Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online

ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
    Trudeau was the man who had studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne, who had caught the tail end of Mao’s revolution, who had travelled the world and ridden the white charger and wooed the fair maidens. Who had won the decisive victory and would bring home the boons, promised to us in what he called the Just Society.
    The Just Society . Trudeau, the great phrase-poacher, likely cadged this one from his former mentor F.R. Scott or from Plato, who had served Trudeau well more than once on the campaign trail. His first use of the phrase during the Liberal leadership convention had seemed a stab in the dark, as if he had been reaching for something loftier, something at the level of LBJ’s Great Society, and had come up with only this slightly lame undergraduate substitute. Yet the phrase caught on. Over the years the Just Society would come to consist ofwhatever policy the Trudeau Liberals happened to be pushing that day, but at the outset what seemed to matter was the tone it caught rather than any specifics, how it seemed to join a Bob Dylanesque sense of changing times with the more traditional “peace, order, and good government” of something made in Canada.
    That, perhaps, beyond his Weberian charisma or his Campbellian heroism, was the truly bewitching thing about Trudeau for Canadians: he was made in Canada. The contradictions he resolved were our contradictions. For both anglophones and francophones, he seemed a model of being oneself and yet more than oneself, of being Canadian in a way that wasn’t defined by negatives. For immigrants, meanwhile, and for all those in the grey zone of the not-quiteincluded, he was the end of an old boys’ WASP hegemony, the man who rose from the outside to the top.
    It would take some doing to sort out all the ways we were wrong about Trudeau in those first heady days, just as we are usually wrong about our beloveds in the first throes of romance, when they are mainly just a blank screen for the projection of our own desires. Clarkson and McCall related how one of Trudeau’s old schoolmates came to visit him before he had declared his candidacy for the Liberal leadership and warned him that he was far too shy to be a politicalleader. Shy was not a word that the general public would have associated with Trudeau, then or afterwards, but it was one often used by the people closest to him. He had that way of projecting his opposite, though also of pulling us up short with the unexpected, until it was impossible to say what was projection and what was real.
    And yet, however mistaken we were in him, however unrealistic in our expectations, he still somehow managed to rise to every challenge. There would be other darlings who came after him who would enjoy their brief moments of deification—John Turner, Kim Campbell, Paul Martin Jr.—yet none would quite reach Trudeau’s height and all would fall more precipitously. For a happenstance prime minister he was amazingly suited to his job: he had studied federalism and constitutional law; he had a solid grounding in economics; he knew the world. Above all he had an unfailing knack for being in the right place at the right moment, and for flourishing there when lesser men would have foundered.
    With typical bravado, Trudeau had called for his first federal election to fall on the day after Quebec’s annual airing of nationalist sentiment, the festival of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. At the invitation of mayor Jean Drapeau, Trudeau, on the day of the festival, had joined a host of other dignitaries onthe reviewing stand of Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville to watch as the parade filed by. There had been threats of violence if Trudeau showed up, and the police were out in force, but Trudeau himself sat