Rise to power

Books on Trudeaumania offer two takes on Canadian political trailblazer

Reviewed by Sheilla Jones

Winnipeg Free Press, D17, November 26, 2016

Trudeaumania

By Paul Litt, UBC Press, 408 pages, $40

Trudeaumania: The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau

By Robert Wright, HarperCollins, 365 pages, $33

There are moments in the usual ebb and flow of conventional politics when the unexpected jolts the electoral landscape. We’ve just witnessed such a shift in the passion-fuelled and decidedly unconventional presidential campaign in the U.S. that saw the charismatic, 70-year-old Donald Trump become president-elect.

It happened in Canada, too, 50 years ago when Trudeaumania hit the staid political scene with a passion that gave the Liberals a majority thanks to charismatic 48-year-old Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

The difference between the two is stark. The Trump campaign was largely fuelled by the anger, frustration and resentment of rural folk against the establishment; the Trudeau campaign in ’68 rode a wave of celebratory national pride and benefited from the peace, love and harmony mantra of the anti-establishment hippie era.

How substantially the Trump victory will alter American politics is a tale yet to be written. Trudeau’s story has been told oft and in considerable detail in more than a dozen books. Now there are two more, both focusing on the phenomenon of Trudeaumania.

It is highly unusual for two different publishers to release books with the same title at the same time, and on the same topic. And they are both written by academic historians. How is a reader to decide which one to buy? That is, of course, what book reviewers are for.

Trudeaumania by Carleton University professor Paul Litt and Trudeaumania: The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Trent University professor Robert Wright have considerable overlap in terms of content, but their approaches are quite different.

Litt’s Trudeaumania is about sex, sizzle and popular culture. Sex, he writes, had become the central obsession of a pop culture, which "exploited its power to titillate and sensationalize. Trudeaumania derived much of its sizzle from the sex-obsessiveness and sexism of the time." It was the time of sexual liberation, Beatlemania and Andy Warhol.

In 1968, Canada was just coming down from the nationalist high of the country’s centennial and the collective pride in Montreal’s Expo 67. The country felt ready to throw off its colonial past and create a new, modern Canada.

"Nationalists saw in Trudeau the cosmopolitan intellectual who could garner for Canada the type of international attention and status it had achieved at Expo ’67," writes Litt. "Better still, he was single, youthful, athletic and fashionable, with a liberated lifestyle that was right in step with the time."

When 70-year-old, bow-tied prime minister Lester B. (Mike) Pearson announced later that year he would retire, then-justice minister Trudeau was a shoo-in to replace him.

Many men admired Trudeau, but women loved him — they literally threw themselves at him to touch him and kiss him. Teenage girls screamed hysterically. Litt says Trudeau represented sexual and political potency; when the new prime minister called an election in 1968, the love-in began in earnest.

Unnerved, a Tory political strategist lamented, "Everybody was having orgasms every time he opened his mouth." The Conservatives fielded the grandfatherly Robert Stanfield to run against him; it was never a fair fight.

Wright’s Trudeaumania: The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau begins with anger, violence and death threats. It was the time of terrorist threats from the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), separatist fervour was at a boil and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were fresh in everyone’s minds.

On the last day of the ‘68 election campaign, Trudeau ignored assassination threats against him to attend the St. Jean Baptiste Day parade in Montreal. Marchers chanted "Trudeau to the gallows" and someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the reviewing stand where Trudeau sat. But even as more projectiles flew, he defiantly refused to leave his seat. It was a defining moment for Trudeau and, says Wright, the riot that night was "symptomatic of Canada’s existential crisis. It was also part of pattern of social upheaval that swept the North Atlantic that year."

Wright argues it was more than Expo 67 ardour and nationalism that fuelled Trudeaumania; he says the mania started the moment Trudeau declared he would run for the leadership of the Liberal Party in February 1968 in the Ontario Room of the Royal York Hotel. Canadians had already been introduced to the hip bachelor, but now he had the media’s full attention.

"Press stories of the justice minister obliging autograph seekers were filed. Analogies to JFK and the Beatles were made," says Wright.

Trudeaumania was born.

Litt and Wright agree a powerful mythology had grown up around Trudeaumania. With all the sex, sizzle and nationalist politics, the Liberals won a majority with 155 seats, but voter participation actually went down. The authors end their stories with a brief acknowledgement of Trudeaumania 2.0, but Justin Trudeau’s rise to prime minister in 2015 challenged publishing deadlines.

Both Trudeaumania books are well researched and well written. If you’re more interested in the cultural phenomenon that was Trudeaumania, that’s what Litt offers. If you are more intrigued by nationalist politics and Trudeau’s path to becoming prime minister, Wright is the better choice. Readers are fortunate to have two excellent books to choose from.

Sheilla Jones is a Winnipeg author. Her husband was fortunate enough to see the Beatles live at the Maple Leaf Gardens in ‘65, but couldn’t hear them because of all the girls standing on their seats and screaming.