Canada: Man of Tomorrow

In campaigning for the post of Canada’s Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau urged Canadians: “Let’s take a bit of a chance.” He offered the voters “a great adventure of discovery” and insisted that “the important thing is that Canadians are beginning to realize for the first time that this country is a fabulous place.” The ideas proved irresistible. Last week Canadians took a chance by overwhelmingly electing Trudeau, 48, their 15th Prime Minister.

Sweeping his Liberal Party behind him to a clear majority in Parliament, Trudeau thus launched upon the latest chapter in a highly unusual career that has propelled him in only a year from relative obscurity into his country’s leadership. Whatever else he does, he is certain to give Canada four years of colorful and unpredictable government.

Both Canada and Trudeau seem to have been preparing for some time to rush into each other’s embrace. The reason that Trudeau won so decisively was that he matched both the times and the country’s mood. A fresh face in a gallery of stale political portraits, he made no promises at all, offered no pat answers and spoke with a candor that was in refreshing contrast to the pompous rhetoric of the past. He seemed a man neither of the left nor of the right, but a man for the future. His campaign was based on the simple, unequivocal proposition: “One Canada.” As a bilingual French Canadian, he appears to be the right man to bring the French-and English-speaking peoples closer together.

Trudeau certainly ranks among the world’s more interesting heads of government. Though of considerable intellect, he is a thoroughly unstuffy man who, when asked by a pretty young Trudeau-bopper for a kiss, can respond: “Why not? It’s spring.” A broad-minded and cultured member of academe, he also canoes, exhibits championship-caliber diving, practices yoga, loves driving fast cars and, as a bachelor, can command the company of beautiful women. A serious political thinker with some unusual views of Canada’s future, he has nonetheless answered hecklers with an impudent “so’s your old man.” He dresses with a style and extreme casualness that stands out in Canada. After a trip to India in 1949, Trudeau wore a turban for a while. His usual outfits include colorful sport jackets, German leather coats, French leather hats, ascots and sandals. Gibed T. C. Douglas, leader of the New Democratic Party: “It’s going to be unusual to have a Prime Minister who has to struggle to wear store shoes.”

Boxing Lessons. That is the only struggle of note that Pierre Trudeau has experienced. He grew up in the affluent Montreal suburb of Outrement, the son of a self-made millionaire whose empire included an auto-breakdown service and a chain of gas stations. (Today, the family fortune is estimated at $7,000,000.) Young Pierre was driven to school by a chauffeur, as a boy was given private boxing lessons “because I was quite a puny child.” Trudeau’s father died when he was 14, and the loss saddened him for years. He went to a Jesuit college called Jean-de-Brebeuf, ran with a crowd known as Les Snobs, and invariably led his classes in academic honors.

Later, Trudeau went to the University of Montreal Law School, studied political economy at Harvard and, after World War II, at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics. But Trudeau, who was working on a Ph.D. thesis, became restless, one day packed up a knapsack and set out on an 18-month trek through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. One of his adventures: he swam the Bosporus. Returning to Quebec, Trudeau fought against the decrepit, reactionary regime of Provincial Premier Maurice Duplessis. He wrote for an intellectual magazine called Cite Libre that helped bring a business and cultural boom to the province. He also worked as a labor lawyer and as an adviser to the Privy Council, later taught law classes at the University of Montreal.

Convinced that Ottawa lacked a philosophy of federalism to deal with Quebec, Trudeau successfully ran for Parliament in 1965. Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson soon after named him his parliamentary secretary and, in April 1967, appointed him Justice Minister. In that post, Trudeau attracted attention by his courage in steering through Parliament three unpopular measures: stricter gun-control legislation and reforms of harsh laws against abortion and homosexuality. Against critics of the liberalized homosexual law, Trudeau demonstrated his sense of irony. “Are we going to put all sin in the criminal code?” he asked them. “If so, it would be a pretty thick book. The state has no business in the nation’s bedrooms.” At a Liberal Party convention in April, this kind of talk earned for Trudeau the rapt gaze of a nationwide TV audience. He outmaneuvered a brigade of party veterans to replace the retiring Pearson as Prime Minister. Then, while the nation was still dazzled by his convention victory, he gambled on dissolving Parliament and seeking his own mandate in an election.

Mind & Body. Until all this happened, Trudeau was not even listed in the Canadian Who’s Who. His life was sheltered and private. He mixed in the rich English and French dinner-party circuit in Montreal and Ottawa, gathered around him people who were either from the same wealthy stratum of society or academically brilliant.

Trudeau embraces the Greek notion of developing both the mind and the body to perfection. In the tradition of the Canadian voyageur, his idea of relaxation is to climb a mountain, go skiing or snowshoeing, paddle and portage his canoe, or just drive out into the country and go exploring in the woods. He has a pilot’s license, a brown belt in judo. Sometimes, during a dinner at a friend’s house, he will excuse himself and stand on his head in the corner for five minutes. Exuberantly boyish, he likes to slide down banisters or vault over platform railings to shake hands. He drinks only moderately—wine with meals, an occasional aperitif or whisky. But he despises smoking, which he looks upon, according to one friend, “as the most barbaric habit in the modern world.”

