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Bob Plamondon

The Truth About Trudeau Hardcover – May 20 2013

by Bob Plamondon (Author)

115 ratings

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Finally, after over 30 years of hagiographies, comes a book that sets the record straight and tells us the truth about Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In this unprecedented and meticulously researched sweep of the record, Globe and Mail bestselling author Bob Plamondon challenges the conventional wisdom that Trudeau was a great prime minister. With new revelations, fresh insights, and in-depth analysis, Plamondon reveals that the man did not measure up to the myth. While no one disputes Trudeau’s intelligence, toughness, charisma, and the flashes of glamour he brought Canada, in the end the pirouettes were not worth the price.

Print length

408 pages
Publisher

Great River Media Inc.
Publication date

May 20 2013
ISBN-10

0986824216
ISBN-13

978-0986824210
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Bob Plamondon
9
Hardcover
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DAVID FRUM: “Finally. No more apologetics, no more myth-making. Here's the real Trudeau and the real record, carefully researched and masterfully told. It's a story that Canada must never forget and never excuse.” LAWRENCE MARTIN: “Plamondon has gone boldly where no Trudeau biographer has gone before. This is not a quickie hatchet job, but a well-reasoned critique.” DEREK BURNEY: “Dissecting reality from mythology, Plamondon provides a compelling assessment of Canada's 15th Prime Minister, one that contrasts sharply with the hagiographies on record.”

About the Author

Bob Plamondon is one of Canada’s leading political commentators and public policy experts. He is the author of three critically acclaimed bestsellers: Blue Thunder: The Truth about Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper; Full Circle: Death and Resurrection in Canadian Conservative Politics; and Hay West: A Story of Canadians Helping Canadians.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Great River Media Inc.; First Edition (May 20 2013)
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0986824216
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0986824210
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 885 g

Best Sellers Rank: #96,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #204 in Canadian Biographies
- #357 in Political History & Theory (Books)

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115 ratings

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4.3 out of 5

115 global ratings

5 star		59%
4 star		23%
3 star		9%
2 star		4%
1 star		5%

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Kindle Customer

Finally some cottoned to this poseur

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

Plamandon has dug deep but all the digging in the world will probably not change the ardor that many held for this PM of Canada.

I met him once in the early days of his political career - at a fund raiser in Winnipeg. That was enough for me and my opinion has never changed. Perhaps I have a thing about grown men who hid out in universities in the middle of war - only being a member of the COTC ( Canadian Officer Training Corps) at university because it was compulsory during wartime. Of course, this was par for the course for some of that age both in Quebec and in English-speaking Canada. But for many in the Services the act was interpreted as "yellow" no matter where it occurred.

While he did much in bringing in a Canadian Constitution with a strong human rights component, his intent clearly was provide opportunity and a protective blanket around French-speakers who had suffered disadvantages and discrimination in public and private life. It is questionable whether he intended to have the overly-active Supreme Court take it as far as it did into areas which later were considered as over-interpretation by the some.

His memory in the West is stained by the National Energy Program, the infamous program which siphoned off financial gains for the oil producing provinces to give the East an easier ride. It was It is an understatement Westerners voiced a popular opinion "let the bastards freeze in the dark" but it was aimed at Trudeau. Not surprisingly, Trudeau did not like the West, gaining notoriety there for giving a finger to a man at the Salmon Arm station. Pierre also had a rep for squiring the gals on Broadway and elsewhere until he finally married Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of a BC politician,. That marriage lasted long enough for Pierre to sire three boys, one of whom later in life tragically lost his life in the Selkirk Mountains when an avalanche swept him into an icy lake, an undeserved fate as he was well liked among those who went into the back country.

This is a good read but fans of this Trudeau won't like it. But, oh well, he has gone only to be replaced as a prime ministerial hopeful son. But even he will never compete with his father's rep.

