“Trudeau must go or party beaten, Liberal MPs state,” went the Globe and Mail headline.
It was August of 1983, and everyone knew that Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who had won his first federal election in 1968, was into his final act as prime minister; the only question was when the curtain would fall. With an election approaching and the party tanking in the polls—27 percent approval in the summer of 1983, twenty-eight points behind the Progressive Conservatives under a dynamic new leader named Brian Mulroney—a cadre of Liberal MPs had begun openly calling for Trudeau’s ouster. “We’ll have a better chance with somebody else,” one Toronto-area MP opined. “The Prime Minister is going to have to resign,” said another. Even Liberal Party president Iona Campagnolo had been “dropping hints” that Trudeau’s time had come. Only a fresh face at the helm, they believed, could stave off electoral collapse.
