Citizen Trudeau: An Intellectual Biography, 1944–1965 by Allen Mills (review)

Citizen Trudeau offers a formidable addition to the wider literature on Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s intellectual formation between 1944 and 1965, a period bookended by the winding down of his formal education and his joining of the federal Liberal Party. While much has been written about Trudeau, Allen Mills provides a take that is unrivalled in terms of its analytical depth and rigour.

Mills’s project holds a unique place in the Trudeau historiography, which has undergone numerous evolutions, the biggest being after his passing in 2000, when his files became open to researchers. Multi-volume projects by John English, on the one hand, and Max and Monique Nemni, on the other, added new dimensions to our understanding of Trudeau. In this sense, Mills is not the first to give us an extensive study of Trudeau in his pre-political life, though this does not diminish his contribution. Whereas English and the Nemnis produced well-researched books with a narrative structure, Mills offers a more analytical intellectual history, with a deeper focus on the ideas that Trudeau digested. He thus provides an indispensable addition to the Trudeau historiography, giving readers a consistent plumbing of the philosophical literature swirling around Trudeau during this era, even if this approach makes the book far less accessible to non-academic audiences and sometimes obscures the argument Mills makes.

Essentially, the book’s core assertion is that Trudeau was a man who, from the end of the Second World War onward, embraced a practical social democracy that he would eventually apply via the Liberal Party. But Trudeau chose the Liberal Party not because it reflected his socialism but, rather, because it was the only feasible route to political power: “It is quite possible to believe that when Trudeau joined the Liberal Party in 1965 he did so not as newly enlightened liberal . . . but as a socialist of a social democratic sort who saw no better course of action to achieve his beliefs” (246). Ultimately, Mills conveys the influence leftist intellectuals like Harold Laski, Frank Scott, and Eugene Forsey had on Trudeau and how he grew to become an integral part of a Canadian social democracy that, while not anti-capitalist, has a healthy scepticism of inequality and market idolatry.

I am not convinced by this thesis, and I feel that Mills’s findings – though expertly presented – actually make the case that Trudeau must be understood as a consistent small-l liberal. Trudeau’s ties to labour and the left, for instance, do not constitute evidence of socialism. Rather, it is evidence that among socialists and trade unionists Trudeau found defenders of liberal freedoms. Prior to 1960, the Liberals – as Trudeau himself noted – largely enabled Maurice Duplessis’s assault on civil liberty, while the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and labour resisted these infringements. Trudeau’s alignment with the Labour Left was instrumental, because it provided key support in his desire to promote liberal democracy. When those movements opposed Trudeau’s liberal goals, as they often did from 1956 until his retirement in 1984, he greeted them as foes.

Similarly, wanting constraints on markets and private property does not make one a socialist. Even Conservatives like Sir John A Macdonald and the Hydro Ontario-creating James Whitney believed that capitalism and private property functioned best when guided and constrained by public initiatives. Trudeau felt much the same, and neither he, Macdonald, or Whitney were socialists; they were capitalists who knew that pure laissez-faire approaches made for a weak and unstable capitalist class. Trudeau desired qualifications on capitalism to stabilize class relations and ensure a modern environment within which capitalists would profit through higher productivity and market liberalization.

Mills concludes by suggesting that Trudeau led the Liberal Party as a “consistent party of the left” (440). But this claim reaches beyond the book’s scope and ignores how Trudeau’s wage and price controls violated rights to strike and bargain collectively, how the Canadian Charter on Rights and...