5 people found this helpful

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MRMLEM

The book glosses over some key elements

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 31, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book seems well researched and brings out several details about Trudeau. However, there has been a lot available in the public domain about his communist affiliations, persona non gratis in the US, weekly meetings with the USSR ambassador to mention a few. A more complete review would have dealt with these issues. Overall, a worthwhile purchase, although incomplete.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Patrick Sullivan

An Analysis Of The Trudeau Legacy

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 7, 2013

Verified Purchase

Plamondon`s goal is to set the record straight, regarding Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Plamondon gives us a brief introduction, into Trudeau`s affluent upbringing and youthful experiences. He outlines Trudeau`s core beliefs, when he enters federal politics. Then Plamondon details how Trudeau, plots and weaves his political ambitions into the national fabric.

Like a lot of Canadians, any mention of things like Meech Lake or constitutional talks, send me running for an air sickness bag. This part of the book, is a little on the slow side. Then of course, all the details regarding the Quebec separation issue are covered. The best part of the book, is in regards to Trudeau`s economic stewardship. The Trudeau record on the economy is without a doubt, the worst aspect of Trudeau`s legacy. The national debt and the National Energy Program, had a terrible impact on the country. Trudeau`s socialist dream, was the cause of long lasting damage to the Canadian economy.

The weak area of the book, is Plamondon`s attempt to explain why Trudeau retained such a high popularity. His brief explanation is that; people had an emotional attachment to Trudeau. I was never able to understand Trudeau`s strong approval rating. I was hoping for a larger interpretation, as to why Trudeau had such enduring popularity in Eastern Canada. The book also had several misprints. The publisher needs to hire a new proof reader.

I recommend this book, to anyone with an interest in Canadian politics.

20 people found this helpful

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Herman D.

Finally the truth about P.E. Trudeau

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is good time to get a realistic book about Trudeau. I have never trusted PET and considered him the worst Prime Minister of Canada since 1956, when I came to Canada. Just looking at Canada's economic decline during his reign tells us enough. Supposedly an economist, he was obviously a fan of Keynes, especially when it came to borrowing money, even in good times. Plamondon gives an extensive, no-holds-barred review of Trudeau's record. I well remember his disastrous "Bill of Rights" which spawned the "Human Rights" Tribunals that have plagued those of us who cherish freedom of speech. Author Mark Steyn and MacLean's magazine can tell you all bout that. Fortunately, its notorious Section 13 has just been done away with at last. Trudeau may not have been a member of The Communist Party but he was certainly a sympathizer. He made no secret of his admiration of Russian and Cuban dictators. Hi saw Ronald Reagan as naive, but he himself was the naive one. Reagan was the one who beat Russia. Pierre's son Justin Trudeau admires his father and hopes to become Canada's next Prime Minister. Heaven help us if he does! But the MSM and most women are already swooning over Justin so he may well have his wish. If you like to know what to expect, please read this book. All Canadians should read it.

19 people found this helpful

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john a denton

This man is a joke and not qualified for the job.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

It really covered the life of Trudeau and his family and proven he is disorganized in his mind and cannot complete any project well. Also he can never say he is wrong. The scary part he does not really have a vision for canada and does not get along with quebec but they will always vote for him as he is perceived as the man who indirectly do the most for them which is not always true. French canadians always vote en masse for a fellow frenchman. His bad mouthing meech lake was small minded and showed he could not stand a englishman doing a deal with quebec when he failed.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Lian Zerafa

I remember

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 20, 2014

Verified Purchase

Bob Plamandon's book is excellent and is a must-read for those looking for a factual recounting of Trudeau and his legacy, unencumbered by Liberal media white washing. This book should serve as a stern warning to current and future voters over the risks of populist destructive policies and how seductive they can be.

This book is well researched and well foot noted with lots of examples and statistics.

2 people found this helpful

TM

Very interesting read with some lesser-known facts about Trudeau's time in office and life before he entered politics

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

Well-researched and interesting information, but an obvious "anti-Trudeau" bias - which is okay, because it is the truth and the author does stay with the facts. The tone of the narrative tells you the author was not a Trudeau "fan", however, the writing is not strongly negative or anything like that. The main reason I gave it 3 stars is because it seemed very repetitive. I think the book could have been shorter and still covered the same information. Overall, a very interesting read though and I did learn some facts that never came out in the mainstream media when Trudeau was Prime Minister.

