Pierre Trudeau: The Philosopher Who Ruled Canada
On 13 October 1970 a CBC reporter named Tim Ralfe stood on the steps of Parliament and asked the Prime Minister how far he was prepared to go to stop the FLQ. "Just watch me," Trudeau said. Three days later his cabinet invoked the War Measures Act — the first peacetime suspension of civil liberties in Canadian history — and within twenty-four hours police carried out 3,000 searches and detained 497 people without charge. A December Gallup poll found that 89 per cent of English-speaking Canadians and 86 per cent of French-speaking Canadians approved. The man who had told Canada the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation had just put the army in its streets.
Outremont and the Wide World
He was born on 18 October 1919 in Outremont, Montreal, to Charles-Émile Trudeau, a businessman whose holdings ran to gas stations, mines and the Montreal Royals baseball club, and Grace Elliott. The bilingual, half-Scottish, comfortably rich upbringing is not incidental — it is the whole explanation of a man who never felt he had to choose between French and English Canada. His father died in 1935, leaving him an inheritance and, more usefully, independence.
He was educated at the Académie Querbes and Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, read law at the Université de Montréal, and then assembled one of the most cosmopolitan educations any national leader has had: graduate work at Harvard, where his dissertation dealt with communism and Christianity, then Sciences Po in Paris and the London School of Economics. In 1948–49 he travelled the world, much of it rough.
Cité Libre
He returned to a Quebec run by Maurice Duplessis, and set about attacking it. He supported the strikers in the 1949 Asbestos Strike and later edited a book about it; in 1950 he co-founded *Cité Libre*, the journal that became the intellectual armoury of Quebec's liberal opposition. He taught law at the Université de Montréal, and Duplessis blacklisted him. His target was never simply the Union Nationale — it was Quebec nationalism itself, which he regarded as a parochial trap. That position, held consistently for fifty years, made him the most hated Canadian in one part of Quebec and the indispensable one everywhere else.
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He joined the Liberals in 1965, entered Parliament, and became Justice Minister in 1967. The omnibus reform he drove through decriminalised homosexuality and liberalised divorce and abortion law, and he defended it with the line that has outlived every other sentence he spoke: there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. It made him famous. In 1968 he won the Liberal leadership and then a general election on a wave the press called Trudeaumania — a phenomenon of celebrity unprecedented in Canadian politics.
Building a Country to His Own Design
He governed from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, winning four elections, and he used the time to redesign the country's self-understanding. The Official Languages Act of 1969 made Canada officially bilingual. In 1971 his government adopted multiculturalism as state policy, the first country to do so. Both flowed from a single argument: that Canadians should be bound by rights held individually and equally, not by membership of a founding nation.
The October Crisis of 1970 tested it violently. The FLQ kidnapped the British diplomat James Cross on 5 October and the Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte on 10 October; Laporte was dead by 17 October. Trudeau's response was the War Measures Act and mass detention. Of the 497 arrested, 435 had been released by February 1971 and 62 charged. Cross was freed after 62 days; his kidnappers were flown to Cuba.
The rest of the record is mixed and contested. Wage and price controls he had mocked in opposition. The National Energy Program of 1980, which redistributed oil revenues eastward, created a western grievance that has never healed. Abroad he recognised the People's Republic of China early and kept an ostentatious distance from Washington under both Nixon and Reagan, and in 1983–84 mounted a personal peace initiative on nuclear tensions.
His masterwork came at the end. Having led the federalist side to victory in the 1980 Quebec referendum, he patriated the constitution from Britain and entrenched the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 — giving Canada, for the first time, a constitution it could amend itself and a judicially enforceable bill of rights. Quebec's government did not sign. He retired in 1984, emerged to help kill the Meech Lake accord that would have accommodated Quebec as a distinct society, and died on 28 September 2000 of prostate cancer.
Why Pierre Is Called a Genius
The quality is genuinely intellectual, and unusually so for a head of government: Trudeau was a trained political theorist who entered politics with a worked-out constitutional argument and spent sixteen years imposing it on a country. The argument — that a plural federation should rest on individual rights held equally by every citizen rather than on collective national claims — is coherent, was unfashionable when he began, and is now the operating system of Canada. The Charter of 1982 is the proof: he identified the instrument that would outlast him, spent enormous political capital to get it, and it has since restructured Canadian law and civic identity more thoroughly than any statute. Add to this the intellectual honesty of the *Cité Libre* years, when the position cost him a career, and a rhetorical gift sharp enough that two of his sentences are still national shorthand.
The counter-case is serious and Canadians make it loudly. He was contemptuous of opponents, mercurial, and centralising by instinct — the Canadian Encyclopedia's own summary lists regional alienation, economic mismanagement and centralisation among the standing criticisms. The National Energy Program did real and lasting damage to national unity in the west. His economic management, through inflation and controls, is widely judged poor. Above all, the October Crisis remains the permanent asterisk: the philosopher of individual rights suspended them, jailed hundreds of people who were never charged, and never conceded that he had been wrong. And the constitutional triumph was incomplete in the way that mattered most — he patriated the constitution over Quebec's objection and then blocked the compromise that might have brought Quebec in, leaving the country's central quarrel unresolved and arguably sharper.
Legacy
Canada's largest airport carries his name and his son later held his office. He is routinely ranked among the country's greatest prime ministers and remains one of its most divisive. That is the correct outcome for a leader who governed from a theory: theories can be argued with, and Canadians have been arguing with his for fifty years without managing to replace it.
Achievements
- Affiliated with Cité Libre
- Educated at Faculté de droit de l'Université de Montréal, London School of Economics and Political Science and John F. Kennedy School of Government
- Worked as politician, lawyer and journalist