Soon after he took over as Prime Minister, Trudeau vowed that “I will not let this job louse up my private life.” Trudeau and his family—and his former girl friends—have a sort of conspiracy of silence on the subject of his social activities. Trudeau says that he is very close to his aging mother, with whom he lived in the family’s large brick house in Outrement until about three years ago. When asked why he has never married, he once replied: “I’ve never been asked, but this is leap year, and I’m still young.” Trudeau’s friends think that he will eventually marry.

There is also an obscure, enigmatic, and somewhat labyrinthian Trudeau. A practicing Roman Catholic, he often goes on formal church retreats. He is interested in Eastern religions, notably Buddhism, that are “religions of love rather than ethics or morals or obligation or principle.” Whenever he can, he goes off to his prefabricated chalet in the Laurentian Mountains where “I replenish my emotions, find my inner directives.” With his colleagues, Trudeau is a man of little small talk. He can be moody and, when dealing with lesser intellects, even irritable to the point of arrogance. When pursuing a political goal, he can be fierce, even ruthless.

Unique Rapport. Though shy, Trudeau somehow achieved unique rapport with people. The metamorphosis began, his aides say, about the time of the Liberal nominating convention. After that, Trudeau’s flair for showmanship became his dominant trait. During the campaign, he reached out to the tumultuous crowds just as eagerly as they clutched for his hand. Thus began the phenomenon that the press quickly dubbed “Trudeaumania.”

His campaign against Conservative Robert Stanfield, the sensible but restrained former premier of Nova Scotia, may have irrevocably changed the pace and style of Canadian politics. In a DC-9 jet and a helicopter, Trudeau bounced around the country as if it were the size of Rhode Island. Wherever he went, he brought glamour, style, movement. Matrons as well as teeny-boppers flocked to his side. He stressed participation, involvement, brought together a campaign army of talented, worshipful political amateurs as well as old pros. “This country is just beginning to burst into its greatness,” he said in speeches reminiscent of John Kennedy’s. “Come take my hand and we will adventure together.”

Outpouring of Hate. Often he felt duty bound to tell his audiences painful things because “there are no magic solutions, we are not magicians or Santa Clauses.” In rural Ontario, he told prosperous farmers that their taxes would have to pay for programs in the poorer provinces. In British Columbia, where the shipyards have been hurt by foreign competition, Trudeau talked, instead, about Canada’s low-income minorities. “What about the shipyards?” a heckler shouted. “What about the Indians and Eskimos?” Trudeau shot back, “Have you thought about them?”

In spite of all Trudeau’s popularity, the campaign was marked by considerable bitterness, including an outpouring of hate literature. There were even the expectable innuendoes based on his backing of the homosexual reform bill and his bachelor status. But Trudeau never lost his temper or became flustered, coolly shrugged it all off.

Starting Out Slowly. While not a landslide, Trudeau’s victory was conclusive. The Liberals captured 155 out of 264 seats in the Canadian Parliament —27 more than they had held before. The Conservatives, on the other hand, went down from 94 to 72 seats, lost some of their best parliamentary leaders and emerged as a party whose influence is now almost solely in rural areas. For the moment, the man who likes at times to stand on his head does not plan to stand Canada on its head. “The first months, perhaps even the first Parliament,” he told Time Correspondents Marsh Clark and Courtney Tower last week, “will be devoted to bringing everything up to date, getting the laws updated, the mechanisms in place. There will probably be a lot of criticism in the early months and early years that I am not doing enough. But I’d rather have that than try to start out fast and peter out.”

Trudeau will have problems enough to deal with. Canada is beset by linguistic, cultural and economic differences that are exacerbated by the vast distances within the country. Its small population does not provide a large enough domestic market for a sustained economic boom. The income gap between the wealthy and the deprived, between the poorer and richer provinces, is still large and not shrinking fast enough.

In the area of foreign policy, Trudeau’s Cabinet is already searching for new ideas. Generally, Trudeau believes that Canada ought to adjust to a role as a small power, should be more selective in its peace-keeping missions for the U.N., should seek better relations with both Latin America and, because of its bicultural policy at home, with the French-speaking states. As for U.S. investment, a perennial bugbear, Trudeau approves of it but favors keeping laws that prevent foreign subsidiaries from dominating key industries.

Prickliest Issue. While Trudeau’s victory was largely one of personality rather than party, it was also an endorsement of his stand on Quebec—which is the bitterest and prickliest issue in Canada today. Trudeau advocates a strong Canadian federation. Though he is French-Canadian, he is more firmly opposed to a separate status for Quebec than a number of English-speaking politicians. The new Prime Minister is committed to a policy of spreading the use of French throughout the country and making the French Canadians feel at home outside Quebec. Already, Trudeau is appealing to young Quebecois to go out and “see how beautiful it is in British Columbia, see how the Atlantic breaks on the granite shores of Newfoundland, see the tremendous adventure that is in store for us all.”