Free Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin Page B

greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas.” And if you don’t, her son warned, “there’s a Dark Age Ahead .”
    Â 

Pierre Trudeau
    Statesman
    October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000
    A S ENIGMATIC AS he was complex, as combative as he was charismatic, Pierre Trudeau was the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. He championed bilingualism, multiculturalism, and national unity; he patriated our constitution and gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has defined modern Canada and become a model for the world.
    Trudeau arrived in the House of Commons in 1965, as the junior member of the federalist trio led by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier, whom Prime Minister Lester Pearson had recruited to bolster the Quebec wing of his caucus. A law professor and a neophyte politician who had worked briefly in the Privy Council Office more than a dozen years earlier, he was an intellectual who had studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and L’institut d’études politiques in Paris and then travelled the world, juxtaposing theory with the rough realities of life on the road. An athlete and an outdoorsman, he was given to testing himself on rugged canoe trips, punishing treks, and daredevil ski runs. A shy and introspective bachelor who lived with his widowed mother well into his forties, Trudeau was also a renowned ladies’ man who cut a mean figure on the dance floor. Abidingly Catholic, independently wealthy, a graduate of the elite Jesuit-run Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, he had flirted with militant ultra-nationalism as a student at the Université de Montréal, protested against conscription in the Second World War, and failed to enlist in the armed forces. Yet he grew out of his insular pro-nationalist phase, emerging as a civil and human rights activist who defied repressive Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis in Cité libre , the political magazine he co-founded in 1950.
    In their book Trudeau Transformed , Max and Monique Nemni argue that they could have written several biographies of Trudeau, concentrating on him as an athlete, a scholar, an adventurer, a heretic, a believer, or a ladies’ man. None of these would have worked, they contend, because they would provide only slices of the man. His strength and his appeal came from the powerful and often odd contrasts among the myriad components of his character and upbringing. His many private sides and personal angles — above all his belief in individual liberty, social justice, and federalism — combined in unusual and unexpected ways to make him the most memorable Canadian politician of the twentieth century.
    JOSEPH PHILIPPE PIERRE Yves Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal on October 18, 1919, the middle child of Grace Elliot, an anglophone of Scottish descent, and Charles-Émile Trudeau, a rural Québécois lawyer-turned-entrepreneur. Growing up, Pierre moved from one language to another like a paddle slicing through the still waters of a northern lake (what other francophone politician of his day had the linguistic ammunition to sneer, “Zap, you’re frozen,” at a stunned Robert Stanfield to deride the Opposition leader’s campaign pledge to freeze wages and prices to combat stagflation in 1974?).
    His father grew rich after selling his string of automobile service stations to Imperial Oil during the Depression for the then-staggering sum of more than a million dollars, but the family always lived modestly, even after they moved to Outremont, an affluent section of Montreal. “My father taught me order and discipline,” Trudeau once said, “and my mother taught me freedom and fantasy.”
    After his father died suddenly of a heart attack in the spring of 1935, when Trudeau was fifteen, he grew even closer to his mother. He also grew more introspective and took up karate and boxing, developing the