Trudeau divorce: Only other PM whose marriage ended in office is Pierre Trudeau (2024)

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After 18 years of marriage, Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau are separating, with the prime minister seemingly following in the footsteps of his father, who went through a divorce in his dying days in politics.

Trudeau Jr. is the first prime minister to go through a separation while in office since Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s mother, separated in 1977 and divorced in 1984. However, there are some differences. Justin and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau have been married for 18 years, while the prime minister’s parents separated after just six years. And there’s only four years between them, while Justin Trudeau’s parents had a 29-year age gap. Justin Trudeau’s marriage is also unravelling at the same age as his father’s marriage was just beginning.

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When Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau (née Sinclair) secretly married in 1971, she was just 22 years old, and the elder Trudeau was 51. They had met on the island of Tahiti; Sinclair was just 18 at the time.

“I found her eyes extraordinarily beautiful,” Trudeau later recounted.

The marriage came when Trudeaumania was at its height, and newspaper accounts of the marriage note that “infatuated young women” were devastated when Trudeau married an “unknown flower child.”

The two were secretly married in North Vancouver, and spent the post-ceremony weekend skiing in Whistler, before returning to Ottawa. The official honeymoon took place aboard a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker. Nine months after their wedding, Justin Trudeau was born; Pierre Trudeau handed out cigars to reporters who were outside the Ottawa hospital and reportedly said the baby was born with “about as little” hair as his father.

The couple was very much in the public eye. They were mobbed at book signings, and on the campaign trail in 1974, where Margaret Trudeau spoke of how he was “quite a beautiful guy … who taught me a lot about loving.”

Margaret Trudeau also raised eyebrows: In 1974, while the couple was in Caracas, Venezuela, Margaret proposed a toast and sang a song she had written herself for the president’s wife.

The couple separated in 1977. At the time, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a notice: “Pierre and Margaret Trudeau announce that because of Margaret’s wishes they shall begin living separate and apart. Margaret relinquishes all privileges as the wife of the Prime Minister and wishes to leave the marriage and pursue an independent career. Pierre will have custody of their three sons giving Margaret generous access to them. Pierre accepts Margaret’s decision with regret and both pray that their separation will lead to a better relationship between themselves.”

At the time, it was said that the 29-year age gap between the two contributed to the separation. Margaret also had trouble adjusting to life at 24 Sussex as the prime minister’s wife, cut off from her friends and her interests by security, and irritated at Trudeau for constantly working as head of the Liberal government.

“I felt unfulfilled, unhappy, caught in an old-fashioned marriage. I wanted my own life and my own career,” Margaret Trudeau told The Globe and Mail in 1982.

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The two had three children: Justin Trudeau, Sacha Trudeau and Michel Trudeau, who died in an avalanche in 1998.

There was tension throughout their marriage, most obviously when Margaret Trudeau, the day before their sixth wedding anniversary in March 1977, attended a Rolling Stones concert and stayed with the band in a Toronto hotel, spending time with guitarist Ron Wood. She told reporters her husband was infuriated, and had given her a black eye when she returned home.

Still, there had been happiness. During the winters at Harrington Lake, where Canadian prime ministers have a cottage, they played outdoors and baked pies. In the autumn, they harvested maple syrup and in the summer had picnics and barbecues. “It was a wonderful life, but there was all too little of it,” writes Margaret Trudeau in one of her memoirs.

At the time they separated, she denied in an interview with the Ladies’ Home Journal that she had been unfaithful as rumours abounded about a link to Mick Jagger after she moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer following the divorce.

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“It was vile innuendo and suggestion — absolutely distasteful. Apparently women aren’t even allowed to talk with a man without the level of being interpreted as sexual,” Margaret said. “I have never had a romantic involvement with anyone other than (Trudeau) and he has never felt threatened by vicious rumours of alleged extramarital affairs.”

She was also dogged by rumours — which she denied — that she had moved to New York because she was pregnant and wanted an abortion. At the time, Canada was still more than a decade from legalizing abortion.

Six years after their separation, in November 1983, Margaret Trudeau, then 35, filed for divorce, citing the long-term separation. They were officially divorced in April 1984. A few weeks later, Margaret married Fried Kemper, an Ottawa businessman.

Margaret went on to have a number of torrid and drug-fuelled love affairs, including with movie stars Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, all of which she detailed in two autobiographies, Beyond Reason and Consequences.

Even their courtship had been tumultuous, with Margaret Trudeau writing in Beyond Reason that she was seized with jealousy when Pierre Trudeau had a candlelight dinner with actress Barbra Streisand and that when he proposed marriage, he insisted that she must be faithful, stop using drugs and “stop being so flighty.”

Pierre Trudeau never remarried. A fervent Catholic, who Margaret Trudeau said objected to her use of the Pill, Trudeau’s faith wouldn’t allow him to remarry. In Justin Trudeau’s memoir, Common Ground, the prime minister wrote that his father once apologized for not being able to remarry and provide a maternal presence for his sons.

Justin Trudeau, in his memoir, reflects a number of times on the divorce of his parents. He writes that he never felt the guilt that many children feel when their parents split up, understanding the stresses on his parents went beyond the ordinary.

“What I felt instead was a sense of diminished self-worth. A part of me thought I should have been reason enough for her to stay,” Trudeau wrote.

Trudeau noted that “every divorce has its casualties where children are involved,” but that his parents attempted to minimize the effect on them. Still, he spent “more than a little time angry.”

He said that to escape the “dark drama” of his parents’ marriage, he would read Archie comics.

“I would dream of growing up in mythical Riverdale, where none of the parents divorced, and where my biggest problem would be choosing between Betty and Veronica.”

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