On the advice of his impish press secretary, Patrick Gossage, Mr. Trudeau invites the press to a cocktail party at 24 Sussex Drive. At his door that spring day, he accepts thanks for his hospitality with a shrug. Ottawa, June of 1984. The streetfighter appears in Parliament for the last time. We celebrate lawgivers and nation-builders who preserve unity and write constitutions and, however unpopular today, we'd surely celebrate Mr. Trudeau.
Few reporters are there that day.
Montreal, April of 1991. Over lunch, Mr. Trudeau is kind, attentive and gracious. He muses about canoeing the country's great rivers and his recent trip to Vietnam, gently correcting me on the location of the imperial city of Hue. He turns to the Constitution. He allows that he fervently hoped that the talks with the provinces in 1981 would fail so that he could patriate the British North America Act against the opposition of all the provinces, not just Quebec.