Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  My grandmother, Rose Edith Bernard, was the strongest woman I had ever encountered. A plain prairie woman then in her late sixties, strong and proud and self-sufficient, Rose, as eldest child, had helped raise her siblings when her mother died, and later taught school for many years. Rose’s husband, Tom Bernard—a modest, Malaysian-born man who had worked for the railway in Penticton—died the year I was born. Every day of her married life, Rose would make a pot of rice and have it at the back of the stove for him, because that’s what he was used to back home.

  I remember the blue rinse my grandmother put in her hair, and the little rituals she had, like listening to classical music on an old radio at the same time every day. She would sit in her chair, put her feet up on a footstool and close her eyes. Her days were ordered and efficient, and she was always busy in the garden or making her own clothes, her own blackberry wine.

  Rose Bernard believed that idleness was the work of the devil, so there was time set aside for the Sinclair sisters to play, and time to do chores—weeding, painting, sewing, mending and, one time, constructing a bird bath out of brick, chicken wire and cement. Looking back on those times, I have to agree with my grandmother: work truly is the cure for a lot of ills.

  But on that day in 1969, just weeks from my twenty-first birthday, I sat on a log on the pebble beach below the cottage at Roberts Creek—dreaming, waiting for the tide to come in, listening to the cries of the seagulls and the soothing roar of the waves on the shore.

  There I slowly returned to some kind of normality. The days passed, and I brooded, walking up and down the shore, watching the seals and the sea lions. When I grew bored, I poked among the rocks for starfish and crabs. I wallowed in memories and tried to avoid thinking about the future, certain only that an ordinary life of convention and respectability, of bridge clubs and nine-to-five jobs, was not for me. Then came a phone call that changed my life.

  My grandmother was on a party line; in those days, rural telephone users sometimes shared the same line, and a distinctive cadence told the homeowner when the call was for her. My grandmother, who didn’t get a lot of calls, picked up the phone after hearing three long rings and one short ring. On the other end was my mother, doubtless with some trivial and prosaic question, asking for me. I sauntered ungraciously to the telephone.

  “Margaret,” she said, trying and failing to sound casual, “an old friend has just called, someone you once met on holiday, and he wants to take you out on a date.”

  I was outraged. A date? I informed her curtly that I didn’t date. She was crestfallen. She knew that I was in a low period; that was partly why I had been dispatched to Grandma’s house. My mother thought that an evening out might cheer me up.

  “Don’t you even want to know who it is?” she asked. I was curious but tried not to show it.

  “Well,” I said finally, with all the truculence of a bad-tempered teenager, “who is it?”

  “Pierre Trudeau,” said my mother, flattered that he had taken an interest in her daughter and adding that he was coming to Vancouver for a meeting. In April 1968, following victory at the Liberal Party convention in Ottawa, Trudeau had been named the prime minister of Canada. As was our custom, my sisters and I had all attended the Liberal convention. My father was backing John Turner as candidate. Like me, my sisters—who had all met Pierre in Tahiti—were backing him, of course.

  I was intrigued enough to agree to return to Vancouver. Pierre, as I soon discovered, was already dominating the Canadian political scene as no other prime minister ever had, and was at work on sweeping changes to social policy and talking of a place for francophones in the Canadian mainstream.

  To prepare for the occasion, my mother insisted that I put away my trailing skirts with the twinkling mirrors and the sequins, the sandals and the beads, and that I wear something formal. The products of our day’s shopping—an elegant, short white dress, and a visit to the hairdresser to iron out my frizzy hair—succeeded only in turning me into a Barbie doll, complete with a diamond brooch and shaved legs.

  For my part, I had two distinct and slightly contradictory images of Pierre. On the one hand, there was a nice-looking middle-aged man who wore old-fashioned shorts and striped T-shirts; on the other, there was the charismatic leader whose ascent to power I had witnessed at the Liberal convention in Ottawa, when Trudeaumania swept the floor.