Kindle Customer

Yes, finally

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 1, 2013

Verified Purchase

I dropped one star here for my own prejudice against Trudeau, plus some important elisions in Plamondon's biography - Trudeau's early life that he does not touch on. I met Trudeau briefly at a garden party during one of his campaigns. He was appropriately charming to the ladies, uninterested in anyone else and left abruptly. I was not impressed then and have only been negatively impressed since. He struck me as a charming, arrogant, and shallow man, obviously bored to be in Western Canada. In my opinion, Plamondon is too kind to Trudeau: for me PET was a poseur, a dabbler and not a true intellectual. Because of his rich-boy parentage and his schooling at Brebeuf and his less than scholarly exposures at U of Montreal, Harvard, Paris and LSE, he was able to spout apparent brilliance. Moreover, he was the next thing to a draft dodger, compulsorily enrolling in COTC to get out of conscription only to be kicked out of that for publicly supporting the anti-conscription campaign of the mayor.

Plamondon does not touch on why a 14-year old , losing his millionaire father and staying close to his mother for the rest of her life became socialistic, almost communistic. Was his father a family tyrant? (not untypical of the day). Was it reaction to his father's business interests? Perhaps a reaction to the Jesuit teachings at Brebeuf which spouted favourable views of ultra-montane countries such as Portugal and Franco's Spain? Nobody to my knowledge has explained this 180 degree turn in his world view. I don't think it was intellectual honesty but perhaps a part of his showy style - not to be what society expected, if not demanded. Perhaps the psychological community could dig deeper than that.

Apparently Trudeau had a steel-trap memory. As Plamondon points out, he was like a leopard with many spots. But he was NOT, in my opinion, a great Canadian, because he did more to damage the country than to heal its wounds. He was only interested in the East and his "federalism" was mainly to get French-speaking Canadians (I abhor the ridiculous terms 'Francophone' and 'Anglophone') a better place in the sun, which he in fact denied them by leaving Quebec out of the action. Despite his pose as a student of LSE and a nominal adherent of Keynes, he was abysmally ignorant about the deleterious economic effects of his own policies. He totally ignored that while Keynes advocated stimulus spending in a downturn, the corollary was to pay off the debt in good times. It took Finance and Treasury officials to shake Paul Martin and Chretien up to try to deal with the mess that Trudeau left - hence the super-austerity measures of the 1990s.

His post graduate efforts seem to me to be more like an acolyte sitting at the feet of gurus rather than a self-disciplined educational program. It was as if his attendances were more like appearing to sit at the feet of a guru (e.g. Harold Laski at LSE). Why did Trudeau never go beyond a shoddy law degree (shoddy in the sense it was limited to Quebec law) and did not take in the wider legal challenges of the practice of law across Canada) and a politics MA? He never finished a dissertation at any of the British and European schools. And when he left Harvard, by his own admission he felt like was a fish out of water. This should have taught that French-speakers could not be competitive in North America unless they could deal in English.

Although he was against the near-dictatorial premiership of Duplessis, and he wrote excellent but leftist articles against Duplessis's rule and the treatment of workers during the strike at Asbestos, his negative federalism in the shoddy treatment of the West in the National Energy program, his public disdain for everything except the increasing and inept exercise of his own view of a centralized Canada controlled by him. While he deserves credit for the Charter, his screwed-up patriation of a constitution (the former one being British legal tradition, the Magna Charta and the BNA Act of 1867 and amendments) only made matters worse with Quebec, which province lost its veto in the amending clause, not to mention his arbitrary declaration of the War Measures Act, an over-reaction which had not been requested by the Quebec civil power as legally required. All these generated a hate for him from Quebec, despite that his former victories had been almost totally assured by Quebec).

