Trudeau grew up in a family of French and Scots-French descent, in the affluent Montreal suburb of Outremont. He studied at Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite Jesuit preparatory school, and at the University of Montreal, from which he received a law degree in 1943. He served on the Privy Council for three years as a desk officer, and in 1950 he helped found the Cité Libre (“Free City”), a monthly critical review. He practiced law from 1951 to 1961, specializing in labour and civil liberties cases.
Trudeau was assistant professor of law at the University of Montreal from 1961 to 1965, when he was elected as a “new wave” Liberal to the House of Commons. In 1967 he toured the French-speaking African nations on behalf of the prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, who had appointed him parliamentary secretary (1966) and minister of justice and attorney general. As minister of justice, Trudeau won passage of three unpopular social welfare measures—stricter gun-control legislation and reform of the laws regarding abortion and homosexuality.
On Pearson's announcement of his plan to retire, Trudeau campaigned for the leadership of the Liberal Party. His colourful personality and disregard of unnecessary formality, combined with his progressive ideas, made him the most popular of the 20 candidates. He became party leader on April 6, 1968, and prime minister two weeks later. As a determined antiseparatist, Trudeau in 1970 took a strong stand against terrorists from the Front de Libération du Québec.
The elections of October 1972 left Trudeau and the Liberals much weakened, with a minority government dependent on the coalition support of the New Democratic Party (NDP). During the next year and a half the prime minister faced a series of no-confidence votes in Parliament, but in the national elections on July 8 the Liberal Party won a clear majority and an increased number of seats in Parliament.
Throughout the 1970s, Trudeau struggled against increasing economic and domestic problems. In the national general elections of May 22, 1979, his Liberal Party failed to win a majority (although Trudeau maintained his seat in Parliament), and the Progressive Conservative Party won power as a minority government.
The Liberal Party was returned to power in the general election of February 18, 1980, and Trudeau began his fourth term as prime minister on March 3. The proposal of French separatism in Quebec was defeated in a provincial referendum on May 20, 1980, and Trudeau then began work on his plans to reform Canada's constitution. Proposed reforms included “patriation” (i.e., that the British Parliament transfer the authority to amend Canada's constitution to Canada), a charter of human rights, broadened federal economic powers, and institutional changes in federal structures such as the Supreme Court.
On December 2, 1981, the Canadian House of Commons approved Trudeau's constitutional reform resolution with a vote of 246 to 24 (only the representatives from Quebec dissented), and on April 4, 1982, Queen Elizabeth II declared Canada's independence from the British Parliament. With these major political aims realized, Trudeau spent his final years in office seeking greater economic independence for Canada, forming better trade relations between industrialized democracies and Third World nations, and urging further international disarmament talks. On February 29, 1984, Trudeau resigned from the leadership of the Liberal Party, but he remained in office until John Turner was chosen to succeed him at the party leadership convention in June of that same year.
Trudeau's publications include La Fédéralisme et la société Canadienne-Française (1967; Federalism and the French Canadians 1968), Les Cheminements de la politique (1970; Approaches to Politics), and Conversations with Canadians (1972).
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