Remembering Pierre Elliot Trudeau

Intelligent, inspiring and polarizing. The op-ed pages ponder the legacy of the iconic prime minister a decade after his death.

Ten years and one day ago, Pierre Elliot Trudeau died at the age of 80. The most colourful prime minister of modern times by a long shot, Trudeau won four federal elections and ran the country for 15 years. We’re still talking about him today, and papers across the country ran columns on his legacy yesterday.

“In the horse-race of history, Trudeau is a thoroughbred,” writes Andrew Cohen in the Ottawa Citizen. “Most of the time he won; some of the time he placed; all of the time, he showed.” Pointing to Trudeau’s role in creating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and his liberalization of laws governing divorce, contraception and homosexuality, Cohen writes, “today's Canada is largely of Trudeau's making.” He goes so far as to say that Trudeau salvaged the country in the sovereignty referendum of 1980. “His three timely interventions that spring saved the faltering federalist campaign and won the day.”

The National Post’s Don Martin notes that despite Trudeau’s hallowed place in history, when talking about great Liberals of the past Michael Ignatieff prefers to invoke Lester Pearson because Trudeau’s still reviled in parts of the country for nationalizing western Canada’s energy industry in 1980. “A towering force of societal change for some, the polarizing godfather of Western alienation for others, he’s still too toxic to be embraced as a mentor by any (federal) Liberal leader”” writes Martin. He’s not so popular in French-speaking Québec either.

Trudeau may have shaped the country, but his “imprint on the national psyche is really fading,” writes the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert. In the past ten years “Canada has become less Liberal in political appearance and in policy outlook.” This week New Brunswick voted the Liberals out of office, the party is poised for defeat in B.C. and Ontario, and a federal Liberal majority remains, for now, a slim prospect. Chantal predicts that “by the end of the current provincial electoral cycle, PEI's Joe Ghiz could be the only government leader to still bear the Liberal label.”