LOVE, POLITICS, TRUDEAU, OUR BABY AND ME
STAR EXCLUSIVE E-BOOK EXCERPT
In her new memoir, Deborah Coyne presents an intimate account of her relationship with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, the father of Coyne’s federal Liberal leadership rival Justin. Complete with rare family photos, it’s a glimpse into Trudeau’s world that has stayed strictly private — until now.
In December 1985, I decided to send Pierre a copy of my NorthSouth Institute publication and update him on what I was doing. Given my interest in and involvement with the Liberal Party, I was curious to hear his perspective on the party’s current state as well as on the often-contentious federal-provincial relations with Quebec. Although we hadn’t been in touch since 1980 and had only a little indirect contact when the PMO helped me get accredited to attend the North-South Summit in Cancun, I figured he’d remember me, the daughter of family friends with astrong interest in government and constitutional issues.
I was pleased when he replied and suggested lunch in Montreal sometime. As it happened, I was going to Montreal on some Insurance Task Force business.
We arranged to meet and, over lunch, we talked about my experience at Oxford and about NorthSouth relations. When we moved on to my various post-university jobs, it became evident that Pierre was not especially enthralled with two of my previous employers, John Turner and Tom d’Aquino. We talked a bit about constitutional matters, especially about the impact of the charter and equality rights. He was interested in my perception of the patriation debate from my vantage point at that time, England. At one point, he chuckled and remarked on how much he owed to two strong women, Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher, for fending off the neo-colonialists in London.
He also said that, despite his commitment to staying out of active politics for two years, he had been asked for advice by the newly elected Liberal government in Quebec on how it should negotiate its formal adherence to the 1982 Constitution. He thought that Quebec should have an effective constitutional veto over future changes — the point that PQ leader René Lévesque had been willing to accept in 1981— but acknowledged that many Quebec Liberals feared that it was insufficient to fend off the separatists. Much of that was new to me, since I’d not closely followed the drama surrounding the final negotiations that led to patriation in 1982. The Meech Lake accord was still more than two years away, and at that time there were no signs that the Mulroney government was looking at constitutional negotiations of any kind. I was mainly interested in how Canada was adjusting to the charter and the Liberal Opposition’s ineffectiveness in dealing with some of Mulroney’s more conservative policies.
In the months to come in 1986, that lunch led to other lunches and one night to dinner with Pierre and his sons. Once, when I was in Montreal to attend a friend’s wedding, our route to the reception went right past his house on Avenue des Pins. Coincidentally, he was arriving home at that moment. I said nothing to my companions in the car because I’d kept my friendship with Pierre private, with the exception of my closest friends, Paul and Mary Jane Torrie. At the reception, though, I found myself wanting to leave, walk up the street, and visit with him rather than wait until our scheduled lunch the following day.
Returning to Toronto, I thought about how intensely I missed Pierre’s company between visits. I’d always been a true romantic, believing I would instantly know when I met the right person, my kindred spirit. At that time, I was 30 and had yet to meet my soulmate. So, one day, I called him and initiated an awkward conversation, telling him how I felt and how I was struggling to come to grips with what seemed like an absurd situation, surely condemned by the difference in our ages, if nothing else. After all, Pierre was 67 at the time, although he was single, having divorced Margaret two years earlier.
He was characteristically calm when he heard what I had to say and simply suggested that I come to Montreal so that we could discuss it. Instead of lunch, we went to his chalet outside Morin Heights in the Laurentian Mountains an hour northwest of Montreal and talked openly about our feelings and our personal circumstances. Pierre was frank, both about the mutual attraction and the reality that I was interested in a more intense relationship than he could provide at that stage in his life. I know he wanted to reassure himself that in no sense was he taking advantage of me. He was not. I understood him perfectly well.
