CKNW Editorial
for September 29, 2000

Pierre Trudeau was a great man … and a great Canadian. It very much remains to be seen whether or not he was a great Prime Minister. His impact on Canada was enormous and his side of the separation debate framed that issue in Quebec. He was, arguably, the only Canadian of the past half century, maybe even longer, that the rest of the world knew.

In trying to assess him as a leader rather reminds me of what Chou En Lai said when asked about the impact of the French Revolution … "it’s too soon to tell", the Chinese Premier replied.

Pierre Trudeau’s patriation of the constitution was the center piece of his political life … no doubt about that. And one might be tempted to say that was a good thing because it took away the last vestige of colonialism. But it cannot and will not be viewed by Canadians as an unmixed blessing.

For one thing it alienated Quebec because the Quebec government, a separatist government under Rene Levesque, did not approve and claimed that they were stabbed in the back. On the other hand, the Quebeckers alienated by this move were already alienated and by the Parti Quebecois’ own admission, were never going to agree to anything. But the center piece of the centerpiece was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And this was Pierre Trudeau’s baby.

I was privileged to be there for much of that debate and later take part in that debate as a broadcaster. Time and time again, throughout the process, Sterling Lyon, Premier of Manitoba, Allan Blakeney, Premier of Saskatchewan, and Bill Bennett, our premier argued that this Charter would seriously derogate from the principle that Parliament is supreme. Mr Trudeau, on the other hand, with the Jesuitical style for which he was so justly famed, would give his Gallic shrug and ask "don’t you want rights?" The battle between parliament and the courts, unthinkable in other British Parliamentary systems has only just begun. There is a braking mechanism – a concession Trudeau only made grudgingly – in the Notwithstanding Clause, where governments can pass legislation notwithstanding the Charter, but as time goes by the practical use of that caveat will be much diminished.

Pierre Trudeau’s relationship with our province was, to say the least, interesting. He loved the scenery but he never understood the people. I think that’s because he couldn’t believe that, unlike all other English speaking provinces, BC was quite unwilling to follow the lead of Ontario. Trudeau saw Canada as the great debate between Upper Canada and Lower Canada with the other provinces as sort of bystanders. From the time of T.D. Pattullo and certainly since W.A.C. Bennett, the first BC premier Mr Trudeau dealt with, British Columbia insisted upon forming and articulating its own policy. This seemed to puzzle Mr Trudeau, who was used used to Atlantic provinces and to some degree prairie provinces lining up behind the Ontario. He could never quite understand what made British Columbia tick.

I saw Mr Trudeau close up for a very intense 5 year period during which time I was in the midst of the patriation exercise. I have always thought that Mr Trudeau missed a golden opportunity in September 1980, at the First Minister’s Conference, when the provinces, sans Quebec, went into the meeting with very high hopes that a consensus could be reached. Pierre Trudeau, for his own reasons, decided to scupper the conference from the outset. This was the year of the famous Michael Kirby memorandum, deliciously leaked to Rene Levesque which, liberally quoting Machiavelli, showed how to deal with the provinces if at any time it seemed that they were making sound points. The work on the constitution since Trudeau returned to power in the Spring of 1979, after the short Joe Clark inter regnum, had been staggering. An enormous amount had been accomplished. It remains one of the great unanswered questions of our history as to what might have happened if Pierre Trudeau, in September 1980, had called the premiers together and said congratulations to the federal and provincial ministers involved in the Committee of Cabinet Ministers on the Constitution, (of which I was one), and then worked from that solid work towards a consensus. He would never have got Quebec on board but that wasn’t going to happen anyway. It’s something we’ll just never know.

Pierre Trudeau was indeed a one-off. The young man who rode a bycycle in World War II with a German helmet on his head to the man who supped and reasoned with the monks of the Far east; the man who took the separatists on toe to toe and, insofar as you can ever win such battles won … to the middle aged swinger who married a flower child from Vancouver. The politician who created the huge debt under which the country laboured; the statesman who cut the gordian knot and gave Canada its own constitution.

Eight years after he left office he could intervene in the National referendum on Charlottetown and have a huge impact on the outcome. Pierre Trudeau was the man who had a love child because the mother thought a child by Trudeau would be a great idea; he was the man whose personal loss of a son moved an entire nation to tears. He was a man to whom no one was indifferent.

He was a giant amongst men and we’ll not soon see his like again … to which one can hear many murmur, with respect, thank God for that.

I suppose that his epitaph might be – he fought mercilessly for what he thought was right, he accomplished much of what he set out to do … his mark on the country was indelible … and life with him in power was never, ever dull.