Saved: The rolling home of the ‘Trudeau salute’
PM flipped bird from rail car as he toured B.C.
Peterborough, Ont.’s Canadian Canoe Museum has Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s buckskin jacket. Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum has his leather sandals.
But it’s only at a private museum in B.C.’s interior where, owners say, you can gaze upon the most infamous Trudeau artifact of all: the restored railcar from which the 15th prime minister flipped the bird to B.C. protesters in 1982.
The car is at Three Valley Lake Chateau, a resort just down the road from Craigellachie, site of the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
There, in the resort’s Railway Roundhouse, visitors can sample what the museum says is another piece of Canadian railway history.
Guests can even pose next to a cardboard cut-out of Trudeau where, naturally, they usually end up flipping friends the finger.
“We renovated the interior by putting in new carpet, paint and adding display items, bedding and dishes,” said Diana Bostock, a thirdgeneration owner of Three Valley Lake Chateau, writing in an email to the National Post.
The resort acquired the former governor general’s railcar in 2005, and only appears to have discovered what’s believed to be its Trudeau provenance once it had been delivered by truck from a nearby railroad stop.
“The information we have came with the car when our family purchased it in 2005,” wrote Bostock.
In 1982, Trudeau had just finished repatriating the Constitution when he decided to borrow the governor general’s train car for a summertime trip to the Rockies. Along for the ride were the Trudeau boys; Alexandre, Michel and, of course, then10-year-old Justin.
At the time, rampant inflation was kicking roughly one cent of value out of the Canadian dollar every month. Unemployment was hitting Depression-era levels in resource towns. Trudeau’s new National Energy Program was seen as a direct assault on an alreadybeleaguered Alberta energy sector.
And in recent months, Trudeau had been calling for restraint on public sector wages in order to combat inflation.
In short, the optics weren’t great for a prime minister cruising Western Canada in a luxury railcar telling locals to screw off.
In various paintings and cartoons immortalizing the event at Salmon Arm, B.C., on Aug. 8, 1982, Trudeau is usually depicted mischievously wagging his middle finger while protesters pelt the car with eggs and tomatoes.
But there were no projectiles at the first encounter between the public and the Trudeau train, just three Salmon Armers carrying signs displaying some version of “Restraint, Practice What You Preach.”
The trio were Liberal voters on strike from their government jobs, and they had rushed to the train station with only a few hours’ notice to protest what they saw as an act of indulgent hypocrisy.
Seeing the signs, a staff member began lowering the railcar’s shutters to shield the Trudeau boys from the sight. The children had “seemed amused by the situation,” reported the Salmon Arm Observer.
But the prime minister stepped forward and pulled back the shutters to take a last peek at the three protesters.
“He looked at my wife, he smiled and gave her the finger. He pushed up the other blind, looked at me and gave me the finger. He pushed the other blind up, looked at David and gave him the finger,” protester Doug Hughes later told The Canadian Press.
“It was very honest,” Hughes added.
The thrown vegetables followed soon after.
Once news emerged of Trudeau’s digitary indiscretions, his trip became a whistlestop tour of pissed off small-towners, prompting railroaders to dub their produce-splattered train “The Caesar Salad Special.”
Tomatoes thudded into the windows as the car emerged from the Connaught tunnel. Eggs rained down on the prime minister’s car outside Calgary. Whitewater rafters in the Kicking Horse River mooned the official train.
In Sudbury, 500 violent protesters subjected the train to such a withering hail of rocks and vegetables that it broke several windows.
“Trudeau Rail Car Pelted With Rocks and Food,” reported the New York Times.
Only the Ontario town of Chapleau provided some respite. There, poultry farmers banded together to present the prime minister with a gift basket of fresh eggs.
“Here are some Chapleau eggs for you. We’re not throwing them at you,” Chapleau man Ernest Lepine told the prime minister.
Now known to history as the Trudeau Salute, to supporters the prime minister’s middle finger became a symbol of his bullish approach to leadership — a view even taken by some residents of Salmon Arm.
“As a long time resident of Salmon Arm and someone acquainted with the protestors, my comment has always been that in that famous gesture Pierre Trudeau proved himself a remarkably good judge of character,” reads one 2011 post to a rail fan forum.
To critics, it became the defining image of a Quebec elitist exhibiting his contempt for the West.
Western MPs have mentioned the term “Trudeau salute” no less than 10 times in the House of Commons, usually in reference to some perceived eastern slight.
“Why has the Prime Minister broken another election promise and given Albertans the Trudeau salute one more time?” Reform MP Eric C. Lowther asked in 2000 regarding Senate selection.
With the death of protester Doug Hughes only last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remains one of the only living witnesses to an event that came to define the final months of his father’s premiership.
In a 2013 visit to the staunchly Conservative B.C. city of Kelowna, the Liberal leader said that he learned from his father that “one should always wave with all five fingers.”
HE LOOKED AT MY WIFE, HE SMILED AND GAVE HER THE FINGER ... HE GAVE ME THE FINGER.