pierre trudeau really, really loved communists | canada did what?!
he covered up famines for red china, and wasn't all that pleased with ukrainian independence
26 minute read
fidel castro and pierre elliott trudeau.
courtesy of kevin tierney
every democratic leader gets accused of being either a communist or a nazi at some point. but canada really did have a prime minister who was unashamed about his love for communist regimes, from china to the u.s.s.r. to cuba. pierre trudeau regularly took their side during the cold war and befriended their brutal dictators. he’s frequently voted one of canada’s best prime ministers but we’re going to show you pierre trudeau’s little-known dark side. and boy is it dark. listen to the first episode of canada did what?!, subscribe for future episodes and read the transcript below.
canada did what?! is a postmedia podcast that digs into the untold, surprising political stories of the last few decades with host tristin hopper. from the metric wars to morgentaler, from the october crisis to the abortion debate, we’re unpacking all the wildest political moments you might think you remember — and giving you the real story you never knew. we talk to the politicians, journalists and newsmakers who were right there when history happened. and we have a lot of fun doing it.
from march 4 until april 1, national post will release one episode every tuesday. each episode tackles a misunderstood moment in recent canadian history.
advertisement
for the next episode, get ready for a wild story featuring angry farmers, lawbreaking butchers, constitutional lawsuits, a “freedom” gallons-only gas station. you can listen to all five episodes, as they come out, on all the major podcast platforms.
subscribe to canada did what?! on your favourite podcast app.
canada did what?! episode 1 transcript
tristin hopper: here’s something you learn if you hang around canadian politicians too often: everyone loves pierre trudeau. obviously, liberals do. he kept them in power for 15 years, and then gave them a son who put them in power for another 10 years. if you go to liberal party events, you may still see people dressing up like pierre trudeau; lapel roses, floppy hats and the occasional cape. but even among conservatives, a lot of them went through a pierre trudeau phase. former conservative prime minister stephen harper certainly did; he liked trudeau so much that in high school he became a member of the young liberals. jason kenney – one of harper’s most trusted lieutenants and the founder of alberta’s united conservative party – also spent his adolescence as a trudeau fanboy.
and even in a canada where most of us do not remember pierre trudeau as prime minister, whenever there’s a poll about best prime ministers, pierre trudeau is always in the top five, if not number one. so, we’re going to an entire episode relentlessly tearing down the reputation of pierre trudeau. any prime minister is going to have a bunch of things in their record that have yielded mixed opinions over the years: they ran up debt, they didn’t run up enough debt, they alienated alberta and quebec, they didn’t alienate alberta and quebec enough. but we’re not going to bother litigating a bunch of “he said, she said” points on 1970s domestic policy. in this podcast, we’re only going to go deep on the absolutely shocking and catastrophic stuff, and there’s a lot of it. making friends with mass murderers. tacitly endorsing arctic slave colonies. that one time he actively helped to run interference on the deadliest famine in human history. every prime minister has a dark side. but if you do just a little bit of digging, you’ll very quickly learn that pierre trudeau had one hell of a dark side.
advertisement
in 1960, a montreal law professor and union activist named pierre elliott trudeau publishes a co-authored book about communist china. it’s called deux innocents en chine rouge. that’s french for two innocents in red china. trudeau is not a politician at this point – he’s not even a liberal. he wouldn’t join that party until 1965; before then he’d mostly been associated with the ndp. the book gets just a passing mention in the press, and the author is referred to as “montreal man pierre trudeau.” otherwise, nobody really notices the book at the time. it’s essentially self-published, and it’s not going to have an english translation until trudeau becomes a household name. the book’s co-author is journalist jacques hebert, and deux innocents en chine rouge got released mainly because hebert ran his own publishing house specializing in controversial left-wing titles.
but if you had picked up this book in 1960, you would have read an unadorned paean to chinese communism. hebert and trudeau had come to china on the invitation of beijing, and for six weeks they were given a grand tour of a country in the “full swing of their industrial revolution,” as they put it. humming factories. schools filled with happy children. peaceful villages. freedom of religion and thought. this episode features one of the very few published canadian political authors who will agree to appear in an entire podcast episode bashing pierre trudeau. fortunately, he’s also quite a good author.
advertisement
bob plamondon: i’m bob plamondon. i’m the author of the truth about trudeau. the chinese government took note of trudeau curiosity and susceptibility to communist propaganda and invited — they invited 100 canadians to come over and visit china. only two accepted.
hopper: there’s just one problem: trudeau had visited the people’s republic of china during the deadliest famine in human history. it’s one of the deadliest single events ever. it’s the reason that when you look at lists of history’s worst mass murderers, right at the top is chinese dictator mao zedong. from 1958 to 1962 mao lead china through the great leap forward. although pitched as a program of rapid industrialization and economic growth, the great leap forward was a series of utterly unworkable economic plans enforced at the point of a gun. peasants were forced into communes and ordered to undertake completely fanciful strategies to boost food production, such as seeding their crops in ridiculously deep furrows, or attempting to eradicate sparrows. it didn’t take long until the entire chinese food system was shattered, and whole regions of china had nothing to eat.
frank dikötter, a historian of the great chinese famine, has said that nobody survived this period without resorting to something they weren’t proud of, be it theft, corruption or cannibalism. trudeau and hebert were walking through a landscape of suffering unlike anything ever seen, and they were being shown an intricately choreographed potemkin village in which food was plentiful, quotas were being exceeded and the economy was on track to overtake the west. they even hint at this deception in the book. minders who never left their side. nervous presenters who they suspect are lying to them. a surreal feeling that nothing is quite as it seems. they write in a conclusion that “skeptics may well tell us these are false fronts.”
advertisement
but they immediately declare that, no, what they saw was real, and any claims to the contrary are racist. the idea of an impoverished red china, they write, is a “legend invented by the westerner to ease his conscience for relegating this nation to the status of coolies.” two innocents in china says explicitly that reports of a great chinese famine are a right-wing lie, or a fabrication of chinese nationalists in taiwan. if the country was to experience any food shortages, trudeau and hebert write that communism means that fewer people would risk starvation, because “there will be fewer financial sharks to speculate in misery.” one of the most disgraced names in the history of western journalism is a guy named walter duranty. he was a moscow-based correspondent for the new york times at the time of the ukrainian famine; which you may know as the holodomor.
the holodomor was a period between 1932 and 1933 in which the soviet government forcibly removed food from rebellious regions of what is now ukraine, causing a famine that killed as many as five million. there’s about a dozen memorials to it across canada. duranty obtained infamy by filing a series of dispatches to the new york times uncritically parroting soviet claims that everything in the ukraine was fine. “conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in one. but don’t take my word for it. here’s an archival interview with one of duranty’s journalist peers.
advertisement
peer: ‘not only the greatest lie among the journalists in moscow, but he was the greatest love any journalist that i’ve ever met in the 50 years of journalism.’
hopper: trudeau did not have the reach of walter duranty. basically nobody read two innocents in red china and it didn’t really have any effect on how westerners viewed communist china. but it’s not unfair to note the parallels between their stories. a sympathetic westerner gets the red carpet treatment from a communist government in the midst of a devastating manmade famine, and then reports back to the rest of the world that all is well.
and we’re only just getting started.
there’s no way around this: pierre trudeau loved communist regimes. he praised their methods, parroted their propaganda, and excused their faults. he did it when he was a young, idealistic student. he did it when he was the prime minister of a nato ally. and he did it all at the absolute height of the communist empire. throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, you had a quarter of the world’s population living under communist rule. east germans were getting shot if they tried to cross into west berlin. southeast asians were being marched into “re-education camps” by the hundreds of thousands. political prisoners condemned to forced labour camps across siberia. there was also that whole “nuclear armageddon” thing. canada’s own arctic was filled with remote radar bases whose only purpose was to detect an incoming soviet first strike.
advertisement
plamondon: so 100%, he knows exactly what is happening. and so the question might be, if he knew what was happening, why did he lend a sympathetic ear? and use his voice to effectively become an interpreter for their point of view and their perspective. so when i say he knew exactly what was happening he was, he was a serious, you know, intellectual and an academic. you know, when he did his phd thesis, it was on the relationship between communism and christianity.
