Canada’s 15th (and third-longest serving) prime minister may have been accused of being too lazy to write a decent memoir but he was a pack rat when it came to the paper trail of his life. To execute the task, he was given access to Trudeau’s unexpected cornucopia of personal papers. No one has gotten more inside Pierre Trudeau’s head and soul.Įnglish, a much-honoured academic historian, officer of the Order of Canada and former Liberal member of Parliament, wrote the biography at the request of the Trudeau family. No one better than John English has captured how that came to be. Why? Because the man, whatever his inadequacies at political leadership, forever blew us out of the stagnant pond of provincialism. Although six years further on, with another Trudeau in the Prime Minister’s Office, the name carries more recognition with Canada’s young, it is the question of what Pierre Trudeau’s meaning is-or should be-to the huge millennial generation that makes this meticulous and beautifully written two-volume Trudeau biography so influential. In one of the myriad press accounts marking the tenth anniversary of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s death, in 2010, University of Toronto historian Robert Bothwell observes that his young students have only a vague impression of who Trudeau is: “a name and an airport.”īothwell’s statement bothered me then it bothers me still.
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