super-informed environment flooded by intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe. His dissertation topic was communism and Christianity. He felt like an outsider at an American, predominantly Protestant institution, and his sense of isolation deepened until he left for Paris in 1947 to continue the work at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, known today as Sciences Po. The Harvard dissertation was never finished.

  He then briefly enrolled at the London School of Economics to study under the socialist economist Harold Laski. Over five weeks of lectures there, he became a follower of personalism, influenced most notably by Emmanuel Mounier and by Nikolai Berdyaev's book Slavery and Freedom. Scholars Max and Monique Nemni later argued that Berdyaev's work directly shaped Trudeau's lifelong rejection of nationalism and separatism.

  In mid-1948, at twenty-eight, he set off on world travels carrying a backpack, using his British passport rather than his Canadian one for portions of the journey through Pakistan, India, China, and Japan, often wearing local clothing to blend in. He visited Auschwitz in Poland, then moved through Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and into the Middle East. When he returned to Canada in 1949, the Economist later wrote, his mind was seemingly broadened, and he was appalled at the narrow nationalism he found waiting for him in French Quebec.

• 3. The Justice Minister Who Changed Daily Life

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  In 1967, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson appointed Trudeau to Cabinet as Minister of Justice and Attorney General. The job lasted barely a year. What happened in that year reordered the lives of millions of Canadians.

  Trudeau introduced the Criminal Law Amendment Act, an omnibus bill that decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, legalized contraception and abortion, loosened lottery restrictions, authorized breathalyzer tests for drunk driving, and added new gun ownership restrictions. Defending the homosexuality provisions to reporters, Trudeau said: "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation", and added that "what's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code." He later acknowledged he had paraphrased the phrase from a Martin O'Malley editorial in The Globe and Mail published on the 12th of December 1967.

  He also liberalized divorce laws and clashed publicly with Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson Sr. during constitutional negotiations, signalling the combative federalist stance he would carry through the rest of his career.

  Those reforms made him a national figure. When Pearson announced his retirement at the end of Canada's centennial year, 1967, Trudeau entered the race to succeed him. Cabinet Minister Judy LaMarsh was caught on television profanely insisting that Trudeau was not a true Liberal, which was technically accurate: he had only joined the party in 1965, having previously supported the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He had shifted to the Liberals partly because he believed the CCF's successor, the New Democratic Party, could not win federal power.

  None of the doubts stuck. On the fourth ballot at the April 1968 convention, Trudeau defeated long-serving Liberals including Paul Martin Sr., Robert Winters, and Paul Hellyer. He was sworn in as prime minister on the 20th of April.

• 4. The October Crisis

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  On the 5th of October 1970, the Front de liberation du Quebec, a Marxist-influenced separatist group known as the FLQ, kidnapped British Trade Consul James Cross at his Montreal residence. Five days later, the same group kidnapped Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte.

  Trudeau, with the agreement of Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa, invoked the War Measures Act, giving the government sweeping powers to arrest and detain citizens without trial. When CBC Television journalist Tim Ralfe pressed Trudeau on how far he would go, Trudeau replied: "Just watch me." On the 17th of October, Pierre Laporte was found dead in the trunk of a car. Five FLQ members were eventually flown to Cuba in exchange for James Cross's release; they returned to Canada years later and served prison sentences.

  The decision to invoke the War Measures Act drew criticism at the time from parliamentarians including Tommy Douglas and David Lewis, who called it excessive. But it drew only limited objection from the general public.

  Trudeau's handling of the crisis fixed his image as a leader who would not flinch. The famous Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day episode two years earlier, in June 1968, had established the same quality: sovereigntist rioters threw rocks and bottles at the grandstand where he was seated during the Montreal parade, chanting Trudeau au poteau, meaning Trudeau to the stake. His aides pleaded with him to take cover. He stayed in his seat, facing the crowd without any visible sign of fear. The next day, he won the 1968 election with a strong majority government, the Liberals' first majority since 1953.

• 5. Bilingualism, Multiculturalism, and the Constitution

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  Trudeau's first major legislative push after taking office was the Official Languages Act, which made French and English co-equal official languages of the federal government. The act implemented most of the recommendations from Pearson's Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Between 1966 and 1976, the francophone proportion of the civil service and military doubled, which generated alarm in portions of anglophone Canada.

  On the 8th of October 1971, Trudeau's Cabinet announced what was described as the first national multicultural policy of its kind in the world. Several Canadian provinces later adopted similar policies, as did Australia, which shared a comparable immigration history. The policy's phrase, a multicultural policy within a bilingual framework, captured a deliberate tension: Canada had two official languages but many cultures. Quebec's public opinion found this annoying, interpreting it as a challenge to the idea of Canada as a country of two nations.

  The Quebec sovereignty movement became, in Trudeau's own view, his biggest challenge. The unexpected 1976 election victory of Rene Levesque's Parti Quebecois, which had run mainly on good-government themes while promising a referendum on independence, forced a direct confrontation. Trudeau and Levesque were personal rivals; Trudeau's intellectualism contrasted sharply with Levesque's working-class image.

  In May 1980, with the referendum approaching, Trudeau delivered what became one of his most remembered speeches, extolling federalism and questioning the ambiguous wording of the referendum question. He promised a new constitutional agreement if Quebec voted to stay. On the 20th of May, sixty percent of Quebeckers voted to remain in Canada. When the result came in, Trudeau said he had never been so proud to be a Quebecker and a Canadian.

  The constitutional work that followed was the capstone of his career. In 1982, Trudeau patriated the Constitution of Canada and established the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms through the Constitution Act, 1982, achieving full Canadian sovereignty. After retiring, he spoke out against the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, which proposed granting Quebec certain concessions, arguing they would strengthen Quebec nationalism rather than contain it.

