Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page A

front and centre on the reviewing stand, leaning out like a sports fan enjoying himself at a ball game.
    Suddenly a hail of rocks and bottles rained down on the stand from protesters across the street. There was a flurry of movement as the gathered dignitaries and their spouses scrambled to get clear, but Trudeau kept his place. A second volley hit the stand and this time Trudeau’s security men took hold of him to pull him away. He waved them off angrily and resumed his seat.
    A cheer went up from the crowd.
    The commentator for Radio Canada, which was televising the event, was unable to hide a note of awe.
    “Monsieur Trudeau insiste il veut demeurer sur place.”
    Mask or no mask, this was not the sort of moment you could fake. Rather, before you could think, your character was revealed: you were the sort who fled, or you were the sort who stayed put. The next day, as people went to the polls, the image of Trudeau sticking defiantly to his place played on every TV screen in the country.
    Once again, when the challenge came he was equal to it, as if he had been training for it all his life. In a sense, he had.Whether he’d got there by choice or by chance, whether he’d been urged there or had led others to urge him, when he came to the sword he had what it took to pull it free.

CHAPTER THREE
Against the Current
    The enduring image of Trudeau during his life, one he often encouraged, was that of someone who from a young age always chafed at conformity. His classmates took the side of the French, so he took the side the English; they spoke street Québécois, joual, so he made a point of speaking the French of Paris. In this way, Trudeau forged himself into the firebrand the country came to see him as when he was prime minister.
    We now know that this image of Trudeau as someone who had sprung out of the womb a rebel and an original was largely a construction. Trudeau himself more or less admitted as much late in life in the introduction to a 1996 collection of his writings, Against the Current, where he remembered that in his early years he was “more inclined to do and say the conventional thing” than to question what he was taught. Though he’d grown more rebellious by his teens, “the real sea change came” when he returned to Quebec after graduate studies abroad and found that his province “hadbecome a citadel of orthodoxy with a state-of-siege mentality. To remain a free man in Quebec, one had to go against the current of ideas and institutions.”
    This admission by Trudeau really goes to the heart of his political formation, even if it can’t quite be taken at face value: he was the one who had changed much more than his province had, alive now to unpleasant aspects of his home culture to which he had been blind before his experience of the wider world. In many ways this more mature Trudeau, for all the sense people would later have of him as someone who had never wavered from certain core beliefs, came to hold views that were the polar opposites of those he had held as a youth. It would be hard to understand Trudeau’s later political trajectory without understanding this crucial transitional period in his life and the demons he had had to wrestle with before he had got through it.
    “MY CHILDHOOD having been a happy one,” Trudeau wrote, “I felt no need for ‘le doute méthodique.’” Happy, on the whole, his childhood may have been, but perhaps not quite in the generic way of Tolstoy’s happy families. Trudeau’s family stood out: a francophone father and anglophone mother, in an era when a kind of apartheid still reigned in Quebec between English and French; an increasing level ofwealth that came not from some seigneurial past or from any of the traditional routes to respectability available to French Canadians—through the professions, mainly, particularly law—but through an entrepreneurial cunning that was entirely anomalous in French-Canadian society of the time.
    If there was a true