The night the RCMP secretly kept an eye on Trudeau

He was almost a decade away from becoming prime minister but the two RCMP constables on surveillance duty that January night seemed to have no difficulty recognizing Pierre Trudeau, even if they misspelled his name. The Mounties in the shadows diligently noted he was among eight people who entered a Montreal home in the early evening 60 years ago this Wednesday. A four-page RCMP memo says Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the constable who wrote up the report omitted the second ‘t’ in Elliott) arrived at the home of artist Jean Palardy, who lived in an apartment not far from Mount Royal.

The declassified, though still heavily censored, memo provides a glimpse into the workings of the national police force’s attentive Cold War security apparatus. The RCMP would later keep a watchful eye over Trudeau, who became prime minister in 1968, to protect him from harm. They would also become wellacquainted with his children, including young Justin, who followed in his father’s political footsteps.

But on Jan. 16, 1959, the Mounties secretly took note of the 39-year-old Trudeau’s presence at the Friday gathering of prominent members of the era’s cultural intelligentsia.

The future Liberal leader was then a university lecturer and public intellectual, playing a key role in the influential journal Cite Libre. Just days earlier, a plaster cast had been removed from the leg he’d broken in a skiing accident.

The Canadian Press obtained the RCMP memo, filed under “Revolutionary & Subversive Activities - Montreal, Quebec,” from Library and Archives Canada through the Access to Information Act.

It was among hundreds of pages the force’s security branch compiled on another Quebec luminary, Rene Levesque, who would become Trudeau’s prime foil in the national-unity battles to come.