Trudeau no longer the dashing whizz-kid

Press, 20 February 1980, Page 8

Trudeau no longer the dashing whizz-kid

NZPA Ottawa When Joe Clark, a virtual political unknown, ended Pierre Trudeau’s 11-year tenure as Canadian Prime Minister last May, Mr Trudeau managed a plucky smile and said, “I think I will be a pretty good leader of the Opposition.” But after six months of playing the foil to Joe Clark’s Conservatives, the Liberal Party chief announced his retirement to dedicate more time to this three young sons Barely three months after that he was headed back into power. The present Mr Trudeau, however, is a very different man to the dashing 48-year-old whizz-kid who first swept into office in June of 1968 on a wave of adulation that came to be dubbed Trudeaumania. The handsome features are somewhat . worn and the shining can-do image has been recast by a decade of efforts to cope with Canada’s persistent economic woes and bitterness between its English and Frenchspeaking citizens. One Canadian commentator said before Mr Trudeau was upset in the May 22 elections that the Liberal leader presided over some of the best governments Canadians have ever known — and some of the worst.

An intensely private man, Mr Trudeau also suffered the agony of world-wide public exposure of his marital difficulties with his estranged wife, Margaret, who is 30 years his junior and had a well-publicised taste for the jet-set life. Mr Trudeau, who built a solid reputation as a world leader in both the East and West, acknowledged that Government was not the carefree exercise he seemed to make of it in his early days as Prime Minister.

"I find the most difficult 1 part of this job is dealing with the people,” he told a Canadian newspaper last; year. “I think it’s a flaw in i my character.” Mr Trudeau, who became Prime Minister in 1968. on ; pledges to unify the divided country, now returns on. the : eve of a fierce battle shaping up over this spring’s referendum on whether his - home province of Quebec should be a separate state. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was : born in Montreal on October

18, 1919,, the son of a millionaire who owned a string of petrol stations. His father was descended from a carpenter who emigrated from France in 1659 and his

mother’s lineage traces back to Scotland. The future Prime Minister, perfectly bilingual, was: educated at the Jesuit-run Col-, lege Jean de Brebeuf and later at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and in Paris. A free-wheeling and adventurous young man, Mr Trudeau toured the world after his studies, hitch-hik-ing across pre-revolutionary China and meeting Mao Tsetung and spending several days in a Palestinian jail on suspicion of espionage. He was arrested in Moscow for having thrown a snowball at a statue of Lenin and was once barred from entering the 1 United States for attending an economic conference in the Soviet Union in 1952. United States Coast Guardsmen off Florida stopped him while he was en route to Cuba in a canoe. A practising lawyer and later associate professor of law at Montreal University, Mr Trudeau entered politics — and Parliament — in 1965 under the tutelage of then Prime Minister, Lester Pearson. Two years later Mr

Trudeau was appointed Justice Minister and, although a Roman Catholic in a country about 40 per cent Roman Catholic, he proceeded to push through progressive laws on divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. . When Mr . Pearson retired, Mr Trudeau was elected head of the Liberal Party in April of 1968 and in the elections two months later managed to steer the Liberals to a clear working majority in Parliament. Mr Trudeau quickly won

passage of a law giving English and French equal status in the Federal Government and also worked to increase French representation at all levels of the bureaucracy.

But when terrorism erupted in Montreal in 1970 in support of Quebec separatism, Mr Trudeau responded forcefully, declaring a state of emergency, suspending some civil rights, and sending in the Army to clamp down on violence. Asked at the time how far he was prepared to go, he replied with an icy, “Just watch me.” On the international front, Mr Trudeau was known as a skilled and innovative world leader. He was well-respect-ed in the Communist world, and his move to establish diplomatic relations with Peking in 1970 paved the way for China’s rapprochement with the West. But his just-society programme for Canada failed to brake inflation, the decline of the Canadian dollar, aqd the country’s worst unemployment since the Depression.

Mr Trudeau found himself increasingly called on to respond to mounting parlia-mentary-criticism in the latter days of his first reign, until he was turned from office by Mr Clark’s Progressive Conservative Party.