Pierre Elliott Trudeau (2 page)

By chance that year I came upon a teacher standing alone in the library AV room watching a news item on one of the TVs. On the screen, a man whom I remember as being in shirtsleeves was talking amid a mob scene that as a grown-up I would come to recognize as a media scrum.

The teacher had an intent look.

“That man is going to be our next prime minister,” he said without taking his eyes from the screen.

I doubt I could even have said what a prime minister was at the time, let alone that we had one, and yet something not so much in the man on the TV as in the teacher’s reaction to him made the moment stick with me. It was as if I had caught a glimpse of a world I had never had access to before or had witnessed a moment of jarring intimacy, in the teacher’s naked, proprietary interest in someone in the news, someone on TV.

I grew up in a town where the news until then had been mainly CBS or
Time
magazine and where we rooted for the Detroit Tigers and hoped for an end to the Vietnam War. I didn’t know about prime ministers, but I knew about presidents. Like much of the rest of the continent, I could remember exactly where I had been and what I’d been doing—watching the afternoon cartoons that served as my babysitter while my parents were out working on the farm—
when I’d learned that JFK had been shot. Copper memorials of Kennedy and of another late John, Pope John XXIII, hung above the dining table in our kitchen, where they seemed to set the bar for the possible both in the Old World and in the New.

It wasn’t clear in this mix what being Canadian might mean. Mainly it meant what we were not: for my immigrant parents, that we didn’t spend our money at the hotel the instant we earned it; for myself, that we didn’t stay clean when we worked, that we picked our teeth in public, that we ate homemade bread instead of store bought. Somewhere I had got the notion that the true height of being Canadian was to be British, and I had created an alter ego for myself who went around saying things like “Pip, pip!” and “Cheerio!” in a broad English accent. But for those of us in the immigrant boonies, the murky land of Canadianness was mostly only a place we visited from time to time, the way we went into town on Friday nights to do our shopping at the A&P.

Maybe what struck me, then, in the library AV room was that simple possessive, “
our
prime minister,” uttered with none of the whiff of dutifulness or exclusivity that clung, say, to events like the Centennial. The man on the TV, of course, was Pierre Trudeau, and across the country that “our” would
come to take on a great deal of nuance in the years to come. For that instant, however, it was my own, as if I had suddenly sensed a different possibility than the ones represented by the two dead Johns in my family’s kitchen.

AS A NOVELIST
I am used to people’s eyes glazing over whenever I make the mistake of trying to describe to them whatever book I’m working on. That was never the case with this particular book. Instead, at the mention of Trudeau, a certain light would come into people’s eyes—wistful or philosophic or diamond hard, but a light nonetheless—and they would launch without the least preliminaries into their own personal Trudeau stories. Many of these were encounter stories of one sort or another, usually told not with the breathlessness of a celebrity spotting but in a protective tone, the way you might speak about an eccentric acquaintance whose reputation you had some share in keeping safe. But just as many involved only encounters of the mind, entirely one-sided relationships that nonetheless went on for years, through all the twists and turns—elation, anger, bitter ends and rueful relapses—of extramarital affairs. What grew clear in this was that Trudeau remained a figure with whom so many of us continued to feel a peculiar sense of engagement, as if we hadn’t quite finished with him. It was also clear that
this lingering connection had as much to do with what we needed to see in him as with what he was.

There are few public personages who continue even beyond the grave to spark the range of opinion Trudeau does, from the viciously demonizing to the hagiographic. He was a great man, a dilettante, a visionary, a bastard; he was a communist, he was a fascist; “the disappointment of the century” or “one of those golden beings” who walked with the gods. He was arrogant and shy, fearless and thin-skinned, generous, stingy, a maverick, and more of the same. He was “William Lyon Mackenzie King in a mini-skirt.” “A political leader worthy of assassination.” He was a twit. He saved the country; he tore it apart. He was a lady’s man. A man’s man. A boy.

A 1997
Maclean’s
survey ranked Trudeau down in the third tier of Canadian prime ministers, on par with the likes of Lester Pearson and Robert Borden. A few years earlier
The Independent
of London had given a different assessment, divvying up Canada’s prime ministers into two lonely categories: “those whom the rest of the world has largely forgotten, if it ever knew about them” and Pierre Trudeau.

