Dear Pierre

On the relationship between friendship and politics, perhaps the definitive pronouncement is that attributed to Aristotle: “O my friends, there is no friend.” This enigmatic insight haunts the pages of the remarkable correspondence between the friends and political adversaries Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Pierre Vadeboncoeur, recently published in Quebec and generating much discussion there.

The figure of Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1984 (with a brief interruption in 1979–80), still looms large for many, even more than twenty years after his death. These letters will only add to the fascination. Vadeboncoeur, who died in 2010, was a trade union activist and philosophical essayist whose writings place him among the most important of Québécois thinkers.

The bitter struggle between nationalism and federalism that divided Quebec in the latter half of the twentieth century and spilled over into the rest of Canada during the two referendums...