He said 'Just watch me', and we did. From his rise to power in the late 60's through almost 16 years of his tenure as Prime Minister, we were all witnesses to his triumphs and his downfalls. On September 28, the Right Honourable Pierre Trudeau passed away from complications associated with prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease.
Trudeau was known as a man of surpassing intellect, acerbic wit, and an absolute single-mindedness when he had a goal in sight. He was born October 18, 1919, to father Charles Emile Trudeau, and mother Grace Elliott, a family whose wealth afforded him the opportunity to obtain an international education and to travel the globe. He attended the Jesuit College Jean de Brebeuf, Universite de Montreal, Harvard University, Ecole des sciences politique (Paris) and the London School of Economics.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly which of his actions will stand out most clearly in our memory. For some it will be when he invoked the War Measures Act, making it a criminal offence to be a member of the FLQ and suspending habeas corpus. For others, it will be his drive to patriate the Canadian Constitution and amend it with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For many Canadians he was, and is, a hero. In Quebec and Western Canada, his legacy may be viewed differently. It can be said that the patriation of the Constitution, which has still to be signed by Trudeau's home province, increased the feelings of estrangement of francophone Quebec from the Federal Government, and possibly from the rest of Canada. His introduction of the National Energy Program in 1980 also resulted in a fuelling of separatism in the Western Provinces.
In 1984, he retired from politics and returned to practicing law with the Montreal firm of Heenan and Blaikie. However, to the chagrin of those who governed after him, he kept returning from his private life to defend his much beloved Constitution. Despite his preference for a private life, he stepped back into the national limelight to express his view on the national unity debate and on constitutional issues, harpooning both the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accords.
His private life seems to have been almost as tumultuous as his political one. In 1971 he stunned the nation when at the age of 51, in a secret ceremony, he married the 22 year-old flower child, Margaret Sinclair. The two had three sons, Justin, Sacha and Michel before they decided on a trial separation in 1977, which ended in divorce in 1983. Trudeau gained custody of all three of the children and part of his decision to leave politics was to enable him to dedicate more of his time to their care. In the early 1990s, Trudeau again surprised us all when he had an affair with constitutional law expert Deborah Coyne, and on May 1991, the two had a daughter, Sarah. Probably the most devastating event of Trudeau's personal life came years after his departure from politics, with the death of his youngest son Michel, who died in an avalanche in Kokanee Lake, BC, in 1998. Several of Trudeau's closest personal friends attribute his health problems to grief over Michel's death.
For several days in October, Trudeau united us again as a nation. People gathered from across Canada to view his coffin at Parliament Hill, or to stop and salute his funeral train as it made its way from Ottawa to Quebec. Foreign dignitaries including former US President, Jimmy Carter, and Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, attended the funeral along with his family and his friends. They all gathered to say a final farewell to the man who reminded us that "we Canadians are standing on a mountaintop of human wealth, freedom and privilege".
