Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 2 - 8 November 2000 Issue No. 506
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

Leaders come and go, and soon they are forgotten -- unless, of course, they leave an indelible mark on their countries. Such was the case with Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat and, before them, Saad Zaghlul and Mustafa Kamel.

This thought came to mind when I read about the death of Pierre Trudeau, the 15th prime minister of Canada. While I was in New York recently, a Canadian friend brought me a copy of the Canadian National Post which had a 23-page supplement on Trudeau's life, his career and his legacy.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Trudeau twice. The first time was in Ottawa during a conference of "Liberal International" which grouped together the liberal parties of the world. Trudeau joined the Liberal Party of Canada in 1965 and became its leader in 1968. Shortly after becoming the leader of the party, he rode a great wave of popularity and won a landslide election victory. Though born in Montreal, the French part of Canada, Trudeau was against cession. His slogans during those elections were "Canada must be unified! Canada must be one! Canada must be progressive! And Canada must be a just society!"

When I met Mr. Trudeau his party was out of power. For some reason, the conference asked me to give a speech thanking him for the barbecue dinner he gave to the conference members. I said in my speech that the last time I had been in Montreal, I had lost my job. That was true because, as a result of that visit during the Camp David Talks, I had to leave my job as chairman of the State Information Service.

Mr. Trudeau replied, also jokingly, that it was in Montreal that he too had lost his job. He was referring to his strong stand against the French sovereignists in the country. It was Trudeau who told me the history of his fight against the Quebec nationalists represented by the Separatist Party Quebecois. When that party came to power under the leadership of René Levesque, Trudeau's comment was: "I like to think that he appealed to the emotions of the Quebec people, while I was trying to appeal to their reason."

The second time I met Trudeau was at the P.E.N. Congress which convened in New York. Among the guests were Trudeau and two Arab poets, Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish. Mr. Trudeau gave a speech in which he expressed his support for the Palestinians, which, of course, did not go down well with our American friends. Again, during that conference I had the chance to talk and reminisce with him about the past.

Pierre Trudeau was a great man, a great leader who "made us hugely more aware of who we are," as Roy Macgregor put it in the Post supplement. The Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said: "Pierre Trudeau, the embodiment of the dream of a just society, has left us. He dreamed of a society that afforded all of its citizens an equal opportunity to succeed in life, whatever their background or beliefs, whether rich or poor."

Many tributes are made in this supplement. In particular the comment by Joe Clark, the former Tory prime minister who defeated Mr. Trudeau's Liberals in the 1979 elections, is worth quoting: "He was, in simple human terms, a giant of a man. There is no question that when he first ran in the 1968 election campaign he came to incarnate a sense of hope for the country, of what we could be. If he had a fault, it was that he thought all of the country had all the talents that he did. That set probably too high a standard for most of Canada. But he was one extraordinary man."

What a tribute from an adversary, and what a lesson in democracy.

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