Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 October 2000 Issue No. 502
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The Canadian Pericles

By Marc Munro

When Pierre Elliott Trudeau died on 28 September, Canada was overcome with grief and nostalgia. For over 35 years, Trudeau had been an omnipresent figure in Canadian politics. Prime Minister Jean Chretien recalled that Trudeau's motto was "reason over passion" -- but it was his passion that defined him for Canadians. Government House Leader Don Boudria asserted that Trudeau "was the closest any western country of the modern age ever had to a philosopher king."

Trudeau was first elected as an MP in 1965, when the rise of nationalism in Quebec was breeding a new generation of intellectuals eager to declare the province an independent state. Then Prime Minister Lester Pearson enlisted the aid of three federalists who became known as the "Three Wise Men." Trudeau was one of them, and he would soon be catapulted to high office. His personality became a cult and in 1968, on a wave of "Trudeaumania", he became Prime Minister.

Behind the glitter of celebrity, there turned out to be great substance. He saw full cultural integration for Quebec into mainstream Canada as the best way of appeasing nationalist aspirations. Radical nationalists rejected his offer of dialogue and took up arms. In 1970 a small group, Le Front de Libération du Quebec, began a series of terrorist activities which culminated in the October kidnappings of the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and the Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, ordering troops onto the streets of Montreal and Ottawa. At the end of the crisis, Laporte was found dead in the trunk of a car. Cross was mercifully set free. Although the disintegration of civil freedom did not last the month, the repercussions proved traumatic. Although hailed as a saviour in Anglophone Canada, in Quebec the reaction to the October Crisis was profoundly ambiguous. For many, the sight of troops and the spectre of arbitrary arrest conjured the ghosts of the original conquest by the British.

In 1976, the Parti Quebecois, under the charismatic leadership of René Levesque, came to power in the provincial government of Quebec on a sovereignty platform. Trudeau appeared on television and set the ground rules for the possible break up of the country. Four years later, the Parti Quebecois called for an independence referendum. Trudeau rejected the nationalist aspirations, and during the campaign seemed to win the argument time and time again, and Quebecois voted to remain a part of Canada.

During the final years of his tenure, Trudeau promised Canadians that, if they followed him, Canada could be a "brilliant prototype for the building of tomorrow's civilisation." The creation of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its entrenchment in the constitution was his crowning achievement. To simply say it left an indelible political mark would be trite. With this act, he wove his personal ambitions and beliefs into the very centre of the Canadian consciousness. Throughout his rule, he had advocated a bilingual, multicultural, egalitarian civil society, and he believed that the Charter went a long way to bringing that vision into a reality.

In 1984, Trudeau suddenly resigned after taking a walk in the midst of a raging blizzard, to see "if there were any signs of my destiny in the sky and there were none. There were just snowflakes." Thereafter, he became an intensely private man, emerging only to speak out against a constitutional attempt to reach an accommodation with Quebecois nationalism. Such a move, he believed, threatened the values and ideals Canada had come to embody. In a reference to himself by analogy, Trudeau noted that the greatness of Pericles lay in the fact that he knew Athens was nothing more than an idea. "I think we have to realise that Canada is not immortal," he warned, "but if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper."

Quebecois alienation remains, despite everything: in 1995 a second referendum came very close to mandating a separatist project. The question now is whether Trudeau's legacy will continue to have the last word on this matter.

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