Pierre Trudeau Quotes

The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not worshipped; it is our future in which we will find our greatness.

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.

The best thing you can possibly do for a friend is to be his friend.

Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.

I've been called worse things by better people.

[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father.

There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

The Past is to be respected and acknoledged, but not to be worshiped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once said: “Living next to the Americans is like sleeping next to an elephant—no matter how friendly and even-tempered the elephant, one is affected by every twitch!

Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die. - Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Former Prime Minister of Canada

I speak of a Canada where men and women of aboriginal ancestry, of French and British heritage, of the diverse cultures of the world, demonstrate the will to share this land in peace, in justice and with mutual respect.

Construction finally began that winter, and by early 1974 Syncrude’s Mildred Lake site bustled with 1,500 construction workers. But the deal remained tentative as cost estimates grew beyond the initial $1.5 billion to $2 billion or more and the federal government’s new budget arrived with punitive new taxes for oil and gas exports. Then, in the first week of December, one of the Syncrude partners, Atlantic Richfield, summarily quit the consortium, leaving a 30 percent hole in its financing. A mad scramble ensued in search of a solution. Phone calls pinged back and forth between government officials in Edmonton and Ottawa. Finally, on the morning of February 3, 1975, executives from the Syn-crude partner companies and cabinet ministers from the Alberta, Ontario and federal governments met without fanfare and outside the media’s brightest spotlights at an airport hotel in Winnipeg to negotiate a deal to save the project. Lougheed and Ontario premier Bill Davis both attended, along with their energy ministers. Federal mines minister Donald Macdonald represented Pierre Trudeau’s government, accompanied by Trudeau’s ambitious Treasury Board president, Jean Chrétien. Macdonald and Davis, both Upper Canadian patricians in the classic mould, were put off by Lougheed’s blunt style. By midday, the Albertans were convinced Macdonald would not be willing to compromise enough to reach a deal. Rumours in Lougheed’s camp after the fact had it that over lunch, Chrétien persuaded the mines minister to accept the offer on the table. Two days later, Chrétien rose in the House of Commons to announce that the federal government would be taking a 15 percent equity stake in the Syn-crude project, with Alberta owning 10 percent and Ontario the remaining 5 percent. In the coming years, it would be Lougheed, with his steadfast support and multimillion-dollar investments in SAGD, who would be seen as the Patch’s great public sector champion. But it was Chrétien, “the little guy from Shawinigan,” whose backroom deal-making skills had saved Syncrude

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses.

The stars aligned for Justin Trudeau in the last few weeks of the campaign. "Ultimately, voters opted for a change of government. If the Liberals hadn't done all their work. the NDP would have won the election. Anyway, the strongest desire felt by voters was to get rid of the Conservatives," says pollster Jean-Marc Leger. In Quebec, Trudeau exceeded all expectations by winning 40 of the province's 78 seats. Vote-splitting by the NDP and the Bloc handed victory to the Liberals in several Quebec ridings. The last time the Liberals had made that many gains was in 1980 when Pierre Elliot Trudeau won 74 of the province's 75 seats. The Liberals swept the four Atlantic provinces, a historical first. The party won all 32 seats there, in strongholds where the Conservatives were well established. The Liberal game plan - whatever its shortcomings - had what it took to get the Liberal Party of Canada from third place to victory in a single election. This was another historical first. "To turn a situation like that around the way Trudeau did is exceptional," says Jean-Marc Leger. "There was a desire for him to succeed, and he did succeed." For Justin Trudeau, the Trudeau name had long been both an asset and a liability. The son had inherited his father's old party but now he had rebuilt it in his own image. He had run his campaign his way. This was his victory, and his alone.

Just watch me.

A sin it may be, he held, but a crime it is not. Sin is to be settled with God; crimes are the concern of Caesar.

I beat up Pierre's son (an eventual prime minister himself) Justin Trudeau.

The two Trudeaus share not only a famous surname. There is an essential Pierre characteristic that I have noticed emerging in Justin, as I have watched him blossom into manhood. No matter what he did, in office or out, Pierre never failed to exercise his ultimate civil liberty: the right to be himself. Justin is cast in precisely the identical mould. As heir to that magnificent tradition, he will try to repeat history and reach for the top. Anything can happen—just watch him. 

All the reasons people give me why I shouldn’t be leader”—the long odds, the shattered aura of inevitability, the pressure from Conservatives and New Democrats consciously executing a squeeze play against the Liberals from either side—“those are the very reasons that make the whole idea tremendously exciting to me.” And on top of everything else, there’s the tantalizing prospect of a chance to do something even his father never accomplished, if only because nobody in his father’s generation ever had to. “Whatever else he did, Pierre Trudeau was not a re-inventor of the Liberal Party.

Ideology Fidel Castro was considered an ideologue by many. His fanaticism was always a continuing animosity towards the United States, while at the same time working to increase his good relationship with most left leaning Latin American countries. However, there have been times when out of necessity he had a tacit understanding with the United States. On September 11, 2001, Fidel Castro offered Cuban airports as emergency landing places, when all American aircraft were diverted from their primary destinations and ordered to land immediately, after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. On another occasion he accepted a one-time purchase of food after Category 4 Hurricane Michelle struck the island that same year. Once, he declined a U.S. Government offer of humanitarian aid turning to Canada instead. Castro continued having close relations with Canada and demonstrated this friendship when he attended Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in the fall of the year 2000. It was a way that he could retain contact with the western world without becoming involved with the United States.

We met in 1976, at a high school dance. It was the era of Pierre Trudeau and glam rock and the Sex Pistols. He was the boy from out of town. I was the girl who wanted out. Like young people of every generation, we thought nonconformity and the acquisition of authentic wounds to be essential to our freedom. Our scars were there, waiting inside us, scars of disease and damage, bur we didn't yet know how they might undo us.

There is an old Arabian saying,” mentioned Khashoggi. “Every sun has to set.” At Holden’s invitation, the Saudi billionaire and his family spent the 1977 New Year’s holiday at the club, which he purchased the next year. After Khashoggi bought the club, he invited Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Hollywood teenage star Brooke Shields to visit him. Clearly, some of Holden’s influence had rubbed off on him.

He often told me the story that Trudeau called him on Christmas Eve 1971 and asked if John and his wife, Geills, would take Margaret and him to a midnight mass, something the Turners always attended at Christmas. They agreed and drove there together. Turner said it was a wonderful evening of friendship and prayer. He never forgot it because of what else happened just a few hours later. Not long after they dropped the Trudeaus off at 24 Sussex, Margaret and Pierre headed to the hospital where Justin was born on Christmas Day.

Kotcheff recalled after a northern trek with Trudeau. “He was by far the best dish-washer, fire-maker and camp organizer. He put some of us to shame.… Not only was he fit, he turned out to be one of the best canoeists and sternsmen in the group. If anyone succumbed to the elements, it wouldn’t be Pierre.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in an essay a quarter century before he became Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, “is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.