Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read Free Page A

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 momentTrudeau 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