hopper: trudeau also lived in a country that was conspicuously filled with communist refugees. in the 1950s, canada took in 38,000 refugees from the hungarian revolution, a liberal, pro-democracy uprising that was brutally suppressed by moscow.
and that happened again after the 1968 prague spring. czechoslovakia had merely tried to implement a reformed and less oppressive version of communism – and for this they were subjected to another all-out soviet-led invasion. 12,000 czechs were able to stay ahead of the soviet tanks and defect to canada. all of this is why – both before and after pierre trudeau’s premiership – the generalized stance of the canadian public and its federal government was “totalitarian communism is bad and we don’t like it.”
advertisement
to this day, one of the most celebrated moments in canadian history is the 1972 summit series. why? because team canada beat the commies on live tv. canadian player phil esposito would repeatedly describe the series as a “war” against canada’s sworn enemy. trudeau had set up the series as a way to promote canada-soviet friendship through sport – and may have been surprised to see if turn into an ultra-violent battle for ideological supremacy. trudeau’s predecessor as liberal leader was lester pearson. although the americans sometimes saw pearson as a softie on communism, the man himself was on record as saying that the chief threat to world peace was “subversive aggressive communism.” in the 1960s, pearson also enthusiastically invited u.s. nuclear missiles to be stationed in canada as a bulwark against the soviets.
trudeau’s most well-known liberal successor is jean chretien. in 1999, when cuba jailed four political dissidents – not an unusual thing in cuba – chretien reacted by putting the two country’s relations into a deep freeze. (chretien actually used the freeze analogy, by the way: he said he was putting “northern ice” between ottawa and havana.)
but trudeau?
but trudeau?
you’re not going to find any record of him calling for communism’s containment, saying that communism is flawed or even criticizing the actions of a communist government (even though he criticized democratic nations all the time). this wasn’t realpolitik; in which trudeau was urging peaceful coexistence with ideological opponents. this was a decades-long pattern of trudeau looking at militaristic governments crawling with secret police and saying “you know what? maybe they know something we don’t.”
advertisement
plamondon: if someone from the u.s. state department or a former politician went to north korea today as a mission, perhaps to gain the release of hostages or some diplomatic protocol to explain to them why the course they are following is reckless, or you’re an academic trying to write about it in a way that others who don’t have exposure to the regime might learn about them, you could see that there might be serious political or academic interest in trying to understand these countries. that was not trudeau mission. it was pure propaganda. this was him absorbing everything that they wanted to say about their country so he could return to canada, return to the western world, and speak favourably about him.
hopper: take the example of the polish solidarity movement. founded in communist poland in 1980, this was an anti-authoritarian trade union that would become instrumental in the fall of communism and the restoration of democratic rule to eastern europe.
when communist authorities tried to crush solidarity by imposing martial law in 1981, most of the free world had no problem siding with the downtrodden, freedom-loving worker’s union. not trudeau. in a tv interview, when asked about the martial law order he said “hopefully the military regime will keep solidarity from excessive demands.”
advertisement
trudeau even defended the sentiment in the house of commons, on the grounds that if the poles got too uppity, they would invite a soviet invasion. so, better that the crackdown be done in house. or, as it reads in the official parliamentary record “if martial law is a way to avoid civil war and soviet intervention, then i cannot say it is all bad.”
plamondon: at a time when you know these people are looking for for their freedom, ronald reagan is out there calling it, you know, a dark night of tyranny, and pierre trudeau is trying to create a moral equivalence between the soviet union and the american administration, as if you know, there’s, you know, there’s fault on both sides. when soviet dissidents anatoly sharansky and andre sakharov are speaking about the repression in the soviet union and their lack of freedom, you know, he calls these, these two world leaders, hooligans, troublemakers, basically.
