Toronto Star Montreal Bureau Last Year
Love or hate him, Trudeau still has the old charisma
At 79, the former PM remains quick-witted, active and controversial
By Sandro Contenta
MONTREAL - It's a sunny fall morning and Pierre Elliott Trudeau turns the last corner of his daily downtown walk to work.
On René Lévesque Blvd., named after the late Parti Québécois premier who was Trudeau's nemesis for so long, the former prime minister eyes a break in the traffic and trots across six lanes.
The jaywalking Trudeau seems in fine form, nothing like the frail old man succumbing to illness depicted in the media rumour mill.
``If I believe what I hear, I'm terribly ill,'' Trudeau says, giving his version of Mark Twain's quip about reports of his death being greatly exaggerated.
He then smiles and reveals a mischievous glint that in younger days might have been the prelude to a pirouette.
``The thing about journalists is . . . No, I better not say,'' he says.
Today, on his 79th birthday Trudeau remains quick witted, active and controversial.
Many Canadians still love him; others hate him just as passionately.
Indeed, the Montrealer who ended his political career in 1984 continues to leave no one indifferent.
His friends say Trudeau is at peace with his political legacy and pays little attention to the strong reaction still evoked by the very mention of his name.
And just to prove it, they say that's likely the reason he declined an invitation to a York University conference this week. The three-day conference will discuss the legacy of Trudeau's years in power.
Interest in reassessing the former prime minister is growing with the publication of Trudeau's Shadow, The Life and Legacy Of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a collection of essays by historians, journalists, novelists and former politicians.
In Montreal, Trudeau prefers a quiet family life, skiing and canoeing as often as he can, and strolling to work every weekday.
His greatest passion is his three sons.
Justin, the oldest, is a high school teacher in British Columbia. Michel is a microbiologist who has spent the past year as a ski instructor in B.C. Alexandre, the youngest son who used to be known as Sasha, has a degree in philosophy and recently completed a documentary film on the bloody civil war in Africa's Liberia. He lives with his dad.
Love him or hate him, a Trudeau sighting still excites.
One Montrealer recalls seeing Trudeau recently on his daily walk down Drummond St. As he passed a child at the gate of a day-care centre who was screaming for his mother, Trudeau backtracked, crouched down to the child and soothed him with the care he gained raising his sons.
The Star briefly caught up to Trudeau last week on one of his walks to work. Asked why he thinks Canadians remain fascinated with him after all these years, Trudeau declined to be interviewed, apologized for any trouble a reporter may have gone through, and agreed to be photographed while walking the last half block to his office at the Heenan Blaikie law firm.
Does he still walk every weekday to work?
``And back,'' he noted. Back is more than a kilometre up a slope to his home on Ave. des Pins hugging Mount Royal.
A photographer then showed him a picture he snapped of Trudeau on the same walk in 1995. Trudeau autographed it, smiled to passersby - ``Hey, it's Trudeau,'' - offered some firm handshakes and disappeared into a highrise office tower. It was 10:30 a.m. last Tuesday.
``He's a man about town,'' says his friend, former Progressive Conservative MP Heward Grafftey. ``He loves to walk around and meet people.''
Trudeau has stayed out of the media limelight since leaving politics, except for what his critics consider the odd commando-style attack, most notably to help sink the Meech Lake accord that described Quebec as a distinct society.
In his home province, he's also perceived as the man who sent the army into the streets to fight the 1970 October Crisis, and the architect of the 1982 Constitution, which Quebec still hasn't officially signed. All this makes him the bogey man of separatists, a role that Trudeau inevitably renews with each new stroke of his pen or public utterance.
``Quebecers are still too defensive toward outsiders, and I worry that there is a new version of Duplessisism in the fear and insularity engendered by the nationalists,'' he says in a newly published book, The Essential Trudeau.
``How many Quebec federalists, even among the powerful business leaders, are afraid to say publicly what they think because their jobs, grants or friendships might be jeopardized?'' he adds.
``Where are the intellectuals who will say, for example, that what's being taught in our history books is false? Who's fighting the lie which holds that it was the anglophone premiers and press who opposed the Meech Lake accord, but not the francophone nationalists?''
But Trudeau is also the prime minister who implemented official bilingualism, who broadened Canada's role on the world stage and whose panache made Quebecers proud.
``Whenever he is out, he still causes a stir,'' says Peter Blaikie, a former president of the Tory party who works at the same law office as Trudeau.
``He still has that indefinable charisma - a word that the media uses far too often and frequently about the most dull and boring people. But Trudeau is someone to whom the word can genuinely apply,'' he adds, saying Canadians are still captivated by Trudeau because they remember him as ``the last Canadian political leader who was truly a philosopher and who really stood for something beyond pragmatism.
``He was essentially a politician of principle and since his time we have had a series of people who are essentially only pragmatic. . . That's why he still causes a stir. In an age of the Bill Clintons of the world, Trudeau stands out,'' Blaikie says. |
