A Plan To Honor Canada's Pierre Trudeau

Daniel Girard, The Toronto Star, 02 Oct. 2004

Pierre Trudeau may get his place in the mountains after all.

Four years after an avalanche of criticism prompted then-prime minister Jean Chretien to abandon plans to rename Canada's highest peak - Mount Logan in the Yukon - for his former cabinet colleague, other plans for a Mount Trudeau are in the works.

This one comes from the village of Valemount, a community of about 1,400 people in the picturesque mountains of northeast British Columbia. Residents of the sawmill town that is a popular centre for heli-skiing and summer hiking want a peak in the nearby Premier Range of the Cariboo Mountains named Mount Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

"This seems like the perfect spot because he was a real outdoors and nature enthusiast," says Valemount Mayor Jeannette Townsend of Trudeau, who died in 2000. She says she hopes to have the designation completed over the next few months with a ceremony sometime next year.

Within a few years, Townsend sees the mountain as the backdrop for a new interpretive centre on the shores of Swift Creek. It would offer visitors historical and cultural information on the region, including its aboriginal communities and salmon spawning grounds.

Chretien's attempt to supplant Sir William Logan, the 19th-century explorer-surveyor who founded the Geological Survey of Canada and is regarded as one of the country's most important scientists, was met with howls of protest. Complaints came from historians, politicians, aboriginal groups and rank-and-file Canadians who wrote angry letters and flooded radio talk shows and Internet polls to denounce the plans.

Within two weeks, the government relented.

"The message that has been sent by Canadians is that we have to make sure that in respecting Mr. Trudeau's memory, we do not cause any difficulty for the history of Mount Logan," then-heritage minister Sheila Copps told reporters. She added that the late prime minister's family wanted any commemoration to have"great public support" while the government's intention was to avoid" controversy" in the way it paid tribute.