A Stroll, a Sauna and au Revoir

By Kenneth W. Banta

The West's senior statesman calls it quits

After a solitary late-night hike last week through Ottawa's worst snowstorm in four years, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 64, trudged home, took a sauna and "just made up my mind." Without bothering to notify the press or his own Members of Parliament, he coolly penned a resignation letter to the president of his ruling Liberal Party, Iona Campagnolo. Serving as Liberal leader, he wrote, "had been one of the joys of my life, but I now feel this is the appropriate time for someone else to assume this challenge."

As far back as 1980, Trudeau had promised that he would not run in the federal elections that must be held no later than next March. But his retirement nonetheless took the nation by surprise. During nearly 16 years in office, the longest tenure of any contemporary Western leader, Trudeau has become a national institution, whose glitter has given normally staid Canada a certain image of political elan.

Lately, however, Trudeau's Liberal Party has been battered by criticism for its failure to boost Canada's ailing economy, while the opposition Progressive Conservative Party, under its new leader, Brian Mulroney, has surged ahead in public opinion polls. Trudeau's long-promised resignation amounted to an admission that he was highly unlikely to win another bitter electoral struggle.

With a mysterious half-smile playing across his lips, a trademark red rose in his lapel and gaggles of young women clinging to his words, Trudeau often seemed more a rake than the philosopher-statesman he aspired to be. Still, the rake's progress was remarkable. The son of a Quebec millionaire, Trudeau had played the stylish dilettante who was occasionally known to ride motorcycles until a successful election bid carried him to Parliament in 1965. There such habits as occasionally wearing sandals to work and driving sports cars made Trudeau a darling of the media. When he called a general election, after winning his party's leadership in 1968, Trudeau was swept into office on a tide of delirium dubbed Trudeaumania.

Once housed in the Prime Minister's residence, Trudeau continued to cavort in public. He stunned staid pols by sliding down banisters and squiring young women to chic discotheques. After a secret courtship came his 1971 marriage--since failed, amid excessive publicity--to Margaret Sinclair, then 22.

The playboy veneer concealed keen political vision. Jesuit-educated, Trudeau frequently quoted "reason over passion" as a maxim and often applied it in reconciling the longstanding divisions between Canada's anglophone majority and the French-descended minority concentrated in his home province of Quebec. In one of his finest hours, Trudeau argued successfully for passage of the Official Languages Act of 1969, which effectively established bilingualism as national policy.

Although Trudeau built a reputation as a civil libertarian, he also proved willing to use force if reason failed. In 1970 Trudeau became the first Prime Minister in history to invoke Canada's War Measures Act in peacetime, sending the army into the streets of Montreal and Quebec City to deal with terrorist kidnapings by the separatist Front de Liberation du Quebec By 1975 Trudeau's reputation as a powerful leader had dimmed. In the 1979 election his Liberals lost to the Conservatives; six months later he announced that he was stepping down as Liberal leader, declaring that he "was not the man to rebuild the Liberal Party."

It was a short-lived decision. When the government of Tory Prime Minister Joe Clark fell soon thereafter, the phoenix-like Trudeau was back in power again. In short order he defeated efforts by Quebec Premier Rene Levesque to win a referendum on negotiations toward independence for the province. Then, in what may prove to be his most profound achievement, Trudeau overrode powerful opposition from several provincial factions to win a revamping of Canada's constitution, including the addition of a charter of civil rights. More recently, he embarked on a well-meant but unsuccessful campaign to ease East-West tensions, calling for arms reductions and a summit of the nuclear powers.

Those initiatives, however, were not enough to offset voters' growing weariness. In January a Gallup poll found that only 32% of the electorate favored the Liberals, with 52% for Mulroney's Conservatives. After Trudeau's resignation was announced, the Toronto stock market rocketed 16 points. In Washington, where differences of style and ideology with Trudeau have grown pronounced under Ronald Reagan, there were also sighs of relief.

A Liberal Party leadership convention is likely in June. The candidate to beat is John Turner, 54, a bilingual Toronto lawyer and former Finance Minister who has long been mentioned as Trudeau's probable successor. But he will face stiff opposition from other contenders, notably current Minister of Energy Jean Chretien, 50, an ebullient Quebecker. As the Liberal search for a successor begins, however, some may already be feeling a twinge of nostalgia for the days of Trudeau and roses. --By Kenneth W. Banta.

Reported by John Ferguson/Ottawa

With reporting by John Ferguson