For me the languages protection in the Charter were great and the encouragement to the spread of bilingual capability inspired many English-speaking Canadians to increase their children's proficiency in French. However, Quebec's attitude in Bill 101 to English in Quebec resulted in an exodus of Anglos (over 300,000 it is said?) and Anglo businesses soured me against Quebec and Trudeau's goals of bilingualism, not to mention multiculturism for all time. Although the bilingual policies in the Civil Service in Ottawa and Quebec were overdue, there appeared to be a distortion of policy in Ottawa where anomalies were created in the Ottawa bureaucracy. Positions were identified as bilingual, or English or French. The result, I was told by an Ottawa insider, was that French-speakers could easily out-compete Anglos who, despite language training, were not adept in the language for the bilingual position, and, because most seasoned French Public servants also spoke English, they spoke English on competitions, and thereby could compete successfully for the English positions! And this was not hurt particularly with the help of bilingual(French) superiors. So it was said, anyway. A demographic analysis of Ottawa public service and military staff would be interesting. These policies skewed promotion policies in the Service (justifiably at first) but unjustifiably when promotions were allocated on the basis of language, not merit. Next time you get a letter from a bureaucrat in Ottawa, check the name at the bototm to see if it is French or English (or other?)

Plamondon does not adequately cover the following point, although he skirts around Trudeau's abysmal constitutional efforts - first in a an abortion of patriation without Quebec's agreement. Quebec thereby lost its veto powers in the amendment process), and secondly, his interference while out of power in the Meech and Charlottetown Accords which were attempts to rectify his gross omission of Quebec from the process. Trudeau exchanged parliamentary governance with a constitutional basis of the distribution of power, but in this imitation of the American constitutional approach, he failed to provide a balance of powers by amending the Senate to be an effective, elected counter to a majority government.(This was probably impossible at the time or ever because of the current imbalance of seats in favour of Quebec and Ontario.) With the PMO, it aped the presidential structure in the US without the balances, sucking power from cabinet ministers to produce an almost dictatorial governance when there was a majority - a situation that is still with us today with the Conservative/Harper government.

Finally, in his written-constitutional approach he empowered a Supreme Court, which in many instances has been accused of aping the US Supreme Court in its political interventions on matters which had formerly been decided by Parliament, often to the detriment of individual civil rights. Despite this, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms under which the status of Quebecers and French speaking Canadians seems to have been his prime goal, became of beacon of civil rights freedoms of different kinds - abortion, homosexuality, divorce - many of which Trudeau accomplished with legislation and were later upheld by the Courts.

With his socialistic outlook (he should have been NDP but knew that the power was with the Liberals) Trudeau moved the country from a healthy economy to a debtor nation. He was no economist, despite his brush with LSE. Nor was he a legal whiz, which he himself found out at Harvard,

Plamondon hits all these spots but not with the effectiveness that he might. Trudeau's weaknesses were covered but in fact made worse by the fact that he DID hold POWER. Nevertheless this is an excellent political biography of the worst Prime Minister Canada has ever had. In international affairs he needlessly incurred the ire of the US government and people - our best trading party - in the pursuit of some visionary "north-south" policy.

Finally,. the worst cut of all, he turned his back on joint security, seemingly deliberately incurred the ire of the US and emasculated our Armed forces and their role in NATO. His friendships with Russia and China were only to be expected of a socialist with communist sympathies.

The book's only deficiency, in my opinion, is the failure to deal with his early life and his 180 degree switch from what was probably the viewpoint of his father. Nevertheless, this is a good start at washing away the Liberal songs of praise to Trudeau.

8 people found this helpful

Judy Shackell

Interesting Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 21, 2014

Verified Purchase

At the time I was young and taken in by Treadeaumania. It was interesting to read a reflective look. However, the becomes a bit of a drudge to read

Russ

A Must Read book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

This is a must read book for the Canadian idiots who voted to put a communist in charge of their country - repeatedly, for 16 years. No wonder Canada has issues!! From the Trudeau charter of 'rights and freedoms' to the legalization of abortion resulting in the loss of 5.5 million children, a dramatic increase in breast cancer and cerebral palsy cases, and a now aging population lacking the young workforce urgently needed to keep things rolling.

2 people found this helpful

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The Truth About Trudeau Hardcover – May 20 2013

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