In 1965, Pierre Trudeau joined the Liberal Party of Canada, became a candidate, and won a Montreal seat in the federal election that year. Canada would never be the same.His run as a Liberal came as a surprise for many people because until that time, Trudeau had openly identified as a socialist and supporter of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). Trudeau’s political evolution and eventual membership in the Liberal Party are described by University of Winnipeg political scientist Allen Mills in his important 2016 book, Citizen Trudeau, 1944-1965: An Intellectual Biography.During the 1950s, Trudeau became an active member of the CCF. He wasn’t just a garden-variety socialist, either. He was extremely far to the left. Mills writes, “Trudeau’s views may not have made him a communist, but they did take him some way towards aligning himself with what actually existing communism was doing.”This was especially clear in his criticism of the Western nations fighting communist forces during the Korean War. Trudeau “did not want American liberal democracy but rather socialism for the peoples of the planet.” As Mills describes Trudeau’s position, if it “was not quite one of absolute defence of the geopolitical interests of global communism, it was not far from it.”During 1952, Trudeau spent some time in the Soviet Union. Soviet officials treated him as a sympathizer with their cause. “From the moment he had applied for a visa and got on the train in Prague to travel to Moscow, Trudeau was accorded the very best of treatment. In Moscow, he was royally lodged at the famed Sovietskaya Hotel and given a car and an interpreter.”While there, Trudeau told the wife of a high-level American diplomat that he was a communist. This led to him being banned from travelling to the United States..Although not entirely uncritical, Trudeau held a very favourable view of Soviet communism. As Mills puts it, “Trudeau did overlook or downplay some of the most shameful realities of the Soviet state.”In 1960, Trudeau and his friend Jacques Hebert spent five weeks in China as guests of its Communist government, then led by Mao Zedong (one of the most brutal tyrants of history). After returning home, the two men wrote a book on their experiences entitled Two Innocents in Red China.In their book, they give a very positive account of China’s Communist dictator and his accomplishments. Indeed, as Mills writes, “they were committed to seeing only virtue in the Communist government and its leader.”Back in Canada in the early 1960s, Trudeau had to determine the best political route for him to push Canada in a leftward direction. Despite his strong socialist convictions, it was clear that the NDP was not going to form a government in the foreseeable future. Therefore, from a pragmatic perspective, he would need to join a political party that could achieve power at the national level and implement some socialist policies, even if not the full socialist agenda he wanted. Only the Liberal Party of Canada could be this vehicle.Thus, as Mills writes, when Trudeau joined the Liberal Party in 1965, he did so “as a socialist of a social democratic sort who saw no better course of action to achieve his beliefs.” In spite of his switch from the NDP to the Liberal Party, “Trudeau remained a socialist of sorts.”Trudeau was appointed as justice minister by Prime Minister Lester Pearson in 1967, and when Pearson resigned the following year, Trudeau would himself become Liberal leader and prime minister. As a leader, he would transform the party. As Mills puts it, the “Liberals under Trudeau would become a consistent party of the Left.”.As our first socialist prime minister, Trudeau would also fundamentally transform Canada. Most importantly among his accomplishments, he changed the constitution. This achievement alone makes his impact on the country more significant than any prime minister since John A. Macdonald. Mills quotes Quebec political scientist Guy Laforest as noting that “Trudeau was the last of our founders. He was the equivalent of Lincoln for twentieth-century Canada. He was the last political leader who was able substantially to modify the thought and the idea of the foundation of Confederation. What Trudeau almost single-handedly achieved in the early 1980s is incredible.”And Mills himself argues that Trudeau can be regarded “as the maker of the modern Canadian political identity, doing for Canada today what Sir John A. Macdonald achieved in post-Confederation times.”When one realizes the deep socialist convictions of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau — not to mention his clear communist sympathies — it is easier to understand Canada’s steep decline over the last 50 years. Trudeau claimed his goal was to create a “just society,” but from his perspective, a “just society” was necessarily a socialist society. The great expansion in the size of the federal government under his administration, the attack on Alberta’s oil industry in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the adoption of a new constitution that deliberately excluded property rights can all be understood as elements of Trudeau’s socialist agenda. Yet despite the devastation Trudeau wrought on the country, there is one ray of hope — an independent Alberta could cast off the socialist shackles and create a more genuinely free and prosperous country.