However, I had to make one significant decision. I didn’t want Pierre — or anyone else, for that matter — thinking that I was only interested in him to bolster my political ambitions. So I decided not to pursue a run for the nomination in the Beaches riding, despite the fact that Don Brown, my former Blake, Cassels colleague and a strong Liberal, had already sent out fundraising letters soliciting funds to support my run. I requested that Don return the contributions we’d received. As for the reason, all I told Don and Pierre was that I felt that, at 31, I wasn’t quite ready. Pierre reassured me, saying, “Well, Debbie, I didn’t get elected until I was almost 50.” (I would ironically think back to that comment as I finally prepared, in 2005, to accept my first nomination as a Liberal candidate shortly after my 50th birthday.) As my relationship with Pierre developed through 1986, we began spending more time together, mainly weekends at the chalet when the boys were with Margaret in Ottawa. He made it clear from the beginning that the boys were his first priority and that remarriage was out of the question, although he also said that he regretted he wasn’t 20 years younger because there might have been a different outcome. Ever the rational man, he was more realistic than I was about our age difference. He urged me not to give up on the idea of meeting someone else, drawing a distinction between loving and being in love. Pierre was also keenly aware that he was treated like a celebrity. He told me he was surprised that anyone would want to go out with him, since the media speculated on his every move. We had much in common: a love of travel and that particular solitude one finds in the wilderness; a fascination with international politics; an enthusiasm for theatre and films. We often used Pierre’s lifetime pass at Cineplex theatres to see a movie, or sometimes a “double-header” (two movies, one in the afternoon and a second in the evening). We both considered cinema to be a window on society because directors were often ahead of political commentators and the media. Some of the international films we especially enjoyed were those of the French Nouvelle Vague movement — by Truffaut, Malle, and Resnais. These filmmakers were concerned with historical memory and social context, which fueled many long, enjoyable conversations afterwards. We talked about the causes and effects of revolution, the need for counterweights in any power structure, the protection of human rights, the role of government, and public action in pursuing greater equality. Pierre was very much a part of the arts and culture milieu. (Among many other things, he was a good friend of Canadian film director Norman Jewison and, for at least one season, on the jury for the Montreal International Film Festival.) Together we attended such events as the opening of the Livent production of Macbeth, starring Chris- topher Plummer, and a special screening of films by the Czech director Jiri Menzel, whose dark comedy, My Sweet Little Village, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. One memorable night out we saw a dance performance by Margie and Christopher Gillis, which included Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses. Pierre would occasionally comment on, and was sensitive to, the contrast between the emotional fragility of so many of his artistic friends and what he saw as my fierce independence and emotional stability. We didn’t always agree, of course. We argued over why the federal government didn’t intervene in the infamous Churchill Falls hydro agreement, giving Quebec longterm access to discount-priced power from Newfoundland and Labrador. Signed decades earlier by Premier Joey Smallwood, it was an awful financial deal for Newfoundland. Pierre was sympathetic but always said he had to bow to the political imperatives of Quebec. He
“I didn’t have much interaction with his sons beyond a couple of family dinners. Pierre first introduced me to them as someone who knew their mother.” FROM DEBORAH COYNE’S “UNSCRIPTED”
would get very defensive when we talked about the occasional need for a government to act forcefully in a democracy, as in the October Crisis. Insisting that former Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa was so agitated about the events that he demanded that the federal government invoke the War Measures Act, Pierre remembered the opposition he faced among the ranks of respected human rights academics, including my former Osgoode professor, Walter Tarnopolsky. He admitted that he was thankful that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms now existed to provide some guidance in future crises. It was at Pierre’s chalet outside Morin Heights that we shared the solitude that so calmed both of us. We witnessed stunning displays of northern lights above the lake he named Jusami, after his three sons, Justin, Sacha (Alexandre), and Michel. Inside the winterized house built by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, we usually reheated prepared meals in a microwave, most of them made by the couple who ran Pierre’s house in Montreal. While both Pierre and I distrusted microwaves (he had a gadget that measured any microwave leakage), our mutual disinterest in anything but the most basic cooking meant we used the microwave anyway. In the winter, we skied and snowshoed, and one winter cut down his family’s Christmas tree. Once we even got lost in a blizzard in frigid temperatures — a harrowing experience. In the summer, we swam, canoed, and hiked (sabotaging beaver dams that stopped the flow of water between the lakes), conducted controlled burnings, and confronted trespassing hunters and fishermen and asked them to leave.
Pierre loved both chocolate and popcorn. Among the gifts he regularly received were superb chocolates from a visiting Middle Eastern politician and, one Christmas, chocolate-flavoured toothpaste. In 1988, after acquiring Bloomingdale’s as part of his Federated Department Stores acquisition, developer and financier Robert Campeau sent Pierre a cubic metre of Bloomingdale’s popcorn.
I didn’t have much interaction with his sons beyond a couple of family dinners. Pierre first introduced me to them as someone who knew their mother. He wanted them to meet me and not feel that I was a threatening presence in any way. Since I had started teaching at the U of T Law School that summer, he explained that I was a law teacher, as he himself had once been.
I would have settled down with Pierre, even married him, but he had a life that involved both numerous public commitments, even at that later stage of his life, and his family. He wasn’t prepared to commit to anything. We never intended to have children. At his age, and with the three sons he was so proud of, he understandably didn’t see having another child in his future. He was also extraordinarily busy. In one letter he wrote to me on November 5, 1990, he listed his upcoming itinerary:
“. . . As for me, in spite of my efforts, things are becoming rather hectic. Tonight I have to make an appearance at the Authors Awards. Wednesday a benefit for the Writers’ Development Trust. Friday I fly to London for some days at Sheik Yamani’s Center for Global Energy Studies. From there a couple of days of wine tasting in the Bordelais. Return to Montreal on Saturday the 17th, then to New York on the 20th to meet a group from New Perspectives Quarterly. In Paris from November 26th to the 30th with Power Corporation’s International Advisory Council . . . ”
Given the circumstances, I understood and accepted the way things had to be. Our relationship together was no less significant or meaningful, just because it was unconventional.
Tomorrow: Motherhood