Young Trudeau, 1919–1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Retired university professors Max and Monique Nemni were close friends
of Pierre Trudeau, who trusted them with writing his “intellectual
biography.” Now translated into impeccable English by William Johnson,
Young Trudeau has made quite a splash across the country by revealing
that the Trudeau of the Charter of Rights was not the same Trudeau who
came of age in Quebec during the 1930s and early ’40s. As Trudeau’s
extensive notebooks and diaries reveal, he was an anti-democrat and
incipient fascist who opposed Canadian participation in World War II and
favoured Quebec separatism. In other words, he was just like many of his
contemporaries who grew up in a rigidly Catholic, closed environment.

Equally interesting, though, is that the Trudeau we all came to know
later lived in that strange rebel of his youth. Rich, aesthetic, and
deeply religious, the young Trudeau was a serious intellectual who loved
the theatre and the outdoors, especially canoeing and motorcycling.

The book is marred by a lack of pictures (what did Trudeau’s pal
Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, later an eminent psychiatrist, look like
then?), and even worse, by the disastrous decision to make its nine-page
index available only on the Internet
(www.mcclelland.com/youngtrudeau/index.pdf).

But Young Trudeau is an outstanding piece of research and writing that
warrants all the praise that has been showered on it. It won the 2006
Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing.