Pierre Elliott Trudeau

ALSO IN THE

EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS

SERIES:

Big Bear
by Rudy Wiebe

Lord Beaverbrook
by David Adams Richards

Norman Bethune
by Adrienne Clarkson

Emily Carr
by Lewis DeSoto

Tommy Douglas
by Vincent Lam

Glenn Gould
by Mark Kingwell

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin
by John Ralston Saul

Wilfrid Laurier
by André Pratte

Stephen Leacock
by Margaret MacMillan

René Lévesque
by Daniel Poliquin

Nellie McClung
by Charlotte Gray

Marshall McLuhan
by Douglas Coupland

L.M. Montgomery
by Jane Urquhart

Lester B. Pearson
by Andrew Cohen

Mordecai Richler
by M.G. Vassanji

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont
by Joseph Boyden

SERIES EDITOR:

John Ralston Saul

Pierre Elliott Trudeau

With an Introduction by

John Ralston Saul

SERIES EDITOR

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © Nino Ricci, 2009
Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2009

Direct quotes from the Trudeau Papers that are excerpted from
Citizen of the World: The Life
of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919–1968
by John English are reprinted here
by kind permission of the Author, and of Knopf Canada. Copyright in all letters and papers
by Pierre Elliott Trudeau: © Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Translation of quotes from the Trudeau papers that were originally written in French are
reprinted here by permission of John English: translation copyright © 2006 John English.
Excerpts from
Memoirs
by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.,
are used with permission of the publisher. © 1993 Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner
and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ricci, Nino, 1959–
Pierre Elliott Trudeau / Nino Ricci.

(Extraordinary Canadians)
ISBN 978-0-670-06660-5

1.  Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 1919–2000.     2.   Canada—Politics
and government—1968–1979.     3.   Canada—Politics and
government—1980–1984.     4.   Prime ministers—Canada—Biography.
I.   Title.     II.   Series: Extraordinary Canadians

FC626.T7R52 2009          971.064’4092            C2009-900461-5

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

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This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper

      CONTENTS

     
Introduction by John Ralston Saul

1  The Hero with a Thousand Faces

2  1968 and All That

3  Against the Current

4  
Cité libre

5  Just Watch Me

6  In the Bedrooms of the Nation

7  Notwithstanding

8  He Haunts Us Still

     
SOURCES

     
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

     
CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION BY

John Ralston Saul

How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also
what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world
hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.

The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.

What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people’s lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the
whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau is one of the most difficult modern figures to write about. All of us think we know him. And much of that myth of knowing has to do with how we see ourselves through the mirror of his long years of power. But knowing isn’t understanding. Nino Ricci’s novels have shown his great talent for revealing the complexities of the human heart. Here he has created a portrait, both psychological and intellectual, that puts together what we know with what we try to understand about Trudeau and ourselves. The strengths and weaknesses of the leader, his victories and failures, become one with the ambitions of the citizenry in an era when to be ambitious for your country—or against it—was considered the norm.

In 1967, the year of the Centennial, I was in the second grade. At school they had been handing out bronze medallions emblazoned with symbols that bore some bastard relation to the Maple Leaf, which I did not then know had only recently, and after some bitterness, replaced the Union Jack as the country’s official national symbol; and they were teaching us songs that bore some even more bastard relation to “O Canada!,” which I did not know would only thirteen years later, in 1980, when the song had already been in existence for a hundred years, replace “God Save the Queen” as the country’s official national anthem. All I really knew was that something was afoot, something big, to judge from the fanfare, though the whole enterprise, with its funny coins and its funny songs, had a suspect air, as if there might be homework involved or extra church services.