Pierre Trudeau

Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau (October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000) was a Canadian politician, lawyer, jurist, academic, author, and journalist who served as the 15th prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984. Between his non-consecutive terms as prime minister from 1979 to 1980, he served as the leader of the Opposition. He led the Liberal Party from 1968 until 1984.

Trudeau was born and raised in Outremont, Quebec, and studied politics and law. In 1950, he co-founded Cité Libre and rose to prominence as a labour activist in Quebec politics by opposing the conservative Union Nationale government. Trudeau was also an associate professor of law at the Université de Montréal. He was originally part of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), but then joined the Liberal Party in 1965 on the belief that the NDP could not achieve power. In the election that year, he was elected to the House of Commons, and was quickly appointed as prime minister Lester B. Pearson's parliamentary secretary. Trudeau was minister of justice and attorney general from 1967 to 1968, during which time he liberalized divorce and abortion laws and decriminalized homosexuality. His outgoing personality and charisma caused a sensation, termed "Trudeaumania", which helped him win the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1968. He then succeeded Pearson and became prime minister of Canada.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, Trudeau dominated the Canadian political scene. After his appointment as prime minister, he led the Liberals to victory in the 1968, 1972, and 1974 federal elections, before narrowly losing in 1979. He won a fourth election victory shortly afterwards, in 1980. Trudeau is the most recent prime minister to win four federal elections (having won three majority governments and one minority government) and to serve non-consecutive terms. His tenure of 15 years and 164 days makes him the third longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history, behind John A. Macdonald and William Lyon Mackenzie King.

As prime minister, Trudeau pioneered official bilingualism and multiculturalism. Amid the Quebec sovereignty movement, he invoked the War Measures Act in response to the 1970 October Crisis and later led the federalist campaign to victory in the 1980 Quebec sovereignty-association referendum. In economic policy, he introduced the capital gains tax, expanded social programs, sharply increased deficit spending, and responded to the 1970s recession through wage and price controls. In a bid to move the Liberal Party towards economic nationalism, Trudeau established Petro-Canada and launched the National Energy Program, both of which generated significant controversy in oil-rich Western Canada and led to a rise in what was called "Western alienation". Trudeau's government also converted Canada to the metric system, created Via Rail, and enacted the Access to Information Act and the Canada Health Act. In foreign policy, Trudeau reduced alignment with the United States, maintained cordial relations with the Soviet Union, and developed strong ties with China and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which put him at odds with other Western capitalist states. He also oversaw Canada's entry into the G7 forum. In 1982, Trudeau patriated the Constitution of Canada and established the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with the Constitution Act, 1982, which achieved full Canadian sovereignty.

Trudeau retired from politics shortly before the 1984 federal election. In his retirement, he practised law at the Montreal law firm of Heenan Blaikie. He also spoke out against the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords (which proposed granting Quebec certain concessions), arguing they would strengthen Quebec nationalism. Trudeau died in 2000, aged 80. He is ranked highly among scholars in historical rankings of Canadian prime ministers, but remains a divisive figure in Canadian politics. Critics accused him of arrogance, econo

The Trudeau family can be traced to Marcillac-Lanville in France in the 16th century and to a Robert Truteau (1544–1589). In 1659, the first Trudeau to arrive in Canada was Étienne Trudeau or Truteau (1641–1712), a carpenter and home builder from La Rochelle.

Pierre Trudeau was born at home in Outremont, Quebec, on October 18, 1919, to Charles-Émile "Charley" Trudeau (1887–1935), a French-Canadian businessman and lawyer, and Grace Elliott, who was of mixed Scottish and French-Canadian descent. He had an older sister named Suzette and a younger brother named Charles Jr. Trudeau remained close to both siblings for his entire life. Trudeau's paternal grandparents were French-speaking Quebec farmers. His father had acquired the B&A gas station chain (now defunct), some "profitable mines, the Belmont amusement park in Montreal and the Montreal Royals, the city's minor-league baseball team", by the time Trudeau was fifteen. When his father died in Orlando, Florida, on April 10, 1935, Trudeau and each of his siblings inherited $5,000 (equivalent to $110,000 in 2025), a considerable sum at that time, which meant that he was financially secure and independent. His mother, Grace, "doted on Pierre" and he remained close to her throughout her long life. After her husband died, she left the management of her inheritance to others and spent a lot of her time working for the Roman Catholic Church and various charities, travelling frequently to New York City, Florida, Europe, and Maine, sometimes with her children. Already in his late teens, Trudeau was "directly involved in managing a large inheritance".

