Pierre Trudeau

Pierre Trudeau

Pierre Trudeau served as prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984. Born to an affluent Montreal family on October 18, 1919, he was educated at Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite Jesuit preparatory school, received a law degree from the University of Montreal, and studied at Harvard University, the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and the London School of Economics. During a brief teaching career, he acted as the assistant professor of law at the University of Montreal from 1961 to 1965.

His 1965 election to the Canadian House of Commons marked the beginning of his ascendancy in Canadian politics. Lester B. Pearson appointed him parliamentary secretary in 1966 and then minister of justice and attorney general. Trudeau won the passage of social welfare reform measures regarding gun control, abortion, and homosexuality.

As the leader of the Liberal Party, he became the prime minister in 1968, largely due to his opposition to the Quebec separatist group Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). In 1972 his Liberal Party was weakened, possessing a minority of seats in the House of Commons, and relied on the support of the New Democratic Party (NDP) to pass its agenda.


Trudeau struggled against economic and domestic problems throughout the 1970s. In 1979 Trudeau lost his position as prime minister to the Progressive Conservative Party; he regained power in the election of 1980, beginning his fourth term on March 3 of that year. His administration witnessed the defeat of a referendum in May 1980 on the separation of Quebec.

Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister includes his successfully patriating the Canadian Constitution from the British Parliament, an act that gave Canada the power to amend the document without the need to seek the approval of the British Crown.

He had included a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guaranteed certain civil liberties, in the constitution that year. Sensitive to the linguistic preferences of Francophone Canadians, he passed laws that made Canada an officially bilingual nation and used his office to support multiculturalism.

Trudeau at the Liberal convention after winning the leadership

Canadian journalists named Trudeau the top Canadian newsmaker of the 20th century in 1999. In 1971, at age 51, he married 22-year-old Vancouver socialite Margaret Sinclair. Their union, which produced three children and was the subject of enormous press coverage, ended in divorce in 1984.

Trudeau’s works include Federalism and the French Canadians, Approaches to Politics, and Conversations with Canadians. Pierre Trudeau, the 15th Canadian prime minister, died on September 28, 2000.

Quebec Sovereignty Movement

Canadian history has been plagued by issues of national identity since 1763, when Britain conquered New France in the French and Indian War. Britain’s Québec Act of 1774 recognized the rights of French-speaking Roman Catholics.

The British North America Act of 1867, the basis for Canada’s constitution, is premised on a doctrine of "two founding nations" in which the English-speaking and French-speaking cultures are recognized as equal partners.

Because the two national identities exist in a country that has traditionally favored Anglophones, Quebec (Québec), the heart of Francophone Canada, and its leaders have tried to assert their nationalism as a distinct cultural community within Canada.

The modern sovereignty movement is a product of the 1960s. It is a demand for political independence for Quebec combined with economic association with the rest of Canada. It was introduced by René Lévesque, a former Liberal cabinet minister and popular broadcast journalist who organized the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968. PQ gained support when the 1969 Official Languages Act seemed to trivialize Quebec’s demand for special status.

In the October Crisis of 1970, a radical fringe group called the Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s minister of labor and immigration. Quebec soon asked the Canadian armed forces to intervene, and the next day the federal government banned the FLQ under the War Measures Act.

Laporte’s body was found October 17, and a group holding Cross released him in return for safe passage to Cuba in early December. A federal inquiry later ruled that the suspension of normal civil liberties had been illegal.

In 1976, the PQ gained control of Quebec’s government and promised to consult the people of Quebec before taking any steps toward independence and secession. Four years later, majority-French provincial voters soundly rejected a referendum to authorize sovereignty negotiations with Ottawa.

Even so, the PQ was reelected in 1981, and in 1982 it refused to accept the new Canadian constitution. When the PQ removed sovereignty-association from its party platform in 1985, the Liberal Party regained control of the Quebec assembly.

Reorganized under the leadership of former finance minister Jacques Parizeau, the PQ again promised to declare Quebec independent after the voters of Quebec voted oui in a referendum.

The Meech Lake Accord, which agreed to conditions that Quebec had placed on its acceptance of the national constitution, collapsed in 1990 due to opposition. A subsequent package of constitutional reforms, presented to voters in a 1992 national referendum, was also defeated.

By 1994 the Bloc Québécois, a national party devoted to Quebec sovereignty, had won enough votes to become the official opposition party in Ottawa. Another sovereignty referendum in 1995 lost narrowly.

Canada was startled in November 2006 when Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper proposed a resolution, passed overwhelmingly by Parliament, stating that the 7 million "Québécois form a nation within a united Canada". Although this recognition was called "symbolic", it was unclear whether it might spark a renewed push for Quebec’s independence.

