In Memoriam: Pierre Elliot Trudeau

Only one Canadian Prime Minister has ever jazzed his potential electorate to such a degree that someone had to append the word 'mania' to his surname to describe the phenomenon, and it sure as Hell wasn't Arthur Meighen...

The year was 1967, and as Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson was preparing to leave office, so was Canada preparing to leave the 1950s. Pearson was popular in the way that quiet people often attract quiet admirers - to him a golf clap would have been a thunderous ovation; his Justice Minister was also quiet, but he was quiet in an entirely different way...

Pierre Trudeau's tenure as Justice Minister saw an overhaul the likes of which the country had never seen - laws concerning divorce, homosexuality, and abortion more in line with the times were implemented. It was almost as though, following a century as an Imperial and Commonwealth Dominion, Canada was finally ready to be its own country. Trudeau's omnibus bill, Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, swept away the old so as to usher in the new as easily as would Trudeau's other masterpiece, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a decade later.

Similarly, Trudeaumania shook Canadian society down to its very core, beginning in that centennial year... For many Baby Boomers the election of 1968 was their first chance to vote, and they sure as tooting weren't going to waste it by voting for some square who favoured the status quo. Trudeau was not only the first 20th Century Prime Minister born in the 20th Century (on this day in 1919) he was also the first Prime Minister elected in Canada's second century - single, athletic, and while not traditionally handsome, he was certainly attractive in other ways, as his never-ending stream of pretty dates could attest.

It didn't take long for his opponents to surface; whether the more staid rural Liberals in his own party or Quebeckers expecting one of their own to just hand them their sovereignty, Trudeau fought them all and won. To this day he's still dividing Canadians, who are still trying to come to terms with his legacy, especially as one of his more anodyne successors prepares to hand control of the Natural Governing Party - potentially even to one of Trudeau's sons, Justin, who could potentially become Canada's first PMILF*...

*Duh! What do you think it means?
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Pop History Moment: The October Crisis Deepens

In general Canadian Prime Ministers have not been possessed of overmuch in the swagger department. They're generally a 'hot mug of cocoa, in bed by ten' kind of group, which suits the country just fine. What a shock it was, then, to find that Pierre Trudeau more than made up for the alternating parade of milquetoasts and blowhards who have typically inhabited 24 Sussex Drive.

Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act to deal with the deepening October Crisis of 1970 isn't something I of all people should be proud of; yet alone among politicians, I would trust Trudeau to know the limits of his power and not abuse them, which anyway is how it all played out.

Watching him now, 40 years later, is an exercise in conflicting emotions: he's maddeningly smug, defiant, and courageous in the execution of a potentially unpopular act - which anyway was requested of him by the mayor of Montreal and the Premier of Quebec. At least he wasn't acting unilaterally - like some Presidents I could name.

It shows, too, the power of an idea called Canada, that it could attract such a fierce intellectual, who in his college days had been a pretty radical leftie separatist, to come to its aid in a time of crisis, deftly display just enough power to subdue a dangerous situation (possibly even forestalling a civil war) and then back off once it was under control, rather than becoming drunk on the power.

I'd like to see Brian Mulroney do that...
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