Trudeau

Abstract

For the first time in 11 years, Trudeau was not the prime minister of Canada. Feeling it necessary to get “back to the basics” and with no more official papers to read or letters to sign, he took the summer off “to rest and reflect.” He took an arduous canoe trip in the Northwest Territories, “indulging once again the love of canoeing I have had all my life, paddling all day for a week with men twenty to thirty years younger.” Together with his three sons, he then went out west to the Rockies by train to visit the national parks. And in September he was off to Tibet, growing a beard in the process. The summer of 1979, he recalled, was really “the first time since 1968 I was free to do what I wanted,” and he relished his newly found independence.1