Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read Free

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 andunreliable 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, Quebecseparatism 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 thishigh-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