Pierre Trudeau

The Right Honourable Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau, PC , CC , CH , QC , MA , LL.L , LL.D , FRSC (October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000) was the fifteenth Prime Minister of Canada from April 20, 1968 to June 3, 1979, and from March 3, 1980 to June 30, 1984.

Early life and career

Born in Montreal, Trudeau earned a law degree at the Université de Montréal in 1943, followed by a master's in political economy at Harvard. During his attendance at the Université de Montréal, Trudeau was conscripted into the army, and joined the Canadian Officers Training Corps under the wartime National Resources Mobilization Act of 1940. Trudeau served with other conscripts in the home guard, since it was only later, starting in 1944, that limited numbers of conscripts were sent overseas, with the vast majority of those sent overseas being volunteers. He said he was willing to become involved in the war, but he believed that to do so would be to turn his back on a Quebec population he considered to have been betrayed by the Mackenzie King government. In a 1942 Outremont by-election, he campaigned for the Quebec anti-conscription candidate Jean Drapeau (see Conscription Crisis of 1944), and was eventually expelled from the Officers' Training Corps for lack of discipline. After the war, he attended the Institut d'études politiques de Paris in Paris in 1946-47, and spent the following year at the London School of Economics.

Related Topics:
Université de Montréal - Harvard - Wartime - 1940 - 1942 - Outremont - Conscription Crisis of 1944 - Institut d'études politiques de Paris - Paris - London School of Economics

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From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Trudeau was primarily based in Montreal and was seen by many as an intellectual. In 1949, he was an active supporter of workers in the Asbestos Strike. In 1956, he edited an important book on the subject, La grève de l'amiante, which argued that the strike was a seminal event in Quebec's history, marking the beginning of resistance to the conservative, francophone clerical establishment and anglophone business class that had long ruled the province. Throughout the 1950s, Trudeau was a leading figure in the opposition to the repressive rule of Premier of Quebec Maurice Duplessis as the founder and editor of Cité Libre, a dissident journal that helped provide the intellectual basis for the Quiet Revolution.

Related Topics:
1940s - 1960s - Montreal - Asbestos Strike - Francophone - Anglophone - Premier of Quebec - Maurice Duplessis - Cité Libre - Quiet Revolution

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Trudeau was interested in Marxist ideas in the 1940s. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he was a supporter of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party. During the 1950s, he was blacklisted by the United States, and prevented from entering that country because of a visit to a conference in Moscow (where he was briefly arrested for throwing a snowball at a statue of Stalin), and because he subscribed to a number of leftist publications. Trudeau later appealed the ban, and had it lifted.

Related Topics:
Marxist - 1940s - Social democratic - Co-operative Commonwealth Federation - Blacklisted

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His views evolved towards a liberal position in favour of individual rights counter to the state and made him an opponent of Quebec nationalism. In economic theory he was influenced by professors Joseph Schumpeter and John Kenneth Galbraith, while he was at Harvard. Trudeau criticized the Liberal Party of Lester Pearson when it supported arming Bomarc nuclear missiles in Canada with nuclear warheads. Nevertheless, he was persuaded to join the party in 1965 with his friends Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand. The "three wise men" ran for the Liberals and were elected in the 1965 election. Trudeau was appointed two years later to Pearson's cabinet as Minister of Justice.

Related Topics:
Quebec nationalism - Joseph Schumpeter - John Kenneth Galbraith - Liberal Party - Lester Pearson - Bomarc nuclear missiles - Gérard Pelletier - Jean Marchand - 1965 election - Cabinet

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