hopper: long before trudeau was visiting china in the midst of famine, he was visiting the soviet union under joseph stalin. in 1952 trudeau was 32 years old and a known marxist sympathizer when the soviet union invited him to attend a conference in moscow. it was supposedly an economic summit, but most economists dismissed it as a propaganda gathering for western communists. trudeau ended up staying for four months. the ussr would reform somewhat in its final decades, but when trudeau came to moscow joseph stalin was still alive and soviet repression remained at orwellian highs. the gulag system in full effect. people disappearing in the middle of the night because they told an anti-government joke. but just as he would do in china, trudeau was shown a manicured version of the soviet economy, and he thought it was great. “soviet economists have resolved the problem of inflation without producing unemployment … the country is progressing tremendously … even if that’s not what the people might want,” he wrote in an account of the visit.
advertisement
plamondon: they were feeding him propaganda during the height of the of the cold war. and at that point in time, he was praising the soviet government for producing material wealth, without the the opulence, you know, that he saw in in capitalist countries. and when he’s writing memos about this trip, he’s signing them comrade trudeau.
hopper: when he returned to montreal, trudeau delivered lectures and gave interviews about how the soviet union wasn’t the military threat people seemed to think it was, and that the secret police were fine fellows too busy saluting to terrorize their fellow citizens.
trudeau was elected to the house of commons in 1965 and obtained the liberal leadership – and the prime minister’s office – within just three years. unsurprisingly, his foreign affairs would strongly prioritize friendly relations with the communist world.
trudeau was elected to the house of commons in 1965 and obtained the liberal leadership – and the prime minister’s office – within just three years. unsurprisingly, his foreign affairs would strongly prioritize friendly relations with the communist world.
plamondon: he was someone who, you know, when it came to the cold war, was giving advice to the soviets on how they should manage them, manage their affairs. he was giving advice on how to manage ronald reagan. he wasn’t taking ronald reagan’s message to the soviets to say that, you know, they should be demilitarizing, or they should be reforming.
advertisement
he travelled to the soviet union in 1971, and boasted to soviet leaders that he had reduced canada’s nato commitments in europe by 50 per cent. trudeau was taken to the closed siberian city of norilsk where he praised the soviets for dramatically outpacing canada in developing their north.
unmentioned was that norilsk was built by stalinist forced labour. this is something that would later be brought up with disgust by the soviet dissident vladimir bukovsky, who was a prisoner in the norilsk gulag at the time of trudeau’s visit. at an ottawa press conference in 1977, bukovsky would say this about trudeau: “when he praised it, he praised this thing built on millions of human bones. it was an awful thing to say. he insulted me, other prisoners and the soviet people.” bukovsky wasn’t the only soviet political prisoner to express his disgust at trudeau’s visit to norilsk. andrei amalrik was in a soviet prison cell when he heard a propaganda broadcast carrying trudeau’s comments lamenting that canada didn’t have its own norilsk.
as amalrik later wrote in a memoir, “i felt the urge to shout back at trudeau … ‘arrest a million canadians, send them beyond the arctic circle, have them set up a barbed wire fence around themselves, under the muzzles of machine guns, have them dig mines and build houses – and then you’ll have as fine a city as norilsk.”
advertisement
plamondon: it’s worth asking if he was in the tank for the soviet union and cuba and china, what benefit ultimately did that deliver for them? i think in the end, not much. i mean, he was a counterweight. he was someone who had a voice, but i don’t think he was ever taken seriously in the capitals around the world that mattered. i don’t think he influenced ronald reagan’s policy on on the cold war.
hopper: trudeau’s 1971 visit would be reciprocated almost immediately with a visit to canada by soviet premier alexei kosygin – a visit that trudeau saw as a diplomatic coup. but kosygin’s canadian sojourn would probably be most remembered for the actions of one of those hungarian refugees i mentioned. 27-year-old geza matrai – whose family had fled to canada ahead of soviet secret police in 1956 – managed to break through a security cordon, leap onto the back of the soviet premier and briefly ride him like a horse.
i spoke to matrai in 2014. he said that after a few seconds on the soviet premier he was tackled by mounties – some of whom were dressed in ceremonial red serge. but as soon as they had him behind closed doors they said “nice going, but you shouldn’t have done it this way.” where all of this most veers into the surreal is trudeau’s close, personal friendship with cuban dictator fidel castro.
