Trudeau Albums

Penny E. Bryden is head of the Department of History at Mount Allison
University. She is the author of Planners and Politicians: Liberal
Politics and social policy, 1957–1968 and the co-author of The Welfare
State in Canada: Past, Present and Future.

This magnificent collection of photographs and essays chronicling the
life and times of Pierre Elliott Trudeau more than lives up to its
advance press as the “hottest gift book of the year.” Divided into
six sections featuring short essays by well-known observers, Trudeau
Albums presents a visual record of one of the most important Canadians
of the last century, and of the country that he shaped so profoundly.

The essayists tell partial and highly personal stories of Trudeau’s
life. J.L. Granatstein introduces us to the man who prided himself on
taking the road less traveled, but argues that in his formative years
there was relatively little that he did that was out of step with the
actions of a significant number of young Quebec reformers. Alison Gordon
shares her thoughts on being young, optimistic, and completely convinced
that Trudeau offered the country something special, a feeling
characteristic of many at the height of 1960s Trudeaumania. The sheen
soon wore off, however, and Trudeau’s handling of the FLQ crisis was
seen by many as a betrayal, an episode explored by Peter Gzowski. Anne
Kingston turns her lens to the rapid deterioration of the fairy-tale
marriage to Margaret Sinclair, while Mordecai Richler shares notes from
the constitutional battles of the early 1980s. Catharine Annau assesses
the final post-political episode of Trudeau’s life from the
perspective of someone who grew up in the Canada that it seemed Trudeau
had created. The authors are not universal in their praise of the man,
nor are they united in disdain for his approach to politics; rather,
they seem only to agree that, for good or ill, his imprint will be felt
on us as individuals and on Canada as a nation for a long time to come.

The photographs, which occupy the bulk of this book, include personal
pictures of Trudeau and his family not seen in other collections. They
also include a vast number of shots of the current events of the period,
and in this illustrate the Canada that seemed to follow the same course
as the man: a country still developing in the first half of the century,
euphoric with modernism and optimism in the 1950s and 1960s, beset with
crises both personal and public in the 1970s, but moving both
confidently and contemplatively into the next millennium.

One of the many strengths of this collection is that it was published
prior to Trudeau’s death in September 2000. Thus the commentary and
the photos are free to honestly illustrate the contradictory mixture of
emotions which produced that outpouring of national grief.