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Trudeauzombia >> What lurks in Trudeau's Shadow? by JULIET WATERS
I sort of loathe the idea of contributing to the trance of Trudeau nostalgia brought on by the 30th anniversary of Trudeau's entry into politics and Andrew Cohen and Jack Granatstein's collection of mostly pro-Trudeau essays, Trudeau's Shadow. But like Mason Lee, I can chart the origin of my political consciousness to how angry Pierre Elliott Trudeau made my dad. And I figure somebody from Montreal should get the chance to express a few of their memories of Trudeau, given that you won't find a single essay by a Montrealer in this book. There were some crucial differences between Mason Lee's father and my own. His father was an ultra-conservative Albertan Mountie. My father was a left-leaning Quebec affairs reporter for the Gazette during the October Crisis. While Mason Lee's father eventually developed a grudging respect for Trudeau when he imposed the War Measures Act, Trudeau put some of my father's drinking buddies in jail. True, most of them treated this violation of their civic rights as just another crazy Montreal night in a different set of bars. But my father never lost his contempt for the man. A contempt I happily mimicked at the politically enlightened age of eight. As a result, what I always loved best about Trudeau was hating him; I loved feeling like the only kid in NDG who was immune to his pied piper parade of pirouettes, wide ties and green jaguars. What I loved best about Trudeau in high school was the contemptuous pity I felt towards him when, as a perverse middle-aged man in the '70s, his glassy-eyed flake of a wife dumped him for Studio 54 and the Stones on election night. But gradually my teenage hatred of Trudeau began to harden. I didn't love hating Trudeau so much when he brought in a constitution while there was a separatist government in Quebec, leaving my city in a state of eternal political limbo. And I certainly had no love left for him when he emerged like a troll from his art deco cave to sabotage support for the Charlottetown Accord, leading Montreal into a second referendum and more years of political uncertainty. I brought up the absence of any Montreal contribution in Trudeau's Shadow with Andrew Cohen over coffee last week, and I believe I managed to shame him into some honest remorse. This was easy, since Cohen grew up in Montreal. (He left in 1977 to pursue graduate work and eventually become the Washington correspondent for the Globe & Mail.) However, he had an honest defence. He claims that the few Montrealers who'd been asked to contribute refused. However, it wasn't so easy to get him to agree with any of my views on Trudeau and, after a fun hour of arguing over which one of us was the more "staggeringly naïve," I've conceded that he's an unreformable Trudeaumaniac. Still, he seemed sincerely grateful to meet any media in Montreal willing to express any opinions on Trudeau at all: "I was afraid I was going to start falling asleep in interviews," he claims. I have a few things to say in defence of Trudeau's Shadow. Primarily, that I hadn't realized how much I missed hating Trudeau until I read some of the more fawning essays. To be fair, there are a couple of provocative critiques by Rick Salutin and Bob Rae. But what burns me is that no one in this book has really had to live with the concrete consequences of Trudeau's errors in judgment when dealing with Quebec. So, unless one really cares about how the rest of Canada feels about Trudeau, for this reader at least, Trudeau's Shadow reads like a parade of Trudeauzombia, occasionally entertaining to watch but not something I really feel a part of. Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, ed. by Andrew Cohen and J.L. Granatstein, Random House, hc, 408 pp, $34.95
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In the new book Trudeau's Shadow, Robert Mason Lee writes: "What I liked best about Trudeau was how angry he made my father."