• 6. Economic Bets and Western Alienation

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  Trudeau's first budget in 1968 produced a deficit of $667 million. His 1969 budget managed a surplus of $140 million. But from the 1970 budget onward, a deficit of over $1 billion, the Trudeau government ran consecutive shortfalls that were not eliminated until 1997. By the time his first tenure ended in 1979, the deficit had grown to $12 billion.

  The capital gains tax, introduced effective the 1st of January 1972, was one of the more contentious structural changes of those years. It came from a 1969 white paper by finance minister Edgar Benson and was debated in Parliament for over a year. When Benson became a political liability, Trudeau replaced him in 1972 with John Turner, seen as a Business Liberal. Turner himself resigned as finance minister in September 1975 rather than implement wage and price controls. Two months later, Trudeau and his new finance minister Donald Macdonald introduced exactly those controls through the Anti-Inflation Act, a policy Trudeau had mocked during the 1974 election campaign, comparing it to a magician saying Zap! You're frozen. The controls lasted until 1978.

  On the 4th of September 1973, Trudeau asked the Western provinces to voluntarily freeze oil prices during the Arab oil embargo. Nine days later, his government imposed a 40-cent tax on every barrel of Canadian oil exported to the United States. Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed called it the most discriminatory action taken by a federal government against a particular province in the entire history of Confederation.

  By late October 1973, responding to a motion from the NDP, whose support the minority government depended on, Trudeau's government moved to establish a nationalized oil company. The Petro-Canada Act was passed in 1975, creating a crown corporation with initial capital of $1.5 billion. In 1976, Trudeau appointed his friend Maurice Strong as the company's first chair.

  The National Energy Program, introduced in October 1980 by Finance Minister Allan MacEachen, intensified the conflict. Western provinces, particularly Alberta, saw it as depriving them of the full economic benefit of their oil and gas resources to fund social programs and transfer payments to poorer parts of the country. The controversy fed what came to be called Western alienation, a political grievance that outlasted Trudeau's tenure by decades.

• 7. Foreign Policy on His Own Terms

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  Diplomat John G. H. Halstead, who worked as a close adviser to Trudeau, described a leader who never read the policy papers submitted by the External Affairs department, preferring short briefings before meetings and generally trying to wing his way through international encounters by being witty. Halstead quoted Trudeau as viewing foreign policy as only for dabbing, meaning he much preferred domestic affairs.

  That said, Trudeau's instincts produced some durable outcomes. In 1968-1969, he seriously considered pulling Canada out of NATO entirely, arguing that the logic of mutual assured destruction made a Soviet invasion of West Germany highly unlikely and NATO therefore an expensive irrelevance. His Cabinet divided sharply. Defence Minister Leo Cadieux threatened to resign if Canada left. On the 3rd of April 1969, Trudeau announced that Canada would stay in NATO, but cut its European forces by 50 percent. The cuts prompted a public protest from the British government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

  Relations with the United States under Richard Nixon were sour. Nixon privately referred to Trudeau in 1971 as that asshole Trudeau. During a March 1969 visit to Washington, Trudeau told the National Press Club that living next to the United States was in some way like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. On the 4th of January 1973, Trudeau voted in the House of Commons to condemn American Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, which pushed Canadian-American relations to what the source describes as a post-war nadir.

  Trudeau established Canadian diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in 1970, becoming the first Canadian prime minister to make an official visit to Beijing. The negotiations, which began in Stockholm on the 3rd of April 1969, took longer than expected partly because China demanded that Canada acknowledge Taiwan as an inalienable part of Chinese territory. The resulting statement, in which Canada took note of the Chinese position without endorsing it, became known as the Canadian formula and was copied by numerous countries that later established diplomatic relations with Beijing, including the United States in 1979.

  In January 1976, Trudeau visited Cuba, meeting Fidel Castro and shouting to a crowd in Havana: Viva Cuba! Viva Castro! In private, he pressed Castro to pull Cuban troops out of Angola. Castro refused unless South Africa withdrew from Angola and South West Africa. Trudeau was the first world leader to meet John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 tour for world peace. Lennon, after talking with Trudeau for fifty minutes, said that if all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.

• 8. Legacy and Division

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  Trudeau converted Canada to the metric system, created Via Rail, passed the Access to Information Act, and introduced the Canada Health Act. Canada's entry into the G7 forum came in 1976, at the behest of U.S. President Gerald Ford. In 1971, his government expanded unemployment insurance so that coverage for the Canadian labour force jumped from 75 percent to 96 percent, and extended the program to include maternity, sickness, and retirement benefits.

  After leaving office in 1984, Trudeau practised law at the Montreal firm Heenan Blaikie and spoke out publicly against successive constitutional proposals. He died on the 28th of September 2000, aged eighty.

  Scholars rank him highly among Canadian prime ministers. But the source is direct about how divisive he remains. Critics accused him of arrogance, economic mismanagement, and overly centralizing federal power at the expense of Quebec's culture and the Prairie economy. Supporters praised his intellect and his ability to hold the country together through the most intense phase of the Quebec sovereignty movement.

  The bill that abolished the death penalty, Bill C-84, passed the House of Commons on the 14th of July 1976, by a vote of 130 to 124. That single vote, achieved after what the source calls a long and emotional debate, captures the narrowness of the margins by which Trudeau often moved his agenda through. His government reached the end of its time in office with the deficit at $12 billion and the constitutional work largely finished. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms he embedded in the Constitution Act, 1982 remains the document that Canadians most frequently invoke when challenging the government in court.