From the age of six until twelve, Trudeau attended the primary school Académie Querbes, in Outremont, where he became immersed in the Catholic religion. The school, which was for both English and French Catholics, was an exclusive school with very small classes and he excelled in mathematics and religion. From his earliest years, Trudeau was fluently bilingual, which would later prove to be a "big asset for a politician in bilingual Canada." As a teenager, he attended the Jesuit French-language Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, a prestigious secondary school known for educating elite francophone families in Quebec.

In his seventh and final academic year, 1939–1940, Trudeau focused on winning a Rhodes Scholarship. In his application, he wrote that he had prepared for public office by studying public speaking and publishing many articles in Brébeuf. His letters of recommendations praised him highly. Father Boulin, who was the head of the college, said that during Trudeau's seven years at the college (1933–1940), he had won a "hundred prizes and honourable mentions" and "performed with distinction in all fields". Trudeau graduated from Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in 1940 at the age of twenty-one.

Trudeau did not win the Rhodes Scholarship. He consulted several people on his options, including Henri Bourassa, the economist Edmond Montpetit, and Father Robert Bernier, a Franco-Manitoban. Following their advice, he chose a career in politics and a degree in law at the Université de Montréal.

In its obituary, The Economist described Trudeau as "parochial as a young man", who "dismissed" the Second World War "as a squabble between the big powers, although he later regretted 'missing one of the major events of the century'." In his 1993 Memoir, Trudeau wrote that the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and his father's death were the two "great bombshells" that marked his teenage years. In his first year at university, the prime topics of conversation were the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, and the London blitz. He wrote that in the early 1940s, when he was in his early twenties, he thought, "So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn't stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible...[I]f you were a French Canadian in Montreal [at that time], you did not automatically believe that this was a just war. In Montreal in the early 1940s, we still knew nothing about the Holocaust and we tended to think of this war as a settling of scores among the superpowers."

Young Trudeau opposed conscription for overseas service, and in 1942 he campaigned for the anti-conscription candidate Jean Drapeau (later the mayor of Montreal) in Outremont. Trudeau described a speech he heard in Montreal by Ernest Lapointe, minister of justice and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's Quebec lieutenant. Lapointe had been a Liberal MP during the 1917 Conscription Crisis, in which the Canadian government had deployed up to 1,200 soldiers to suppress the anti-conscription Easter Riots in Quebec City in March and April 1918. In a final and bloody conflict, armed rioters fired on the troops, and the soldiers returned fire. At least five men were killed by gunfire and there were over 150 casualties and $300,000 in damage. In 1939, it was Lapointe who helped draft the Liberals' policy against conscription for service overseas. Lapointe was aware that a new conscription crisis would destroy the national unity that Mackenzie King had been trying to build since the end of the First World War. Trudeau believed Lapointe had lied and broken his promise. His criticisms of King's wartime policies, such as "suspension of habeas corpus", the "farce of bilingualism and French-Canadian advancement in the army," and the "forced 'voluntary' enrolment", were scathing.

As a university student, Trudeau joined the Canadian Officers' Training Corps (COTC), which trained at the local armoury in Montreal during the school term and undertook further training at Camp Farnham each summer. Although the National Resources Mobilization Act, enacted in 1940, originally provided that conscripts could not be required to serve outside of Canada, Parliament amended the act and removed that restriction in 1942. The Conscription Crisis of 1944 arose in response to the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

Trudeau continued his full-time studies in law at the Université de Montréal while in the COTC from 1940 until his graduation in 1943. Following his graduation, he articled for a year and, in late 1944, began his master's degree in political economy at Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration (now the John F. Kennedy School of Government). In his Memoir, he admitted that it was at Harvard's "super-informed environment" that he realized the "historic importance" of the war and that he had "missed one of the major events of the century in which [he] was living. Harvard had become a major intellectual centre, as fascism in Europe led to a great migration of intellectuals to the United States.

Trudeau's Harvard dissertation was on the topic of communism and Christianity. At Harvard, an American and predominantly Protestant university, Trudeau, a French Canadian Catholic living outside the province of Quebec for the first time, felt like an outsider. As his sense of isolation deepened, he decided in 1947 to continue his work on his Harvard dissertation in Paris, where he studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). The Harvard dissertation remained unfinished when Trudeau briefly entered a doctoral program to study under the socialist economist Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE). This cemented Trudeau's belief that Keynesian economics and social sciences were essential to the creation of the "good life" in a democratic society. Over a five-week period he attended many lectures and became a follower of personalism after being influenced most notably by Emmanuel Mounier. He also was influenced by Nikolai Berdyaev, particularly his book Slavery and Freedom. Max and Monique Nemni argue that Berdyaev's book influenced Trudeau's rejection of nationalism and separatism.

