 With PETER BLACK On Trudeau Turning 80
What does you give a former prime minister for his 80th birthday?
TV networks have put together retrospectives on Pierre Elliott Trudeau's life, cranking out the footage on this convenient anniversary, lest it crumble to dust in the vaults while he outlasts most of his contemporaries -- and many of his juniors?
What tribute could possibly ease the agony of his loss -- not even a year ago -- of a precious son, taken from him at an age when Micha had yet to find his path in life. He was so much like his father who, at 23, was a carefree law student in wartime Montreal, making anti-conscription speeches, speaking out for French language rights in the military, still seeking his own way.
It's a strange irony that an untimely death also deeply affected Pierre Trudeau at the beginning of his life, according to biographers Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, and altered his destiny in a direction that ultimately delivered him to Canadian public life. When Trudeau's father, the dashing, brash Charlie Trudeau, died in 1935 at age 47, Pierre was just 15. As the theory goes, Pierre developed the discipline and the distance from others he required to prove he was as good or better man than his father or anyone else for that matter.
Whatever you thinks about Trudeau, you cannot but help feel for the man as he enters his nineties with the burden of grief choking the breath from his birthday candles. It's Charlie all over again.
Despite the tragic twist to Trudeau's twilight years, his life and legacy live on, although, to play upon the aforementioned biographers, he haunts us less. You get the feeling that, as much as keeping Quebec in Canada was his lifelong passion and his political raison d'être, even he must be becoming bored to the point of satisfying indifference with the current stasis in the constitutional file.
At his infrequent public outings in Montreal, he refuses comment on Quebec issues, claiming his grasp of the dossier isn't what it used to be. As if.
Trudeau, it will be noted, has already passed a prolonged period of political record-correcting and sage declarations from the safe sanctum of retirement. Indeed, some accounts credit him with personally torpedoing the Meech Lake treaty with his haunting admonitions of an insatiably power-hungry Quebec.
For those of us who had the priviledge -- or bad luck, in some cases -- to be working on Parliament Hill during Trudeau's last stab at greatness (the patriation of the Constitution), it surely must rank as a singularly unforgettable experience. As contentious as the outcome eventually was, from sweeping Charter rulings, to Meech and Lucien Bouchard, the process was arguably the most dramatic and emotional time in Parliament this century -- no slight intended for the gravity of wartime deliberations.
The image I have from that era, the one that haunts me still, is that of Pierre Trudeau, in 1981, at the peak of his powers, biting into a challenge that had foiled his predecessors for fifty long years, single-handedly dragging the entire country into the uncertain and dangerous territory of Constitutional change.
What was so gripping was that this dusty, dry, deathly dull document, the nation's constitution, had been brought to life as a real and human and visceral, and sometimes tawdry, struggle for a country's progress.
All at the will of one driven man.
There are still many Quebecers who detest Trudeau for the way he handled the patriation of the Constitution -- one of them is now premier of Quebec. But the sting of betrayal, whether real or imagined, will eventually disappear as time passes and historians debate whether there could have been any other outcome. The point is, it happened, and it happened because of Trudeau.
You want haunting?
Try Quebec journalist (and former Bouchard paramour) Denise Bombardier's assessment of our octogenarian former prime minister:
"If Trudeau had become a separatist in the Sixties, Quebec would be independent by now."
So, while everyone figures out who is most insulted or alarmed, let's raise a birthday toast for our PET.
Copyright © 1999 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/10.99 |
