Since much of the world is presently convulsed by something resembling Trumpophobia, it is timely perhaps that two recently published books hearken to a more innocent time when Canada was convulsed by a national obsession called Trudeaumania.
The year was 1968 and this unique political phenomenon catapulted a relatively unknown Montreal intellectual named Pierre Elliott Trudeau into the most powerful political job in the land. While the full force of Trudeaumania didn’t last that long, Trudeau, settled into life at 24 Sussex Drive for an astonishing fifteen years, one of the longest ministries in our history, and it was in the PM’s residence where our current leader, Justin Trudeau, spent his first formative years.
The more recent Trudeaumania 2.0 plays a walk-on part in one of the books and though an interesting aside, the enthusiasm Pierre’s eldest arouses in Canadians, though palpable, pales in comparison to the mass hysteria ignited by his Papa. So why did Canadians fall so hard for the man with the trademark rose boutonniere?
Of the two books, Robert Wright’s Trudeaumania, The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, is the more conventional political narrative. Like PET’s other chronicler, Paul Litt, Wright is an academic political historian but he writes with commendable journalistic verve. No stuffy academese on display here. But Wright takes a rather contrarian position about the impact of emotionally charged Trudeaumania on PET’s astonishing political rise in 1968. Forget about Pierre’s pirouettes Wright argues, Trudeau “vaulted to political stardom because he provided a cogent diagnosis of the crises facing Canada and the world.” PET’s success pivoted around his ideas not the crass hysteria he excited.
True, of course, in part. Both Wright and Litt convincingly argue that Trudeau’s rejection of special status for Quebec and embedding the concept of “deux nations” in our constitution resonated with an electorate in English Canada fearful of separatism and its threat to our national existence. Trudeau famously dismissed special status as “un connerie.” Still, Wright’s book provides ample evidence that Pierre’s personal élan played its role as well.
But it is Paul Litt’s book, simply titled Trudeaumania, that fully embraces the idea of Trudeau as the saviour Canadians had been hankering for in the wake of upheavals catalyzed by separatism and the’60s. Unquestionably, he arrived on the scene at a propitious time. Centennial Year and Expo 67 marked Canada’s Coming of Age. As one of the country’s most prominent journalists at the time, Scott Young, opined, “Trudeau was a human expo . . . the long happy summer that can be extended and extended, world without end.”
Among those most responsible for nurturing Trudeaumania according to Litt was the Star, spearheaded by its then national affairs columnist, Peter C. Newman. “Newman’s florid prose would become, quite literally, the narrative voice of Trudeau’s ascent in Canadian politics.” But it was perhaps Newman’s then wife, the great political journalist, Christina McCall, who best captured the congruence between Trudeau’s persona and the country’s destiny.
On the 1968 campaign she wrote, “The core of this seemingly casual campaign was a very casual plan focused on making one feel that a vote against Trudeau was a vote against the Canadian future.” And who could argue with logic like that?