“I’ll climb, not high perhaps,” Trudeau’s motto was, after Cyrano de Bergerac, “but all alone.” Why, then, did so many of us follow him? One of the iconic images of Trudeau is of
him dashing, suddenly, with a mischievous grin, from a flock of admirers seeking his attentions outside the Parliament Buildings. He was pushing fifty by then, a balding intellectual who had lived with his mother most of his life and who into his thirties was still seeking permission from the archbishop before reading anything on the church’s index of banned books. Yet he drew us on like a rock star, with that same mix of playing to us and eluding us, seeming to speak to some need we were barely aware of until he awakened it. “Not very badly,” he answered, when he was asked how much he wanted to be prime minister, and from that moment he seemed to have us eating out of his hand. We wanted him because he didn’t want us, the way we wanted an unrequited love. We wanted him because we didn’t know him. We wanted him because he always seemed
more:
more than met the eye, more than others had been, more than we’d hoped we could be. Because he seemed different, yet was one of us.

If he hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him. In many ways, of course, we did.

THE CLOSEST I EVER CAME TO TRUDEAU
in the flesh was to stand at the back end of a crowded Toronto conference hall during the launch of one of the mostly unmemorable and
unreliable summation books he was talked into ushering into print in the latter years of his life. As a child I had had the honour of second-hand contact when he reviewed the air cadet unit of one of my brothers, who reported back only that he was very short. Then in the 1980 election he caused a scandal in my hometown by agreeing to hold a rally at the upstart Lebanese Club rather than at the Italian one, something for which the Italians never forgave him, though as it happened his appearance was cancelled due to snow.

These entirely unremarkable near-misses accurately reflect, in a way, the very peripheral place that Trudeau had in my own life. Despite that glimmer of awareness in the library AV room, it is still the assassination of Robert Kennedy and not the election of Pierre Trudeau that I remember most viscerally from June 1968; if I was aware of Trudeaumania, it was with that baffled sense the young often feel at the seeming absurdity of grown-up behaviour. By the time I was dragged into anything like real political awareness, by a precocious friend who browbeat me into canvassing for the NDP in the election of 1974, the Trudeau honeymoon was long over. Soon enough even the NDP seemed entirely too establishment to me, so that I was never to vote for Trudeau or his party and was never to understand, during his reign, his two great obsessions, Quebec
separatism and the constitution, the former of which seemed a matter of personal vendetta and the latter of trumped-up legacy building. And yet far more than any other Canadian public figure, Trudeau was formational for me. At no point during his regime could I have described in any detail his political philosophy or even have named, beyond his sheer persistence, his political accomplishments; yet I always felt him at my back. In this, it seems, I was not in any way distinctive but entirely typical of my generation.

Two episodes beyond my AV-room awakening stand out in my own Trudeau story as emblematic of the peculiar hold he had on me. The first occurred in the Canadian history class I took in my final year of high school, by which time Trudeau was already an overly familiar fixture on the political scene. Our teacher was one of those who had never forgiven Trudeau for the War Measures Act, but one of my fellow students presented a seminar on him that brought home to me, maybe for the first time, the irreverent iconoclast he had once seemed to the nation, a man who had caught the tail end of the communist revolution in China, who had thrown a snowball at the statue of Stalin in Red Square, who had set out for Cuba from Key West in a homemade canoe. “Citizen of the World,” he’d had posted to his dorm room door at Harvard. I would discover that this
high-minded sentiment was fairly common at universities, once I got to one myself, and yet I was to spend many years trying to live up to it, most of them without understanding the contradiction that lay at the heart of it. Incarnated as it was in Trudeau, the phrase seemed to hold out the possibility of being a Canadian without quite having to be one. Of being Canadian and more than Canadian. Of making the “more than,” somehow, not the negation of Canadianness, but the essence of it.

The second episode took place during the summer after my first year of university, when I had in fact set out on a Trudeau-like quest across Europe using $1,500 I had left over from a student loan. The quest turned out to involve many more lonely hours waiting for rides at expressway on-ramps than I had bargained for and nowhere near as much enlightenment or sex, but along the way there were those few special moments when the reality came breathtakingly close to the fantasy. One occurred in Norway. I had had a hellish time with mosquitoes and rain in the north of Sweden looking for the midnight sun, but then I had entered into God’s country, coming down through Norway across stunning mountains and fjords that went on in endless succession.

