Joseph Philippe Pierre Ives Elliotte Trudeau, who prefers to be called Pierre Elliott Trudeau without the final e, in order to emphasize his bilingualism and biculturalism, was born in Montreal, Quebec on October 18, 1919. Trudeau was born into a poor family that lived on a small farm in Montreal. His father was a farmer and worked almost around the clock in order to make enough money to support his family which consisted of five people, Trudeau's mother Grace Elliotte, his father Jean-Charles Emile Trudeau, his sister Suzette, his brother Charles, and finally Trudeau himself.
When Trudeau was five, his father started up what was to be a highly successful chain of 30 service stations which was in 1931 sold to an oil company for $1.4 million and through astute investments, this amount multiplied many times. At the same time, Trudeau started school at L'Academie Querbs. Along with his daily teachings at Querbs, Trudeau's father also taught Trudeau about politics. Trudeau obviously did not understand any of it at that young age, but some words that his father commonly used while talking to Trudeau intrigued him, such as the word "political machine."
Trudeau tried in vain to imagine what such a machine would look like. He thought that it was a machine that manufactured laws. After completing elementary school at Querbs, Trudeau's parents had chosen Brebeuf, formally known as Le College Jean-de-Brebeuf, which was a French-speaking high school. Trudeau never anticipated the challenges of high school until one afternoon, an "upperclassman" decided to provoke Trudeau by throwing a banana into his soup.
Tags: Pierre Elliott Trudeau, bilingualism and biculturalism, investments, L'Academie Querbs
[...] In 1948, Trudeau left Paris in order to go to London, England where he enrolled himself at yet another University, this time The London School of Economics. It was here where Trudeau began his long journey into politics. Trudeau went to Ottawa where he was hired as an economic advisor in the Privy Council office. This was the office from where the Prime Minister - at that time Louis St. Laurent - gathered information and gave commands by which the government functioned. [...]
[...] In 1976, Trudeau's followers began to turn on him because since the Finance Minister, John Turner resigned in 1975, Trudeau neglected the economy, and it began to rapidly deteriorate. There were many protests on Parliament Hill and on October just after Trudeau announced the imposition of mandatory wage and price controls, millions of business men and women from across Canada formed a massive strike. Meanwhile, in Quebec, there had been another storm cloud forming. This finally exploded and in November 1976, René Lévesque was elected and the Parti Québécois was formed in order to achieve full Québécois independence. [...]
[...] Trudeau never anticipated the challenges of high school until one afternoon, an “upperclassman” decided to provoke Trudeau by throwing a banana into his soup. Trudeau then, never thinking about the consequences threw the banana back into his soup. The persecutor then stood up and beat up Trudeau. Trudeau tried to act confident by fighting back but that didn't work. On that day, Trudeau learned a lesson that stuck with him throughout his life, can't win some confrontations just by acting confident”. [...]
[...] Trudeau refused to give in to the terrorist's demands but agreed to make some concessions. Then the next day, the FLQ abducted yet another person, Pierre Laporte, Quebec's minister of labor, from his Montreal home at gunpoint. The government took immediate action and by the next day there were armed soldiers patrolling the streets of Ottawa. Quebec's premier Robert Bourassa convinced Trudeau to call in the army to invoke the War Measures Act. This gave the police almost unlimited power to search homes and buildings and to arrest members of the FLQ, people who spoke in support of the FLQ, and people who attended political rallies. [...]
[...] Trudeau was then authorized to send the revised constitution to London, England for official approval by the British Parliament. In 1982, on a rainy spring day, on Parliament Hill, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II signed the proclamation that gave Canada a new constitution. With such a historical moment behind him, Trudeau began his mission to meet the leaders of other countries such as Italy, France, England, India, Japan, China, the Soviet Union (now called Russia), and the United States. Although his mission had no immediate results, it later won Trudeau a Nobel prize. [...]
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