Canada Nunavut Territory

As early as 1963, some natives of Canada’s Northwest Territories began agitating for greater autonomy within a nation where the vast majority live within 200 miles of the U.S. border. In particular the eastern Inuit (formerly called Eskimos) sought to control more aspects of their Arctic lives above the tree line.

Not until 1999 was Nunavut ("our land" in the Inuktitut language) separated from other northern territories by an act of Parliament. On April 1, 1999, the Territory of Nunavut was born with Iqaluit, a city of 6,000, as its capital.

Canada’s creation of Nunavut was a dramatic example of the growing awareness of indigenous rights in several nations. As in the United States, where Native Americans began rallying for recognition and respect, creating the American Indian Movement, aboriginal groups in Australia and Canada’s 630 officially recognized "First Nations" likewise began demanding greater self-determination. In 1973 after a long period of refusing to abide by most treaty rights, Canada changed course and signed six major treaties, including Nunavut’s.

Straddling the Arctic Circle, and including Ellesmere and Baffin islands and Cape Dorset—a center of Inuit indigenous art—Nunavut has a population of 29,500, 80 percent of it Inuit, in 26 settlements spread across 770,000 square miles, a fifth of Canada’s total land mass.


Most of this vast territory is inaccessible by road or rail; everything arrives, expensively, by air. The government of Nunavut, whose first premier was lawyer Paul Okalik, oversees an annual budget of about $500 million (U.S.), more than $18,000 per resident. About 84 percent comes from the federal government in Ottawa.

Prior to the 1950s most Inuit were still leading traditional lives based on hunting and fishing. The cold war changed that. In an agreement with Canada, the United States built the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line, a system of radar installations designed to detect Soviet invasion across the North Pole.

Although the DEW Line was useless against nuclear submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles, it remained in place for 30 years. In 1985 Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a new defense agreement. Abandoned DEW Line installations littered the Arctic landscape, in some cases leaching PCBs and industrial solvents into the ground.

Around the same time as the DEW Line’s installation, Canada’s government began to move Inuit families into permanent settlements where they were offered health care, education, and other services, but at a price. Their new lifestyle pushed many Inuit communities from subsistence hunting to fur trapping for the cash needed to buy newly available "southern" goods.

Reliable sources of income remain scarce in Nunavut, although mining, fisheries, tourism, and cultural products are being aggressively explored. The Internet plays a significant role, allowing Nunavut’s widely separated citizens to communicate with each other and the world via expensive satellite hookups that leaders hope to replace with fiber-optic installations.

The emergence of global warming patterns in the Arctic poses both threats and opportunities. Some believe that the storied Northwest Passage, now frozen most of the year, will soon be navigable in summer, cutting almost 5,000 miles from a sea voyage between Europe and Asia.

Nunavut’s government has discussed building a deepwater port and a 185-mile all-season road. On the other hand, climate change would likely further endanger Inuit ecology and traditions of self-sufficiency.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trilateral trade pact among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Implemented on January 1, 1994, the agreement is intended to foster open and unrestricted commercial relations among its three signatories.

Supplemental agreements, also part of NAFTA, are the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), and the Understanding on Emergency Action (Safeguards). Administered in the United States by the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, NAFTA is one of several regional trading blocs in the Western Hemisphere.

These include the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, among Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, f. 1969); the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM, f. 1973), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR, among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay, f. 1991), and the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, f. 2004).

NAFTA’s supporters conceive of the agreement as an important stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include the 34 nation-states and territories of the Western Hemisphere.

In its goal of fostering unrestricted commercial relations, NAFTA follows the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

NAFTA has sparked a huge debate between its supporters and opponents. Its principal supporters in the private sector consist of the hemisphere’s largest corporations, most of which are based in the United States.

They argue that in all three countries NAFTA will increase living standards, create new jobs, protect the environment; and ensure compliance with labor laws. Its principal opponents include labor, environmental, faith-based, indigenous rights, and consumer rights groups.

They maintain that NAFTA, like the WTO, promotes a "race to the bottom" by favoring large corporations over smaller enterprises, benefiting the rich more than the poor; increasing inequality, causing a net loss of jobs, fostering environmental degradation, and failing to adequately protect the rights of workers.

The communiqués of sub-commander Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—a group whose rebellion against the Mexican government was timed to coincide with NAFTA’s implementation—convey many of the principal arguments of NAFTA’s opponents.

A large scholarly literature mirrors this debate. On the whole, the evidence demonstrates that NAFTA has increased trade dramatically while failing to meet its supporters’ expectations with regard to employment, poverty, inequality, the environment, and labor rights. In Mexico, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all increased substantially since NAFTA’s implementation.

In the United States and Canada, the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with the outflows of capital and jobs traceable to NAFTA. The leftward tilt in Latin American politics since the 1990s has buttressed that continent’s opposition to multilateral trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed FTAA.