In mid 1948, Trudeau embarked on world travels to find a sense of purpose. At the age of twenty-eight, he travelled to Poland where he visited Auschwitz, then Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Middle East, including Turkey, Jordan and southern Iraq. Although he was wealthy, Trudeau travelled with a backpack in "self-imposed hardship". He used his British passport instead of his Canadian passport in his travels through Pakistan, India, China, and Japan, often wearing local clothing to blend in. According to The Economist, when Trudeau returned to Canada in 1949 after an absence of five months, his mind was "seemingly broadened" from his studies at Harvard, Sciences Po, and the LSE, as well as his travels. He was "appalled at the narrow nationalism in his native French-speaking Quebec, and the authoritarianism of the province's government".

Beginning while Trudeau was travelling overseas, several events took place in Quebec that were precursors to the Quiet Revolution. These included the 1948 release of the anti-establishment manifesto Refus global, the publication of Les insolences du Frère Untel, the 1949 Asbestos Strike, and the 1955 Richard Riot. Artists and intellectuals in Quebec signed the Refus global on August 9, 1948, in opposition to the repressive rule of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and the decadent "social establishment" in Quebec, including the Catholic Church. When he returned to Montreal in 1949, Trudeau quickly became a leading figure opposing Duplessis's rule. He actively supported the workers in the Asbestos strike which opposed Duplessis in 1949. Trudeau was the co-founder and editor of Cité Libre, a dissident journal that helped provide the intellectual basis for the Quiet Revolution. In 1956, he edited an important book on the subject, La grève de l'amiante, which argued that the asbestos miners' strike of 1949 was a seminal event in Quebec's history, marking the beginning of resistance to the conservative, Francophone clerical establishment and Anglophone business class that had long ruled the province.

Because of Trudeau's labour union activities in Asbestos, Duplessis blacklisted him, and he was unable to teach law at the Université de Montréal. He surprised his closest friends in Quebec when he became a civil servant in Ottawa in 1949. Until 1951, he worked in the Privy Council Office of the Liberal prime minister Louis St. Laurent as an economic policy advisor. He wrote in his memoirs that he found this period very useful when he entered politics later on, and that senior civil servant Norman Robertson tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay on.

Trudeau's progressive values and his close ties with Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) intellectuals (including F. R. Scott, Eugene Forsey, Michael Kelway Oliver and Charles Taylor) led to his support of and membership in the party throughout the 1950s.

An associate professor of law at the Université de Montréal from 1961 to 1965, Trudeau's views evolved towards a liberal position in favour of individual rights counter to the state and made him an opponent of Quebec nationalism. He admired labour unions, which were tied to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and tried to infuse his Liberal Party with some of their reformist zeal. By the late 1950s, Trudeau began to reject social democratic and labour parties, arguing that they should put their narrow goals aside and join forces with Liberals to fight for democracy first. In economic theory, he was influenced by professors Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith while he was at Harvard. In 1963, Trudeau criticized the Liberal Party of Lester B. Pearson when it supported arming Bomarc missiles in Canada with nuclear warheads.

During his time as a professor at the Université de Montréal, he was featured in Denis Héroux's 1964 student film Over My Head (Jusqu'au cou), appearing as himself in a political debate.

Trudeau was offered a position at Queen's University teaching political science by James Corry, who later became Principal of Queen's, but turned it down because he preferred to teach in Quebec.

In 1965, Trudeau joined the Liberal Party, along with his friends Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand. Dubbed the "three wise men" by the media, they ran successfully for the Liberals in the 1965 election. Trudeau himself was elected in the safe Liberal riding of Mount Royal in Montreal. He would hold this seat until his retirement from politics in 1984, winning each election with large majorities. His decision to join the Liberals rather than the CCF's successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP), was partly based on his belief that the federal NDP could not achieve power. He also doubted the feasibility of the NDP's centralizing policies and felt that the party leadership tended toward a "deux nations" approach he could not support.

Upon arrival in Ottawa, Trudeau was appointed as parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and spent much of the next year travelling abroad, representing Canada at international meetings and bodies, including the United Nations. In 1967, he was appointed to Pearson's Cabinet as Minister of Justice and Attorney General.