Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read Free Page B

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.
    While doing the research for this book I often felt as I did a few years ago doing research for a novel on the life of Jesus: that I had stepped into a war zone of vested interests and scholarly bloodletting, with no opinion unpartisan or untainted. Interestingly, Jesus, like Trudeau—though Iwouldn’t want to carry this analogy too far—was another of history’s contradiction-bridgers, surely one of the reasons his story has had such staying power. That is the fate of some stories: they speak so deeply to our hopes and fears, to the disjunctions of our lives and our wish to overcome them, that they pass from art to myth.
    Michael Valpy, describing myth as what “reveals the deep patterns of meaning and coherence in a culture,” what “shows us who we dream ourselves to be,” has made the argument for Trudeau as “our one truly mythological prime minister.” There remain legions of dissenters, however, particularly in Quebec and in the West, who still grow apoplectic at such appraisals, and for whom the only proper application of the term myth to the Trudeau legacy is in the sense of unholy fiction, of a great lie perpetrated on the Canadian people. Even here the contradictions repeat themselves, for the more we learn of Trudeau, the more those two opposing summations of him seem inextricably intertwined.

CHAPTER TWO
1968 and All That
    Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those watershed years in human history that was almost enough to make even the most cynical believe in astrological forces. In France it was the year of May ’68; in Poland, of March ’68; in the United States, of Chicago ’68. It was the year of the Prague Spring. Of bra burning. Of Hair.
    In Canada we tend to look at 1967’s Expo as the evidence that we, too, even before Trudeau arrived on the scene, had been moving toward our own ’68. Thinking of Expo 67 as a precursor to the spirit of 1968, however, is a bit like thinking of Sunday school as a proper warm-up for a Grateful Dead concert. In the United States, in 1967, they had the Summer of Love: tens of thousands of youths descending on Haight-Ashbury from around the world with flowers in their hair and sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll on their minds. All this was a far cry from the