Word: trudeau
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Once housed in the Prime Minister's residence, Trudeau continued to cavort in public. He stunned staid pols by sliding down banisters and squiring young women to chic discothèques. After a secret courtship came his 1971 marriage-since failed, amid excessive publicity-to Margaret Sinclair, then...
...playboy veneer concealed keen political vision. Jesuit-educated, Trudeau frequently quoted "reason over passion" as a maxim and often applied it in reconciling the longstanding divisions between Canada's anglophone majority and the French-descended minority concentrated in his home province of Quebec. In one of his finest hours, Trudeau argued successfully for passage of the Official Languages Act of 1969, which effectively established bilingualism as national policy...
...Although Trudeau built a reputation as a civil libertarian, he also proved willing to use force if reason failed. In 1970 Trudeau became the first Prime Minister in history to invoke Canada's War Measures Act in peacetime, sending the army into the streets of Montreal and Quebec City to deal with terrorist kidnapings by the separatist Front de Libération du Québec By 1975 Trudeau's reputation as a powerful leader had dimmed. In the 1979 election his Liberals lost to the Conservatives; six months later he announced that he was stepping down...
...short-lived decision. When the government of Tory Prime Minister Joe Clark fell soon thereafter, the phoenix-like Trudeau was back in power again. In short order he defeated efforts by Quebec Premier René Lévesque to win a referendum on negotiations toward independence for the province. Then, in what may prove to be his most profound achievement, Trudeau overrode powerful opposition from several provincial factions to win a revamping of Canada's constitution, including the addition of a charter of civil rights. More recently, he embarked on a well-meant but unsuccessful campaign to ease East...
Those initiatives, however, were not enough to offset voters' growing weariness. In January a Gallup poll found that only 32% of the electorate favored the Liberals, with 52% for Mulroney's Conservatives. After Trudeau's resignation was announced, the Toronto stock market rocketed 16 points. In Washington, where differences of style and ideology with Trudeau have grown pronounced under Ronald Reagan, there were also sighs of relief...