In May, Bob Plamondon published The Truth About Trudeau. It became a bestseller, reflecting an enduring interest in Pierre Elliott Trudeau almost 30 years after he left public office.
And well it should. The Truth About Trudeau is peppery and provocative. In a Canada where the wisdom is always conventional and the ovations are always standing, an intelligent critique like this is refreshing. Ours is an unconscious country, a nation of amnesiacs with a gauzy sense of our past. We need antidotes to orthodoxy.
Plamondon provides one. His trenchant thesis is that Trudeau is hailed as a great prime minister — praised by historians, lionized by admirers — but wasn’t one. Indeed, he thinks that Trudeau damaged the country. The Northern Magus?
To Plamondon, he had feet of clay.
“Far from being one of the best of our prime ministers, he was one of the worst,” he writes. “[He] left deep divisions and scars that remain to be healed. … It took successive leaders many decades to clean up the disorder.”
While Plamondon finds some nice things to say, it seems a struggle. In a broad analysis that alights on the economy, foreign policy, national unity and much else, there is little to praise in Trudeau.
(Disclosure: Bob Plamondon and I have collaborated on efforts to raise the stature of Sir John A. Macdonald in Ottawa and to build a better capital. As friends, we have agreed to disagree here — with respect, of course).
As students of history know, though, there is usually more than one truth. Ultimately, Plamondon has his Trudeau and I have mine.
Consider national unity, where Trudeau was indispensable. Plamondon correctly argues that Trudeau was “obsessed” with bringing home the British North America Act, a process that initially left most Canadians indifferent. After all, he says, we’d done fine with things as they were. Sure, patriation would happen, “but only when the time was right.”
Yet the time was never right — and likely never would be, at least in Trudeau’s lifetime. We had been trying since 1927 to free the BNA Act from British trusteeship. That paralysis appalled Trudeau, who believed in a striving, mature, self-respecting nation. His magnificent obsession, as it was called, was what drove him to detach ourselves from Great Britain, to create an amending formula and to entrench a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Trudeau’s struggle was the greatest single act of nation-building since Macdonald and Confederation in 1867. It was a herculean achievement. Without his imagination, vision and tenacity, it would have not have happened. So important was Trudeau to this enterprise, it dwarfs anything else he did or didn’t do.
Bringing home the Constitution was the zenith of a life that made him, as John Turner said, the most remarkable Canadian of his generation. Plamondon calls it a betrayal of Quebec, as if René Lévesque’s separatists would ever have agreed to a renewal of the federation.
Trudeau repeatedly took on the forces of division. He spoke for Canada with a singular, eloquent passion. In 1968, at a federal-provincial conference, he challenged Daniel Johnson’s suffocating nationalism. In 1970, he vanquished the terrorists in the October Crisis. His response crushed the FLQ, sparing Canada the violence that stung Italy and West Germany in the 1970s.
In 1980, in the Quebec Referendum, he rallied the flagging federalists. In 1987, he challenged the Meech Lake Accord, and in 1992, the Charlottetown Agreement. He thought they were flawed. Such was his stature among Canadians that both times he carried the day.
Patriation, the Charter, the collapse of Meech Lake, the end of Charlottetown: each time, the Cassandras, the Jeremiahs, the shiver sisters, the currency traders — and often the political elite — issued their alarms. Trudeau, bless him, ignored them. He knew this country was stronger than that.
He made mistakes and enemies. That’s what greatness is. Nations don’t raise statutes in parks to managers of banality or accountants of envy. They celebrate founders, reformers and builders.
Today’s Canada remains Trudeau’s Canada. Whatever its flaws, it remains prosperous, progressive and diverse. And it includes Quebec.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
