A career of durable style

Press, 2 March 1984, Page 6

A career of durable style

NZPA-Reuter Ottawa

Pierre Trudeau, aged 64, who . announced yesterday that he would resign as the Canadian Prime Minister as soon as his governing Liberal Party could elect a new leader, burst on to the national political scene in the late 19605.

He came with a splash of stylish vigour coating an inner core of seriousness that eventually made him the Western world’s most durable leader.

Mr Trudeau entered politics with a flourish to save Quebec from separatism. After 16 years of almost unbroken power as Prime Minister he was still chasing ideals, seeking to halt the world arms race with a one-man peace crusade.

As the leader of a country with a population of only 25 million, he won Canada a big voice internationally at Western summit meetings and in supporting a northsouth dialogue between rich and poor nations. Canadians, who kept returning him to power while accusing him of intellectual arrogance and an aloof lack of interest in the economy, will probably remember him best for transforming their country into a genuinely bilingual State.

Four times he won elections, but by the time the recession hit in the early h9Bos his popularity plunged

and he was blamed for record unemployment and steep inflation. For all his political ups and downs, the lasting images are of Mr Trudeau’s style rather than policies — his performing an impish pirouette behind the back of the Queen, in Buckingham Palace, marrying a tempestuous “flower child” of the 1960 s half his age who left him in a blaze of publicity. Voters first swept the suave Montreal millionaire into office in 1968 and only spurned him once later when they kept him out for nine months in 1979. For the years of his lovehate rdationshp with the voters, 3sfr Trudeau held

power with a brand of committed federalism, economic opportunism, and superb crisis management of the darker, bloodier side of Quebec separatism.

One in four Canadians speak French but the language had always been swamped by English everywhere except Quebec. The genesis of a French separatist movement brought Mr Trudeau into federal politics in 1965, when aged 46, after a life of globe-trotting, legal work and journalism.

His rise was meteoric. In three months, he became the private secretary of the then Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, two years later he became Justice Minister, and in three years he had stepped into Mr Pearson’s shoes.

The Quebec issue reached fever pitch in 1970 when separatist urban guerrillas in Montreal kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, and a Quebec Minister, Pierre Laporte. Mr Cross was released after two months, but Mr Laporte was strangled with his own crucifix.

Mr Trudeau acted tough and fast. He invoked emergency powers, sent troops into Montreal to round up suspects, and dismissed critics as “bleeding hearts who just don’t like ttßsee

people with helmets and guns.”

The measures worked. The kidnappers of the Quebec Liberation Front went into exile and the violence subsided. Quebec separatist sentiment did not. By 1976, Rene Levesque, the leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, had swept to power in the province. But, in a 1980 referendum on a diluted form of independence, voters opted 60-40 in favour of Mr Trudeau’s Federalism.

In foreign policy, Canada’s commitment to foreign aid and Mr Trudeau’s sympathetic hearing for Third World causes won him admirers in spite of critics’ accusations of inconsistency. Mr Trudeau once said that having the United States as a neighbour was, “like sweeping next to an elephant” but in his dealings with Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, he kept the world’s largest trading partnership intact.

His most ambitious crusade began last year as East-West relations sank to’ their most dangerous level since the Cold War.

When tension grew after the Soviet Union shot down a South, Korean passenger plane in September, he decided that, as he put it, the

doomsday clock must be halted at five minutes before midnight. He travelled from Peking to Washington, to West and East Europe, in a bid to halt the arms race and promote a conference of the nuclear Powers. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal in 1919, the son of a self-made French Canadian millionaire.

After his appointment as Justice Minister he was quick to reform abortion, divorce and homosexuality laws, arguing that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” He took over as the Liberal leader from Mr Pear,son in 1968 and- won a landslide election victory. Four years later he was cut back to a minority, then won another majority in 1974. In 1979 he lost to the Conservatives under Joe Clark and announced his retirement. He changed his mind and came back in 1980 with another majority. Mr Trudeau married, when aged 51, Margaret Sinclair, aged 22. They had three sons, but the marriage soured amid a blaze of publicity as Mrs Trudeau stifled by official life, had a nervous breakdown, went partying with the Rolling Stones rock band, and told all in her autobiography. Theyjjseparated in 1977.