Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin

pugilistic skills and the stance of the solitary warrior that he would later use to his rhetorical advantage in debates and on the campaign trail. A team player he was not.
    When he accepted Pearson’s invitation to run in the safe Liberal riding of Mount Royal in the 1965 federal election, Trudeau was forty-seven, a law professor at the Université de Montréal — the theory of the law had always appealed more to him than its practice — a critic of Pearson’s decision to allow American nuclear-armed Bomarc missiles to be deployed in Canada, and politically aligned with the social democratic aspirations of the New Democratic Party. Far too much of a pragmatist to settle for moral rather than electoral power, Trudeau decided that if he was going to enter politics, he wanted to run for the Liberals, a party with a likelihood of governing the country. After winning his seat, he served as parliamentary secretary to the prime minister and was appointed minister of justice a little more than a year later.
    He excelled in the role. Late in December 1967, at the end of an exuberant, self-confident centennial year, he introduced two pivotal pieces of legislation to bring the antiquated divorce laws and the stringent Criminal Code in line with the behaviours and attitudes of a younger generation of Canadians, even if the changes contravened religious codes and mores. The omnibus amendments to the Criminal Code, which proposed legalizing contraception and decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, provided Trudeau with one of his most celebrated quotes — albeit lifted from an editorial in the Globe and Mail — that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”
    Enshrining individual rights and personal freedom was one of his core beliefs and would become a hallmark of his political career and his legacy. He showcased another political and philosophical tenet — a strong federal government surmounting its constituent provinces and territories — at a televised federal-provincial conference on constitutional affairs in Ottawa in February 1968. Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson had been elected premier of Quebec in 1966 after a campaign of “ égalité ou indépendance ,”and he brought that mandate and the idea of a new kind of federalism — based on the notion of two equal nations: Quebec and the rest of Canada — to the conference.
    Trudeau eviscerated the argument coolly but with merciless logic, and humiliated the man on national television. “His tone ever more biting, his voice metallic, Trudeau responded to Johnson’s reference to him as the ‘député de Mont-Royal’ by describing the premier as the ‘député de Bagot’” (his provincial riding in the Eastern Townships of Quebec), as John English relates in Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau . At a coffee break hastily called by Pearson to allow the tension to dissipate, Trudeau “curtly nodded at Johnson and muttered that the premier was seeking to destroy the federal government. Johnson sneered that Trudeau was acting like a candidate, not a federal minister.” Here was an early example of the lone combatant in action, yet another side of the dashing, eloquent bachelor who sported a rose in his lapel, wore a leather coat, and drove a silver Mercedes 300SL convertible.
    A little more than a week later, Trudeau announced that he would be entering the leadership race to succeed Pearson as party leader and prime minister at the Liberal convention in April 1968. He had agonized over the decision to run and he didn’t win the contest easily — it took four ballots. But in the wider world, the one reached by television, he was already generating emotional crushes normally reserved for rock stars.
    From the beginning he envisaged a goal far beyond the mundane pragmatism of party politics. “By building a truly just