Love on the Hustings

In Western Canada's oil capital, Calgary, a crowd of several hundred recently waved hostile placards at campaigning Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. "Get lost, Pierre!" hecklers shouted. "Go back where you came from!" Two years ago, when he was running for reelection, Trudeau might well have responded with an angry gesture. This time he held his celebrated temper in check and smiled down his tormentors. That emphasis on politesse over pique is a fair measure of how determined Trudeau is to win a decisive mandate at the polls next Monday.

Trudeau, 54, whose minority Liberal government fell eight weeks ago following a no-confidence vote in Parliament (TIME, May 20), is fighting for his political life. At stake are the 264 seats in Ottawa's House of Commons. After nearly losing the 1972 election to the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, with a slim two-seat margin, clung to power for 18 months--thanks to their shaky alliance with the tiny, socialist New Democratic Party. When the government ran out of legislative concessions to keep the N.D.P. in line, the New Democrats severed the alliance by joining the Conservatives last May in voting down the Liberals' budget. Trudeau and his party must win at least 24 new seats in order to form an effective majority government. Just as determinedly, Conservative Leader Robert Stanfield, 60, and his Tories want to finish the near-demolition job that they inflicted on Trudeau last time round.

Recipe for Ruin. Dire economic issues and a restive national mood are helping the Tory cause this year. A rocketing 10.9% annual inflation rate has dominated campaign rhetoric so far. Trudeau blames the high inflation on external forces, since the country is heavily dependent on international trade, and argues that his defeated budget would have provided the best cure through tax reductions and federal subsidies for consumers. Stanfield has accused Trudeau of "outright deception" and dismissed his economic policy as a "recipe for ruin." As an inflation antidote, the Tory chief prescribes a 90-day price and income freeze followed by selective controls.

Trudeau has made some points with campaign audiences by abandoning his lofty stump style of 1972 for a more down-to-earth approach. As he whistle-stopped on a special nine-car train through desolate Nova Scotian villages and jetted in his chartered DC-9 across the vast prairies of central Canada, the Prime Minister managed only a faint echo of his smug complacency of two years ago. "Nobody is asking you to like Trudeau," he bluntly told a group of Saskatchewan farmers. "People are asking you to vote for his party." Still, many Westerners resent Trudeau's French-Canadianism and his recent tax on Western oil exports to the U.S.

Trudeau's success may depend a good deal upon the appealing impact of his comely wife Margaret. The daughter of a Vancouver businessman and former Liberal Cabinet Minister, Margaret, 25, shunned public exposure after her marriage to Trudeau in 1971. She preferred the quiet domestic life--skiing and pack trips with Pierre, caring for their sons Justin, 2 1/2, and Sacha, six months--but decided after Trudeau's near-defeat in 1972 that this time she should take a more active campaign role. Lately Margaret, with her elfin smile and insouciant ways, has been wowing crowds from Quebec to British Columbia--delivering informal talks in English and French, balancing on stilts for delighted children, and frolicking in a bikini for photographers at a motel pool. At a salmon barbecue in Vancouver, she introduced her husband to 1,500 whooping partisans as "a beautiful guy, a very loving human being who has taught me a lot about loving."

"Good Friends." That prompted Tory supporters in Guelph, Ont., to break out a banner proclaiming STANFIELD is A LOVER TOO. Even New Democrat Leader David Lewis, 65, was forced to admit to a persistent questioner at a campaign rally that he and Sophie, his wife of 39 years, were "very good friends, let me tell you." The latest Gallup poll gives Trudeau the edge in the election. But the figures--Liberals 42%, Tories 34%, N.D.P. 18%--so closely approximate those of the 1972 election that another minority-government era for Canada seems likely.

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