It was just after 8 a.m. Monday and an exceptionally warm October sun was already washing warmth over several thousand people gathered on Parliament Hill for one last farewell.
Past the Peace Tower and over the Ottawa River into the Gatineau Hills where Pierre Trudeau had loved the solitude and beauty, a morning autumn mist was burning off to unveil the spreading hardwood colors.
Beside Parliament, as cannons roared a 19-gun salute and the acrid smell of gunpowder lingered, the crowd grew silent when Trudeau’s body was carried from the parliamentary Hall of Honor to a waiting hearse and the beginning of the journey home to Montreal.
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As the entourage drove off the Hill, Canadians applauded, saluted, wept or stood at attention, their final tribute to the man who died Sept. 28 but who lives on for them as a symbol.
The death of Trudeau, Canada’s 15th prime minister and third-longest serving, produced a Canadian outpouring of memory and nostalgia for the man who inspired and infuriated, who governed with theatrical flair and Machiavellian cunning, who bungled the economy but fought the separatists, modernized the state, loved Canada passionately and urged Canadians not to feel second class.
He fought to give Canada a modern constitution with a charter of individual rights.
“Pierre, you made us young, you made us proud and you made us dream,” a red-eyed prime minister Jean ChrŽtien said in a House of Commons tribute Sept. 29.
From his home near Windsor, Ont., former Trudeau agriculture minister Eugene Whelan was on the telephone talking about The Boss and agriculture.
There was an irony. Trudeau the intellectual was known as a prime minister who could master massive amounts of detail, often knowing as much about files as the responsible minister.
Not with agriculture.
“One day, the prime minister told me he had tried to figure out agriculture and after reading and reading, he was no further ahead. It was so complicated,” Whelan chuckled.
“He said ‘I don’t know how you do what you do but just keep doing it.’ I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did without Trudeau’s support.”
Whelan had served in Parliament for 10 years as a backbencher by the time the 1972 election was called.
He was thinking of quitting.
“I talked to Trudeau and told him,” said Whelan. “My farm was going to hell. I didn’t know my kids. I thought it was time I changed something.”
Trudeau talked him into running again, arguing that Whelan could win his southwestern Ontario seat, but a new candidate might not be able to do so.
Whelan won his seat but Trudeau came within two seats of losing government.
He appointed Whelan agriculture minister and stuck with the populist politician for the next decade in power, through crises over supply management, subsidies and farm supports.
“He was a great supporter of research and we built many of the finest research facilities in those years,” said Whelan. “I think one of the rea
sons I got along with him is because I laid it on the line. That is what he expected from people.”