advertisement
plamondon: so he’s done the soviet union. he’s done china, at a time when no one was going there. and then he ventures into communist cuba in 1964 after fidel castro had taken over, and he watches fidel give these four hour long speeches in front of the throngs of thousands, tens of thousands of people. and after watching him deliver the speech, he says, “you know, you wonder, what’s the need for elections?” this is, this is 1964 this is, you know, just before he becomes a candidate for the liberal party of canada in the 1965 election.
hopper: there’s plenty of instances of 20th century world leaders being friendly with one another, even if they come from ideologically opposed systems. in this same general era, you’re going to see a surprisingly warm working relationship emerge between soviet leader mikhail gorbachev and u.s. president ronald reagan. if you go to the reagan presidential library in california, there’s actually a statue of the two men together, smiling and talking about arms control. but trudeau’s relationship with castro went well beyond two government leaders who simply got on well at summit meetings. castro would end up occupying a space in the trudeau family similar to that of a beloved uncle. they went diving. they smoked cigars. they gathered sea urchins for beach cookouts.
advertisement
news clip: informal talks at an island hideaway intensified their respect for each other and their mutual enjoyment of skin diving added to the rapport.
plamondon: if i could make just one reference to pierre trudeau sons to show the closeness of the relationship. the nickname that the trudeau sons had for fidel castro was papa fidel. so that gives you an indication of the closeness of the bond that existed between a communist dictator, you know, thorn in the side of every american administration for the past 50 years, and pierre trudeau.
hopper: when trudeau’s youngest son michel died in an avalanche in 1998, castro called the family in tears to express his condolences. as an eight-year-old, michel had referred to fidel castro as his best friend. when pierre died, fidel declared three days of mourning and flew to montreal to act as an honorary pallbearer.
plamondon: when trudeau went down to cuba, all the people in south florida, the exiles were thinking, why is this western leader giving comfort to a murderous dictator, you know, who is oppressing their people in cuba and saying, you know, good things about about fidel castro, and as i’ve mentioned, to have him in the pew at trudeau funeral, in the front row as as a, as a, as a dignified person. when he had been he’d been such a brutal leader, says more about pierre trudeau than it does about fidel castro.
advertisement
hopper: here’s where we should probably touch on what castro had done – and what he was continuing to do — while going on beach vacations with the trudeau family.
you have the basics: no elections, nobody allowed to leave the country, the jailing of political dissidents. even at a time when latin america had no shortage of oppressive autocrats, the sheer quantity of political prisoners in cuban jails was higher than anywhere else in the hemisphere. castro is also one of the few national leaders in history to go on record as saying that nuclear armageddon might be a good thing.
the 1962 cuban missile crisis saw the soviet union withdraw nuclear missiles from cuba in order to avoid the risk of all-out war with the united states. but as the crisis progressed, soviet officials were horrified to discover that their cuban allies didn’t think world war 3 was such a bad idea. this is from an october 26, 1962 letter that castro sent to soviet premier nikita khruschev. castro said that if the crisis should result in the u.s. invading cuba, the soviet union should launch a nuclear first strike – even if it signed the death warrant of his own nation. “if they manage to carry out an invasion of cuba … then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defence. however harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.”
advertisement
such a “terrible solution” would have conservatively killed tens of millions of people. including, potentially, a university professor named pierre trudeau. any soviet nuclear strike against the u.s. had to pass over canada first, and military planners were pretty confident that the red air force would probably spare a few bombs for ottawa, toronto and montreal along the way. but i’m guessing this never came up.
okay, i’m going to take a quick side note here to address the internet rumour that justin trudeau is the illegitimate son of fidel castro. i don’t think it’s true for a few reasons, but let us first review the evidence in support. as mentioned, justin trudeau has a weirdly familial relationship with a man that most of his democratic leader peers consider a murderous pariah. justin trudeau’s mother margaret was pretty open about her attraction to castro. in her 1979 biography beyond reason, you can basically cut the romantic tension with a knife. here’s her describing an after-dinner exchange she had with the cuban leader in 1976.
