Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau has been described by some as a brilliant philosopher king. With decades now having passed since his tenure, it’s worth examining whether the impact of his policies matches that description.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who served as prime minister from 1968 to 1984 with a nine-month gap, changed Canada forever.
Many were charmed by Canada’s celebrity prime minister, who was described as a “brilliant, enigmatic man” with a great brain. Historian Allan Levine called him “arguably the most charismatic and brilliant figure to hold Canada’s highest elected office.” Biographer Richard Gwyn said, “In sheer power and range, Trudeau’s mind is the finest of all our Prime Ministers,” while George Radwanski referred to Trudeau’s “unrivalled intellect.”
Around Grade 7, I was given a book of prime ministers which described Trudeau as the “philosopher king,” a term beloved of fawning journalists. According to a documentary on the Canadian Public Affairs Channel (CPAC), “many believe” that Trudeau was a “saviour.” But a saviour he was not.
As an old saying goes, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Trudeau began his career in Ottawa on the basis of supposed economic expertise. Though known in elite circles as a socialist intellectual, he was hired in 1949 by the Canadian civil service as an economist. A closer look reveals that while Trudeau, as Liberal leader in 1968, was presented to Canadians as a product of the elite London School of Economics and Paris Sorbonne, he failed to complete a degree at either institution. He studied economics at Harvard, but it was said he spent most of his time having fun; he did not complete his thesis on communism and Christianity, and perhaps it’s just as well. The academic economists with whom he claimed affinity were state interventionists and advocates of the socialist transformation of society.
Trudeau was brought into politics by Liberal bigwigs set on extending Liberal rule by any trick necessary. With the help of Democratic consultants from the United States they created “Trudeaumania,” another illusion. Once he had reached Canada’s highest office, Trudeau ran budget deficits every year, and in the course of 15 years spent $54.4 billion more on programs than he raised in revenues.
Through reckless government spending and the demoralizing effect his government had on business and development, Trudeau also gave Canada one of the world’s worst inflation records. As Bob Plamondon, author of the book “The Truth About Trudeau” (2013) put it, Trudeau “unleashed his socialist impulses and drove our nation’s finances to the brink.”
Apart from the revised Constitution, it is with regard to national unity that Trudeau is most praised. Historian Michael Bliss said that the dramatic year of 1968 “gave us the one person who was equipped to combat separatism,” just in time for the rise of the Parti Quebecois in the 1970s. Trudeau, Bliss says in the same CPAC documentary, was the Canadian who “most closely approximated Abraham Lincoln ... the essential person who probably saved Canada from a messy dissolution.”
In reality, the Trudeau effect was to make separatism worse and drive it to a bitter climax—twice. The sovereigntist Parti Quebecois was elected in 1976, after eight years of friction with Trudeau, and Quebec scheduled its 1980 Referendum towards the end of his third term. When ex-prime minister Trudeau helped defeat the Mulroney government’s attempts to reconcile the federation, Quebec fought back with another referendum in 1995.
To understand Quebec’s concept of “equality of nations” requires going back into history, long before Confederation. The Province of Quebec is much older than the Canada that was refounded in 1867. Quebec was created in 1763 by the British government, encompassing much of the old French colony of New France. By then the already-ancient French-speaking country along the St. Lawrence river had used the name of “Canada” or “true Canada” since the early 1600s. With the creation of Upper and Lower Canada in 1791 (by splitting Quebec in two), each got its own elected legislature.
In 1840, the British closed the bilingual Legislature in Quebec City as a punishment for radical elements (both English and French) whipping up Lower Canada to the point that the 1837 Rebellions broke out. This was a bitter loss to Quebec’s political class, which had happily embraced British parliamentarism and had become adept at electoral politics. The French were so effective and numerous that English Upper Canadians complained of “French domination” in the United Province of Canada.
That same legislature is today’s National Assembly of Quebec, a name adopted in 1968 in defiance of Ottawa’s continual encroachments on provincial autonomy. It would take another column to explain why, but tapping into a 100-year tradition of centralization, Trudeau took up the mantle of exacerbating Quebec’s century-long mistrust of Ottawa.
Trudeau disdained his own Quebec culture (thinking himself a sophisticated man of the world compared to his hick countrymen) and had little understanding of Canadian history, which he said should be ignored. “Forget the Plains of Abraham” he declared—something no patriotic Quebecer can afford to do.
No matter how smart Trudeau supposedly was, the effect of his policies was disastrous. He and his colleagues left the economy a wreck and the military a hollow ruin, destroying the world’s finest medium-size armed services and leaving Canada an untrustworthy dilettante on the world stage. He escalated regional tensions with Western Canada to the worst low ever seen. He distorted Canada’s workable British Constitution by injecting it with rationalist illusions from the French Enlightenment, undermining the common law, Parliament, the legislatures, and the rights of law-abiding citizens.
Trudeau’s 1982 Constitution, including his Charter of Rights and Freedoms, empowered radical activists, criminals, and an unelected New Class of civil servants, judges, academics, and lawyers imbued with a “just society” ideology that is actually rooted in Communist Party ideas.
The list goes on. Trudeau undermined free enterprise. His favourite regimes overseas were Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union. In a famous overreaction designed partly to create a tough-guy image, Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act on Oct. 16, 1970, and told reporters that bleeding hearts could go on and bleed. The very next morning, the terrorists who had a few days earlier kidnapped Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, murdered him. Trudeau had said: “The Government promises unceasing pursuit of those responsible.” But he allowed them to escape justice by flying to Cuba.
It may not be true that Trudeau and his allies were communist agents or fellow travellers—as was believed by those who despised him most in the 1970s and 1980s. For that the evidence is inconclusive. But if the Soviet Union had conspired to groom a prime minister of Canada during the Cold War in order to weaken and sow division in a strong country, capitalist economy, and ally of the West, one of the freest and most prosperous and gifted societies ever seen, they could have done little better than Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
