What Should Pierre Trudeau be Remembered For?

Pierre Elliott Trudeau was born in 1919 in Montreal to a wealthy

family, the son of a French Canadian businessman and a mother of Scottish ancestry.”(Whittaker) This background would give Trudeau a good grounding on both English and French culture and it put him in a good position to deal with the controversies he would later face as Prime Minister. He received an excellent education, having attended “a Jesuit college, London School of Economics, Harvard, and Mcgill.”(Alward) Before Trudeau became P.M. in1968, he had a lot of political experience: he had been an adviser to an Ottawa council, he joined the Liberal party

Despite Trudeau’s alienation of the western provinces he should not be remembered for this his push towards bilingualism proved to be beneficial in the future, representing Anglophones and francophones . His decisions were always for the good of the majority of the population, whom he tried to please. Trudeau’s stand against Quebec is what he should be remembered for. He realized that the FLQ was threatening the peace of society and the lives of citizens. In order to maintain the present-day civil peace, Trudeau realized that he had to take a firm stand against the terrorist FLQ, even if it cost him a few votes. This was a risk that he was willing to take when he invoked the war measures act, and it paid off in maintaining a united Canada. If Trudeau had not have taken a strong stance against Quebec separatists, Canada might have been a smaller country consisting of nine Provinces , with the country of Quebec right down the middle.

Another example of Trudeau ignoring Western concerns was when he passed the “Official Language Act.”(Whittaker) This helped him increase bilingualism throughout Canada and hopefully satisfy the Quebecois. Unfortunately, neither the anglophones nor the francophones were content: seeing everything in French and English, including cereal boxes, angered the English population and bilingualism did not satisfy the French population. One western Canadian simply put it quite bluntly, “Trudeau wants to ram the French down our throats,” (Vastel, p. 141)

with Marchand and Pelletier, he was appointed to be an Ottawa secretary, and later he was named Minister of Justice. Finally, when P.M. Lester Pearson retired, Trudeau was elected P.M., to the Canadian population’s delight.

A day after the War Measures Act was invoked, Pierre Laporte’s dead body was found in the trunk of a car, killed by his kidnappers. Trudeau announced the event on TV and attacked the FLQ saying ,“ it had sown the seeds of its own destruction.”(G

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