“it was as well that castro and i were not alone, for he paid me the most outrageous compliment i have ever received. “you know,” he said to me in his silken english. “my eyes are not very strong so every day to make them stronger i force myself to look at the sun. i find it very hard. but do you know what i find harder? that is to look into the blue of your eyes.” (this is where my producer is asking me to remind you that looking directly into the sun is not a good strategy to improve your eyesight. it will actually have the opposite effect).
advertisement
margaret would also describe castro as “ridiculously romantic.” final point in favour of justin trudeau being castro’s son: he really, really looks like him.
okay, the first point against the theory, while justin trudeau looks like castro, the same could actually be said of pierre trudeau. young pierre isn’t the spitting image of fidel like his son is, but they do look like brothers. second and most important, the timelines don’t match up. justin trudeau was born on christmas day 1971, which means he was conceived in the spring of that year. so, a few weeks after his parents were married in a quiet ceremony in north vancouver.
but the trudeaus didn’t meet castro until 1976, when justin was five and both of his brothers had already been born. his youngest brother michel was a baby during the visit: if you’ve seen that photo of fidel holding a baby next to margaret trudeau, that’s michel, not justin. ‘ but wait, you say: the trudeaus took their honeymoon in the caribbean nation of barbados, and there’s an april, 1971 united press report saying that the couple left barbados on a chartered plane to take a “quick sidetrip to an unidentified nearby island.”
so maybe that island was cuba; yadda, yadda, yadda, impregnation. okay, but barbados and cuba are at opposite ends of the caribbean; they’re 2,700 kilometres apart. that’s the distance between saskatoon and montreal. even if the charter plane was a jet, they would have to be in the air most of the day to make a roundtrip to havana without anybody noticing.
advertisement
that leaves only a few hours for the prime minister of canada to take his new 22-year-old bride, convince her to have unprotected sex with a latin dictator she’s never met … and then get back on the jet, bear the dictator’s child nine months later and never tell anybody this had happened.
ok that’s enough about that. let’s get back to pierre.
ok that’s enough about that. let’s get back to pierre.
plamondon: i think both the soviet government and the chinese government made an investment in pierre trudeau. they thought he was susceptible to their perspective, and i think that investment paid off handsomely. i don’t imagine that they expected in the years later, that he would not only be elected to the house of commons, but he became leader of the liberal party and prime minister of canada. i don’t think anyone celebrated his victory more so than did the soviet bloc countries and did china, because they felt, well, here’s someone who understands us, who sympathizes with us, who’s not going to be critical of us.
hopper: when the soviet empire suddenly came apart in the late 1980s, the reaction in canada – like almost everywhere else – was jubilation. if you’d opened the ottawa citizen that month, you would have seen a series on the “death of the soviet union” – complete with a graphic of a crumbling hammer and sickle.
advertisement
but a retired pierre trudeau – who was now working at the montreal law office of heenan blaikie – didn’t see it that way. not at all.
trudeau had refused to offer any criticism of china after the 1989 tiananmen square massacre. his son sacha would later explain his father’s silence on the tragedy by saying that westerners had an “outlandish sense of righteousness” about such things, and trudeau had taught his sons to strenuously reserve judgement on the chinese system.
even if, as in 1989, that system involved running over student protesters with tanks.
and then, on his son justin’s christmas day birthday in 1991, trudeau saw the soviet union formally dissolved into its constituent republics.
and then, on his son justin’s christmas day birthday in 1991, trudeau saw the soviet union formally dissolved into its constituent republics.
trudeau wrote openly in his memoirs that the breakup of the soviet empire was a chaotic episode that westerners would come to regret. at a time when places like latvia and ukraine were finally declaring their independence from russian domination, trudeau slammed the west for welcoming them as independent states.
this is trudeau from his book memoirs, published in 1993: “we in the west made sure (the soviet union) would break up by rushing to recognize every tom, dick and harry republic that decided to proclaim its independence. by doing that, we helped create the chaos in that part of the world, which i think we will eventually regret.”
