Pierre Trudeau - Early Career

Early Career

From the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Trudeau was primarily based in Montreal and was seen by many as an intellectual. In 1949, he was an active supporter of workers in the Asbestos Strike. In 1956, he edited an important book on the subject, La grève de l'amiante, which argued that the strike was a seminal event in Quebec's history, marking the beginning of resistance to the conservative, Francophone clerical establishment and Anglophone business class that had long ruled the province. Throughout the 1950s, Trudeau was a leading figure in the opposition to the repressive rule of Premier of Quebec Maurice Duplessis as the founder and editor of Cité Libre, a dissident journal that helped provide the intellectual basis for the Quiet Revolution.

From 1949 to 1951 Trudeau worked briefly in Ottawa, in the Privy Council Office of the Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent as an economic policy advisor. He wrote in his memoirs that he found this period very useful later on, when he entered politics, and that senior civil servant Norman Robertson tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay on.

His socialist values and his close ties with Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) intellectuals (including F. R. Scott, Eugene Forsey, Michael Kelway Oliver and Charles Taylor) led to his support and membership in that federal social-democratic party throughout the 1950s. Despite these connections, when Trudeau entered federal politics in the 1960s he decided to join the Liberal Party of Canada rather than the CCF's successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP). This is attributed to a few factors: (1) he felt the federal NDP could not achieve power, because of Tommy Douglas's inability to attract voters in Quebec, (2) Trudeau expressed doubts about the centralizing policies of Canada's socialists (he favoured a more decentralized approach), and (3) there were "real differences" between his approach and the NDP's "two nations" approach to the Canadian constitution and the role of Quebec within Canada.

In his memoirs, published in 1993, Trudeau wrote that during the 1950s, he wanted to teach at the Université de Montréal, but was blacklisted three times from doing so by Maurice Duplessis, then Premier of Quebec. He was offered a position at Queen's University teaching political science by James Corry, who later became principal of Queen's, but turned it down because he preferred to teach in Quebec. During the 1950s, he was blacklisted by the United States and prevented from entering that country because of a visit to a conference in Moscow, and because he subscribed to a number of left-wing publications. Trudeau later appealed the ban and it was rescinded.