Pierre: Colleagues and Friends Talk About the Trudeau They Knew

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

The editor of this volume, who describes herself as a “neighbour and
friend” of Pierre Trudeau, “contacted over three hundred people
around the world” who had known the late prime minister at some point
in his life and asked for personal recollections or anecdotes about the
man, who, it is famously said, haunts us still. She received more than
200 responses, and more than 150 of them, along with several
never-before-published photographs and a foreword by Justin Trudeau,
make up this wonderful book. There are reminiscences of journalists,
actors and artists, cabinet ministers, lovers, and friends who shared
Trudeau’s lengthy canoe trips in the north. A former prior of a
monastery remembers him, along with a former U.N. Secretary-General, two
American presidents, RCMP bodyguards, nannies of the Trudeau children, a
French president, and the caretaker at the Trudeau house for the last
six years of his life.

The views of the writers vary, of course, depending on their
relationship with Trudeau. One journalist writes that Trudeau “had
very little sense of humour about himself or anything else,” but
several others remember fondly his sense of humour. “There was a lot
of laughter in Pierre,” one former aide recalls. Even Joe Clark, who
admits, “[s]itting across the aisle from one another was about as
close as we came,” speaks of Trudeau’s sense of humour.

The anecdotes and reflections are grouped into 19 chapters under such
headings as “Faith,” “Women,” “Canoe Gang,” “Inside the
PMO,” and, most poignant, “Michel.” A motif common to many
chapters is his overriding devotion to his children.

This book—in turn revealing, moving, or amusing—is never less than
absorbing, and the brevity of most of the recollections is a constant
invitation to read just one more, making this one of those rare volumes
that is difficult to put down.