Tom Axworthy recalls Pierre Trudeau’s resignation, 40 years later

It was exactly 8 a.m. when the phone rang in a Glebe-area home in Ottawa. The caller was brief, business-like as he almost always was. His voice betrayed no emotion. It was at that moment that Tom Axworthy learned that Feb. 29, 1984, would be a day unlike any other. The name of his caller? Pierre Trudeau, Canada's 15th prime minister. His reason for calling his principal secretary so early? (a rare occurrence, Axworthy recalls today.) Trudeau phone to say that he’d gone for a walk in the snow the night before. He’d decided, after almost 16 years atop the Canadian-version of Disraeli’s greasy pole, to resign and return into private life. Political Ottawa, and the nation itself, would never be the same. “He said, ‘Well, Tom, I have made up my mind and I’m going to resign. I just don’t have the energy to do this job, to lead the country any longer,’” Axworthy says, adding that his boss told him to draft a statement and to have it ready an hour later when Trudeau would arrive at what was then called Langevin Block (now the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council). With that, Axworthy called a Blue Line taxi, hopped in, and got to the Prime Minister’s Office in record time. Trudeau, as he had told his principal secretary he would, got there at 9 a.m. Not long after, Trudeau shared the news with another of his most trusted aides, Joyce Fairbairn, who had been working closely with him for 14 years. Later that day, Fairbairn—whom Trudeau would appoint to the Senate before he left office, and who passed away in 2022—gave an interview to the Ottawa Citizen's Mark Kennedy. “I’ve been with him so long that it was a bit hard to accept,” she said. Axworthy remembers calling a meeting of Trudeau’s personal staff in a Langevin boardroom shortly before noon. About 30 people attended, and Trudeau made very brief remarks. “He started off by saying, ‘look, let’s not have a lot of tears,'" Axworthy told the Citizen that day. PMO staff, of course, ignored their boss’s request. “He shook everyone’s hand as he left the room there were a lot of tears,” Axworthy added. Later that day, Trudeau famously spoke to the press in person. Reporters, of course, asked the outgoing prime minister why he’d chosen the day he did to announce his resignation plans. It was a leap year. “Well, because it’s a good day. It is the first day of the rest of my life,” Trudeau said. “I went to judo . a great walk in the snow, and here I am.” In the early 1990s, writing in his Memoirs, Trudeau described that day in his own words. “On the evening of Feb. 28, 1984, I took another long walk in the snow in Ottawa,” he wrote. “Sixteen years earlier, on a similar winter’s walk, I had agonized over whether to stand for the leadership of the Liberal Party. My 1984 decision was easier to make. My three boys were entering their teens, and I felt the need to spend more time with them. For all their lives until then, from the moment each of them was born, they had been the prime minister’s children, set apart from others by that fact, accompanied by bodyguards and such... I also didn’t know whether I had the energy left to fight another gruelling election campaign.” “But most of all,” Trudeau continued, “I had done what I had come into politics to do. I had come to Ottawa to fight for a just society both at home and abroad. I had done my best. There wasn’t much more to give. I thought it would be time for somebody else to take over. The philosopher George Santayana defines happiness as taking ‘the measure of your powers.’ That night I took the measure of mine. It was time to go home.” With that, the Pierre Trudeau era ended. His legacy was now in history’s hands. Feb. 29, 1984. A day like no other, indeed. Kingston’s Arthur Milnes is a veteran Hill Times contributor, and the author of National Newswatch’s daily feature, "Art’s History," which celebrates milestone moments from Canada’s political past seven days a week. The Hill Times