It was 46 years ago, in November of 1979, that Canada last saw the spectre of a Trudeau announcing his resignation.
Much like the recent resignation announcement of Justin Trudeau, the elder Trudeau didn’t specify when he would be quitting as head of the Liberal Party; he told party leadership to pick a successor and promised to leave once they had one.
He also used near-identical language to his son.
“Wherever I am and whatever I do, I will continue to fight for my country,” said Pierre.
“I will always fight for this country, and do what I believe is in the best interest of Canadians,” said Justin this week.
But 1979 was not the end of Pierre Trudeau – not even close. In yet another parallel with his son, the last days of Pierre Trudeau would become an interminable odyssey of an unpopular leader refusing to leave.
There is an alternate reality of Canada in which Pierre Trudeau follows through with his 1979 resignation, and his prime ministerial career comes to an end after a relatively conventional 11 years.
As such, there is no Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Canada is spared many of the most controversial aspects of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy, including the National Energy Program and a massive expansion of the federal deficit.
But fate intervened. At the time of his 1979 resignation pledge, Trudeau had just narrowly lost an election to Progressive Conservative Leader Joe Clark, and was not adjusting well to life as an opposition leader. As an Associated Press report put it, “he was absent from Parliament frequently, and when present for the daily question period often kept a low profile.”
He was also going through a divorce; his wife Margaret had moved out in 1977 and in 1979 had published a bestselling book filled with lurid personal details about her much older ex.
Only a month later, a surprise budget vote changed everything. Clark headed up a minority government, but he assumed he had the votes for a budget thanks to the support of MPs representing the right-leaning Social Credit Party.
But after the SoCreds sat out the vote, the result was an unexpected vote of non-confidence that plunged Canada into another election, and the Liberals back into power.
If Trudeau had resigned outright and handed power to an interim leader, that would have been it: The interim leader would have been the one to steer the Liberals into the 1980 election and likely would have been sworn in as Canada’s 17th prime minister.
Instead, the election forced the Liberals to suspend their search for a replacement, and stick instead with a Trudeau who appeared to be just as uninterested with contesting an election as he was at being an opposition leader.
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Trudeau skipped the leaders’ debate, he held precisely one news conference the entire campaign, and he kept saying that he still intended to resign. Reporters even noticed that he wasn’t bothering to put a rose in his lapel anymore. Clark called him the “invisible man.”
“The people finished me last May by asking somebody else to be the prime minister,” Trudeau said at one point, promising that even if Canadians made him prime minister again, he was going to quit anyway.
“I would very much insist that, before the four years are out, my party hold a leadership convention and choose a successor.”
But Canada (well, Quebec and Ontario) still decided they liked an apathetic Trudeau better than Joe Clark, and gave the Liberals a majority.
A restored Trudeau would never formally rescind his threat to resign. And in the months after the Liberals were restored to power in 1980, analysts continued to speculate that a new Liberal prime minister was just around the corner.
Ottawa columnist Bob Reade continued to publish speculation about potential leadership contenders, albeit with the caveat “this is assuming, of course, Trudeau will resign sometime in the 20th century.”
“I imagine in a couple years or so he’ll ask the party to select a new leader,” Liberal MP Romeo LeBlanc speculated in 1980. (And if that name sounds familiar, LeBlanc is the father of Dominic LeBlanc, Justin Trudeau’s recently appointed successor to ex-finance minister Chrystia Freeland).
But as Canadians would learn, Trudeau wouldn’t end up acting on his threat until he’d explored entirely new frontiers of just how hated a Canadian politician could become.
After just two years, polls began to show an electorate that felt they’d made a mistake.
In Sept. 1982 – right around the time the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was being enacted – Trudeau’s poll numbers posted their first record low. Just 28 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they would vote for him.
The now-familiar phrase “Trudeau must go” entered common parlance. An Edmonton realtor solicited $10 cheques from across Canada to put towards a “Trudeau Retirement Fund” (the cheques were ignored by the Prime Minister’s Office).
The summer of 1982 was also the one where Trudeau – in a particularly tone-deaf reaction to plummeting economic conditions – decided that his summer vacation would involve taking a private luxury railcar across the country.
Perhaps inevitably, gangs of protesters began to regularly intercept the train at its Western Canadian stops. It was in Salmon Arm, B.C. where Trudeau infamously met a group of unemployment protesters with an outstretched middle finger.
As is very much the case with Justin Trudeau, there were no obvious successors to Pierre Trudeau. When he had first appeared to throw in the towel in 1979, commentators noted that he’d never bothered to groom a replacement.
It’s not that he didn’t have options. As early as 1978, polls were showing that former Liberal MP John Turner was more popular than Trudeau himself. One Gallup poll even appeared to show that if the Liberals had been led by Turner, they would never have lost the 1979 election to Joe Clark.
But as the calls for resignation mounted, they only seemed to entrench Trudeau’s resolve to never leave.
“Trudeau said … he is the only prime minister Canada has and no amount of media criticism, poor Gallup polls or ‘crackpots’ collecting money to bribe him into retirement can change that,” read a Canadian Press report from the fall of 1982.
A column in the Mississauga News chastised fellow Canadians for the new national sport of “Trudeau bashing.” Not because they didn’t agree with the sentiment, but because there was no point.
“Trudeau isn’t going to be dumped, and he’s made it clear he isn’t going to leave until he chooses to,” it read, adding that time would be better spent figuring out how to “fix things up once he does leave.”
There were still 16 months left until Trudeau would finally leave in Feb. 1984. And it was these final months where Trudeau’s mounting disinterest in public opinion would truly veer into the cartoonish.
This was the time of the “Peace Initiative”; Trudeau’s ill-conceived plan to fly around the world asking world leaders to voluntarily dial down Cold War tensions.
In 2018, the International History Review published a comprehensive analysis of documents outlining how Trudeau’s Peace Initiative was received in NATO capitals.
It concluded that the main outcome of the Peace initiative was annoyance, with most of Trudeau’s counterparts seeing the whole thing as a bid to elicit a “positive response from his Canadian audience (rather than) achieving genuine progress with other world leaders.”
And just before leaving, Trudeau would notoriously order a batch of 200 Liberal Party patronage appointments, ranging from ambassadorships to committee appointments.
“My God, I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is not normal,” were the words of the civil servant ordered to process the appointments. They were quoted anonymously by Southam News.
For Brian Mulroney, the Progressive Conservative leader who would eventually ride all this Trudeau hate into one of the greatest landslide victories in Canadian history, his public comments at this time were very much like the contemporary statements of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
He would urge Trudeau to resign, pledge to fix things once taking power, and speak of the Trudeau government not as a mere political rival, but as a kind of natural disaster.
After one of Pierre Trudeau’s last cabinet shuffles, Mulroney would tell an interviewer “the damage and the and the sadness that had been inflicted on the Canadian people by the actions of a Liberal government for the last 15 years are so substantial that it’s going to take infinitely more than a cosmetic little change.”
The Liberals, he added, had “absolutely devastated this country.”
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