  When he came through the door of my parents’ house in North Van, I liked the look of him immediately. This was late summer, and he was tanned, which looked good against his white shirt, blue blazer and coloured ascot. He wore dark glasses and a flower in his buttonhole. I liked his charm, his boyish manner, and I couldn’t stop myself sneaking a quick look at his tight butt. He was confident, flying high, a good first year as prime minister behind him and the country at his feet, and he had about him such an air of fun, such a charming, teasing expression, that he made me laugh at once. Poor Pierre, on the other hand, remembering a simple young girl, without artifice, in a bikini on a beach, was clearly taken aback by my over-groomed, stilted appearance.

  Still, our evening was wonderful. I got him out of the house as soon as I could, unable to stand the nervous giggling of my sisters or the feigned relaxation of my mother. A blue Pontiac sat in the driveway with two plain-clothed officers in the front seat, both with the unmistakable muscles and air of security of policemen. We set off to catch the gondola to the Grouse Nest, a restaurant at the top of Grouse Mountain. For a moment, it occurred to me that I should perhaps be wary of this man, but then that notion passed. We quickly resumed the long conversations we had begun in Tahiti and I soon forgot who he was and saw only the man sitting across from me: the most charming, easiest, most interesting man I had ever met.

  Within minutes, I had blown my cover. The little French dress was a sham, and we talked about student revolution and Berkeley and Morocco. Pierre was so obviously relieved that there was a real human being inside the Barbie doll that he gave me every encouragement, and I was hugely flattered by his attentiveness and charm. I was also embarrassed at the thought of asking him questions about his own life. How could I really say, “Tell me, what’s it like to be prime minister?” We danced, we poked fun at the touristy restaurant and we laughed.

  Later that night, as he dropped me off at home with a brotherly kiss goodbye, he asked me whether I had ever considered a job in government. I hadn’t, but I did now. I was already infatuated—by his manners and courtesy, his air of experience and a strange quality he had of making everyone about him want to be as pleasing as possible. In my imagination, I was already seeing myself at his side. For all my rebelliousness, I was my mother’s daughter at heart and could envisage no future without a husband and children.

  Within a month, I had moved to Ottawa and found a job in the Department of Manpower and Immigration as a sociologist. My parents were overcome by my sudden transformation. Overnight, I began eating properly again. I sewed myself neat, tailored suits, appropriate to the city life I imagined.

  Two weeks transpired before I mustered the courage to call Pierre, and when I did he was clearly extremely surprised; he had not expected me to take his words so literally. But his voice was warm and faintly amused, and he asked me round at once for dinner at the prime minister’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive. This was October, a warm, early-autumn evening, and the lawns surrounding the large stone mansion were scattered with falling leaves. I approached the door with some trepidation.

  I had turned twenty-one years old on September 10, and here I was knocking on the door of the prime minister’s house for a dinner date.

  The door was opened by a cheerful woman who led me into the library, a room I found soulless and bleak, home to shelf upon shelf of art books and volumes of philosophy, political treatises and leather-bound theology. What I had seen of the hall, with all its paintings of heavy Canadian landscapes, only added to an impression of austere and grey formality.

  Over a dinner of spaghetti (overcooked) with a little oil driz
zled over top and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, I looked around me and saw a barren, cheerless decor. Still, the evening was charming, delightful, grown-up and very easy. I felt as if Pierre and I had known each other for a long time. Our romance began.

  The more I saw of Pierre, the more I liked him. Bit by bit, I managed to get him to reveal something of his own past. I discovered that his father had made his fortune by buying service stations during and immediately after the Depression, that he had been a funny, boisterous father even if highly ambitious for his elder son and that Pierre had been brought up in luxury, transported by chauffeur to the prestigious Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal every day. I learned that he had overcome his excessively shy nature by taking boxing lessons and that he had grown up speaking both French and English at home, so that he was fully bilingual.

