Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau [Paperback]

Trudeau was Canada's Prime Minister for nearly 16 years. He was elected in the late 1960's during a wave of "Trudeaumania" where the politician was received (and dressed) like a rock star. This aspect of Trudeau's idiom - his celebrity raised the hopes of many (some of whom would eventually be disappointed when Trudeau turned out to be a human public official after all). Trudeau's charisma/inspiration invites comparison to Kennedy, but his similarity t American presidents does not end there.

Trudeau's vision of Canada was inseparably linked to the struggle for his native Quebec to find its place either within or outside the larger country. Trudeau defied separatists and believed that Canada should be a country in which all Canadians would feel at home everywhere. So, while he opposed separatism, he promoted bilingualism and promoted French-Canadians within his government. But some Quebec separatists would not be satiated. The movement actually got violent in 1970 as radicals launched a brief campaign of terror.

The terrorism was brief because Trudeau clamped down swiftly and decisively. Although noted as a civil libertarian, Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act and sent tanks into the streets of Montreal. Though these actions have eventually come to be viewed as heavy handed, they also worked. Quebec separatism ceased being violent ever since. Though a few violent radicals is vastly different than a huge, organized region like the southern U.S. states that formed the Confederacy during the American Civil War, I could not help think of Lincoln while reading about Trudeau. Who knows where the separatist movement would have led had Trudeau not established the parameters of acceptable protest activity early on. As great a president as Lincoln was, imagine how much greater he would have been had he figured out an essentially non-violent was to end slavery and keep the country together. This is what Trudeau did (perhaps, had Lincoln done the same, the significance of his achievement would have been under-appreciated).

One of the writers in TRUDEAU'S SHADOW, Guy Pratte, also compares Trudeau to Lincoln, but he makes a less favorable comparison. Lincoln, according to Pratte, was more practical than Trudeau, willing to do whatever it took to save the union. Trudeau had his unity plan and stuck to it, often poking Quebec separatists in the eye, thus emboldening them. The only problem with this view is that Canada has remained united, the separatist movement has been rejected at the polls time and time again, and again, violence is not one of the ways the conflict plays out.

Where Pratte saw Trudeau's most bull-headed was on the matter of a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yet, while this, perhaps Trudeau's greatest accomplishment, seemed like overkill to some, it also cemented his place as the father of the Canadian constitution, Canada's James Madison.

When Trudeau first became Prime Minster, Canada was not yet entirely independent from Great Britain. It had no written constitution, and Canadian civil liberties were not universally protected from one province to the next. Patriation of the constitution and the establishment of a written bill of rights was one of Trudeau's long-term goals, which he finally achieved late in his tenure as Prime Minister.

The achievement was monumental in its scope. The establishment of the Charters of Rights and Freedoms was the rare political feat that changed and helped define the character of a nation. It has already affected the lives of every Canadian and helped define what it means to be Canadian.

I learned all this in bits and pieces by reading TRUDEAU'S SHADOW. The authors were writing for a Canadian audience and assumed that readers had a base understanding of modern Canadian history. Although I essentially did not, reading a book like this was perhaps a more engaging activity than reading a strait chronological history because I needed to think in order to make sense of it.

Although the essays were balanced between Trudeau fans and Trudeau critics, I was highly impressed with the composite Trudeau that emerges is a political giant with a titanic legacy. If the Canadians don't fully appreciate what they have, they should only look to the south and compare. If for one wish we in the states had our own Trudeau!