Tan, please try and get your hands on a copy of Friday's Nat Post. In the special section on Trudeau, there's an article by Robert Fulford, and I would like to quote a few paragraphs.
"Would national unity have been served better by a less ferociously combative and more conciliatory prime minister? We can never know, but we know for sure that his way didn't work. Apparently, he had no interest in speculating why this was so. When I asked him about it, his answer was brief, grim and totally incurious: his enemies were wrong, and that was the end of it. Not the reasoned response of an intellectual.
At some point a horrible thought occurred to many people who had once admired him: he wasn't nearly as serious about his job as he needed to be.
He was serious about creating a place of equality for French-Canadians, and about "patriating " the Constitution and entrenching the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In his own terms, he was a success on the constitutional issue, even if he did infuriate the Quebec government. The Charter, his chief monument, has changed Canada by greatly enhancing the power of appeal-court judges and altering the way laws are made: legislatures today operate in the knowledge that in most cases they must conform to the Charter and its' judicial interpreters. Whether this has made us more free, as it was intended to do, is debatable. Those of us who dislike the Charter (mostly non lawyers) and those who passionately love it (mostly lawyers and rights-seeking groups) have almost stopped arguing about it. We know that it will be part of Canada far into the 21st century.
In the career of Trudeau, it remains a startling and incomprehensible anomaly. He was the most anti-American of all our Liberal prime ministers, but giving power over Parliament to the Supreme Court, and raising the court to the same level as the nine judges in Washington, did more to Americanize Canadian government than any other single act of the 20th century. Perhaps a Trudeau biographer will someday explain this most baffling of his many contradictions".
One other thing, my world flying experience, or lack thereof, has SFA to do with my opinion of Pierre Trudeau.