  I heard how he had taken a first degree in law and then a master’s in political economy at Harvard before getting caught up in Québécois politics, losing his job and spending many months travelling the world. And that he had become a teacher of constitutional law at the Université de Montréal before becoming the member of parliament for the west Montreal riding of Mount Royal and then minister of justice in the Lester Pearson government. He made a name for himself with sweeping reforms of the legal system, championing human rights and fair play and becoming the much-loved rogue of the Liberal Party.

  However, our romance was not all easy. Pierre was a very private man, and I was a far cry from the kind of woman whom Canadians would consider a suitable wife for their prime minister. What was more, he was widely regarded as a reserved and cautious bachelor and had lived for many years with his mother, taking out few women, until he had suddenly been catapulted into the leadership of the Liberal Party and the public eye. For years, magazines had been running articles asking “Whom should Trudeau marry?” and his name had been linked to the singer Barbra Streisand (who once described him as a “tantalizing blend of Marlon Brando and Napoleon”) and to Madeleine Gobeil, who taught French literature at Carleton University in Ottawa and who would go on to become director of arts for UNESCO.

  I was beginning to discover that behind the silky, charming manner and the absolute confidence that had given Pierre Trudeau something of a reputation for arrogance lay a curiously solitary figure. I hated the way that people would stop talking whenever he approached them, and the way that everyone stared at him—and us—with awe and admiration. So he and I stopped going out in public together and instead spent our evenings alone at 24 Sussex and, best of all, at the prime minister’s country house on Harrington Lake.

  Located several kilometres north of Ottawa in the Gatineau Hills, the Harrington Lake estate comprises thirteen acres in Gatineau Park. The place was born when supporters suggested to then prime minister John Diefenbaker that he needed a country retreat, a quiet and tranquil place where a busy leader might have time to, say, go fishing. One story has it that when Diefenbaker was touring the property he was dubious at first, but the caretaker taking him around had been instructed to make sure the PM caught a trout, which he did. In 1959, then, Harrington Lake became the official country house of the prime minister of Canada.

  Unlike 24 Sussex, which is an old lumber baron’s mansion, stately and heavy, Harrington is a simple white clapboard house with a screened-in sun porch along one side and magnificent views over the lake to the forests beyond. Accented by green shutters, the house is plain but sprawling—sixteen rooms and more than eight thousand square feet. The widow’s walk over the sun porch allows for a splendid, lofty view of the lake, which the English called Harrington and the French called Mousseau. Families with those or similar names settled the area in the early nineteenth century, as did the Meech family. Meech Lake, site of that famous accord signed in 1987, is close by.

  The house at Harrington Lake—the one place Pierre truly loved and scene of the happiest days of my marriage—has wooden floors and white-painted panelling, with two vast stone fireplaces at opposite ends of the house, in the sitting room and dining room, where we burned great logs of wood. On Saturdays and Sundays, whatever the weather, Pierre insisted that we spend at least four hours outside—hiking, canoeing and swimming in summer, cross-country and downhill skiing and skating in winter. Pierre had a raft built, and we anchored it some distance from shore; we would sunbathe there for hours in total privacy. He loved the place for its solitude and simplicity.

  What I found so wonderful about this time was that Pierre totally allowed me to be myself, and that he seemed to love everything about me. The twenty-nine-year difference in our ages bothered neither of us. We never thought about it, though, looking back, we should have.

  By Christmas, we had settled into a routine. We met for dinner once or twice a week, when Pierre’s chauffeur collected me at 7:00 p.m., and Pierre walked me home around 10:30 p.m., when he had to get back to work. Occasionally we went to a restaurant in the more unfashionable places, and photographers who did catch us simply assumed that I was one of the prime minister’s many occasional dates.

  At Harrington Lake, I had my own room and we were very discreet. But we felt private and absolutely free. Best of all, perhaps, were our trips to Pierre’s remote, simple cabin at Morin-Heights in the Laurentians. On these occasions, I came to love and admire Pierre’s self-sufficiency, his conscientiousness, his disregard for social conventions and his seriousness.