I had caught a ride with a kindly young pastor moving house from north to south.

“I would like to visit one day to your side,” he said, “but of course it is always the U.S. I think to come to, not so much Canada.”

Who could blame him, really? Canada the quaint. Canada the forgotten.

He dropped me on the Oslo road. The next car that pulled up—in my idealized memory of the event it is a convertible, and the top is down, and the Norwegian air is pellucid under a brilliant northern sun—turned out to be the dream ride, the sort every hitchhiking male prayed for but never got: five Norwegian blondes, and not the quiet, mousy, world-shy ones of the mountains but the feisty, progressive blondes of the south. I was packed into the backseat between two of them, where I felt utterly overwhelmed. Then came the inevitable question, where was I from, and my squeaky reply.

“Canada! How wonderful!”

It was as if I had come from Valhalla, to tell them the news from the other side. What they wanted to know about: Maggie and Pierre. So this was the sort of tabloid gossip it took to be known in the world, to have a bit of cachet. Back home, of course, the whole sordid affair had already passed from the merely tawdry to the downright embarrassing. Yet even in my disdain there was a pride, a sense of affirmation:
I came from a place of sufficient complexity to have a scandal of international proportions. It was like wearing genuine Levis, say, instead of the BiWay knock-offs I’d had to wear as a kid. The difference between holding your own and non-existence.

“We don’t pay that much attention to them anymore,” I said lightly, riding the high of my celebrity for days afterwards even though I’d been dropped not five miles down the road when the girls reached their turnoff.

IT WAS ONE OF THE PARADOXES
of Trudeau, the antinationalist, that he brought to so many Canadians a sense of national identity they could finally live with. In some way he spoke to the contradictions at the heart of us, to our being this nation of many nations that often felt like no nation at all—one that barely had its own flag or its own song, that still looked to London and Paris and New York for its culture and to Washington for its politics. A place that was “not so much a country,” as Mordecai Richler once put it, “as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.”

None of these propositions was quite as true after Trudeau’s reign as before it. As much as anything, this shift in our collective self-perception was a matter of style. From the moment
Trudeau appeared on Parliament Hill in his Mercedes roadster it was clear something had changed: here was a man who seemed afraid of nothing, who went his own way, who had none of the cultural cringe that was the Canadian norm. It has always been an open question, of course, how much of that style flowed naturally from him and how much of it was strategic. His “Not very badly” of 1968 looks a little disingenuous next to the ample evidence in his archive that he had been honing himself for politics from a young age. Trudeau was not the sort to stint when he set himself an objective. Sickly and weak by disposition as a child, he turned himself into a superb athlete; shy in crowds, he sharpened his debating skills and became a formidable orator. Far from having been dragged into political leadership, he seemed to have been training for it all his life, perfecting his talents with the precision of a master craftsman. This coldly calculated version of Trudeau doesn’t quite square with Trudeau the gunslinger, the man who spoke his mind, yet the calculation was there, perhaps not so much as one makes an object for some specific use but as one makes art, including flourishes for their own sake. There is that aspect to Trudeau’s life, when it is read in full, the sense of a man with the leisure and means—would that we all had them—to consciously fashion his life as one might fashion a work of art.

Works of art are about much more than style, of course. They are about style in the service of content, or more correctly about style as content, about the point where the two merge. Style, really, is what makes it possible for art to be art, to hold a hundred balls in the air without dropping any, to contain in a single package unresolvable contradictions—and the really good contradictions are the unresolvable ones—without splitting apart at the seams. Trudeau was nothing if not a package of contradictions. The anglophone French Canadian. The woodsy sophisticate. The rich socialist. The passionate man of reason. Follow any thread of his life and you inevitably end up in some paradox. The fierce advocate for human rights who went spearfishing with dictators. The devout Roman Catholic who took buggery off the law books, gave us no-fault divorce, and laid the ground for abortion on demand. And yet, like a successful work of art, he hung together. There was a wholeness to him that we looked to, and a breadth of character that gave sanction to our own contradictions, and our own hopes.