advertisement
plamondon: what i find fascinating and i still can’t understand, is, how can he in canada stake his political career to — on the adoption of a charter of rights and freedoms, which is essentially a check and balance on, you know, on government and putting the supremacy of the individual over, you know, the power of the state. you know, how do you reconcile, you know, those two — so he is all about freedom and independence and individual liberty in canada, yet he is the apologist to all those who are repressing individual rights elsewhere around the world in the most brutal way.
hopper: some version of the soviet union should have remained. if only because, in trudeau’s words, “the peace of the world is based on stability.”
according to a biography of alexander yakovlev – a soviet ambassador to canada who was the namesake for trudeau’s son sacha – “stability” was the same reason that, deep down, trudeau preferred the central planning of communism to the free market of his own country. capitalism was chaos, quotas and five-year-plans represented order.
trudeau’s sons have all had the same blind spot when it comes to communist tyranny. but theirs is arguably more understandable because – to them – the deadliest ideology of the 20th century mostly took the form of attentive old men giving them presents and taking them on vacations. pierre trudeau’s direct exposure to the communist world consisted almost exclusively of curated trips where he saw only what his hosts wanted him to see. even in retirement, pierre trudeau took vacations to the communist world and was immediately paired with state-supplied minders. in 1990, he took his two oldest boys to china only a few months after the tiananmen square massacre, and was met at the airport by government interpreters who were to accompany the trudeaus throughout their entire voyage. “we wouldn’t want you to hurt yourselves,” was how it was explained to the visiting canadians.
advertisement
when trudeau took his family on these trips, they were taken in by the charm and the pageantry even harder than he was.
here’s margaret trudeau again from her 1979 biography, describing cuba. “this is the answer to utopia, i said to myself … if this is revolution, it is truly marvelous.” she added that cuba “could do no wrong” and “everyone was happy.” remember sacha? the one named after the soviet ambassador? he wrote an op-ed for the toronto star in 2006 in which her referred to castro as “something of a superman.”
this is a direct quote: “his intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. he is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. on everything. combined with a herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes fidel the giant that he is.” sacha goes on to admit that cubans may sometimes complain about their government, but it is like how an “adolescent might complain about a too strict and demanding father.” even long after castro’s death, sacha wrote that cuba will be “haunted” by “his questions, by his inescapable rationality,” and his desire to “seek justice and excellence in all things.” in 2016, sacha would publish his first book. barbarian lost, a travelogue about china and another trudeau family tribute to the communist country. here’s a telling passage: “i don’t think china could have come so far so quickly without the unity and organizational power (the communist party) has provided.” sacha’s book would acknowledge the famine that his father so clearly overlooked in 1960, but only in passing. “to this day, the party has made it impossible to properly fathom how many people died in the famines caused by the policies of mao’s great leap forward,” wrote the younger trudeau, adding “but the chinese population still grew under chairman mao.”
advertisement
“even in error and calamity,” declared sacha, mao “achieved his billionaire kingdom.” sacha’s older brother justin hasn’t been quite as embarrassing, but his time as prime minister has been marked by a weird affinity for governments normally considered hostile to the interests of free governments. when castro died in 2016, trudeau issued a statement cheering the late dictator as “a legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” his only critique being a passing reference to castro being a “controversial” ruler.
that same year, trudeau made his first official visit to the people’s republic of china, and made a point of bringing his daughter. he presented the young ella grace to chinese officials and immediately spoke of his fond childhood memories of similarly accompanying his father to china. “the friendship and the openness towards china that my father taught me, i’m certainly hoping to pass on not only to my children but to generations of canadians in the future,” he said. as with his father, this is all extremely out of sync with the country he represents. canadians do not like autocracies. polls consistently show that the people’s republic of china stands alongside russia and north korea in terms of governments disliked by more than four fifths of the canadian electorate. a 2020 pew research poll found that among g7 nations, canadians were more likely to mistrust beijing than italians, germans and the french – and our china-skepticism was tied with the u.s. but if justin trudeau has a weird habit of treating totalitarian regimes like family friends, it’s because they sort of are.
share story