  But we also laughed a lot. These were idyllic days, and the contrast between them and the rest of my life made me feel that I was split in two. I had told only two people, my sister Lin and a friend in Toronto, about the seriousness of my relationship with Pierre. There is definitely something devious about me: I took perverse pleasure in my double life, leading my friends on to think I was doing one thing while in fact I was doing quite another. I even played a game with myself, tricking my friends into talking about Pierre, the prime minister of Canada, while I laughed silently to myself.

  One of my favourite photos of all my time with Pierre was taken in the summer of 1970. We’re on the ferry from Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver, heading to Gibsons on the Sechelt Peninsula and a rendezvous with my grandmother Rose Bernard. In a very real way, I was seeking her approval of the man I was to marry.

  I wanted the blessing of a woman I very much admired. My grandmother once told me when I was very young, “Margaret, you’re one of the more delicate flowers in the garden. But you’re also a perennial.” Only later did I understand that she was remarking on how fragile I was and yet how durable. A perennial is an eternal flower, one that keeps coming back year after year.

  The light that day was dazzling and the photo shows us both in sunglasses, sitting on the deck, leaning against a wall and basking in the sun. Pierre is barefoot and his elbows are resting on his knees. He is the picture of a very relaxed man. My hands are hugging my ankles and I’m smiling.

  I look back on that moment as one of sweetness and innocence. Canadians on board recognized Pierre, of course, but they were so warm and polite, wanting to shake his hand. Among the well-wishers was a group of Brownies in their uniforms and badges, which seemed so familiar to me. I had worn that uniform as a child. These girls were eleven and twelve years old and they were charmed and delighted when Pierre teased them.

  Then some German tourists approached and in heavily accented English asked, “Why are these children and old people coming to your feet? We are curious.”

  Pierre explained to them that he was their Willy Brandt—then chancellor of West Germany.

  “Ah,” they exclaimed. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  We pressed on to my grandmother’s house, where Rose Bernard—ever the straight-talking Tory—lit into Pierre for allowing French on cereal boxes. She liked to read the boxes as she ate her cereal in the morning, and she argued that the French was cutting into the English. And besides, she said, there wasn’t one francophone in her community. Later Pierre would say, rather famously, “Well, turn it around,” to the anglo
phone complaint of French on cereal boxes. But my grandmother may have been the first to voice the lament to him.

  Before our wedding, Pierre teased her, asking her what an Anglican thought she was doing in a Catholic church. Pierre’s beloved mother, Grace Elliott Trudeau, was of Scottish ancestry, so naturally Rose and Pierre hit it off. She flirted with him.

  Given what soon followed, you will understand why I cherished that moment on the ferry. What I had to get used to was that everywhere Pierre went, he was accompanied by RCMP officers who were trained to guard him, though they kept their distance—as they did that day on the ferry. I found the constant tailing irksome, but we could, and did, joke about it.

  Then all joking ceased. On October 5 of that same year, 1970, the British trade commissioner, James Cross, was kidnapped in Montreal. Five days later, Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s vice-premier and minister of labour, was also captured by the Front de libération du Québec, while he was playing football at dusk on a field near his home. The FLQ cell that held him hostage demanded the release of a number of political prisoners.

  Pierre invoked the War Measures Act and ordered mass raids and arrests but said that he would not deal with terrorists. On the sixteenth of October, 497 people were rounded up and arrested. I was with Pierrenext the night that, when the red emergency phone—kept in the closet at Harrington Lake above his sweaters—rang ominously. The news was that Pierre Laporte had been found dead, strangled with his own crucifix chain, his body left in the trunk of a car at Saint-Hubert Airport, some sixteen kilometres east of downtown Montreal.

  Pierre wept: for the Laporte family, and for the choices that he had had to make. He would not negotiate with the kidnappers, and he would confront and close down the terrorist cells—even if it meant curtailing many of the civil and political rights to which Canadians had become accustomed.