Camelot North

Businessmen ask for his autograph on dollar bills. Hippies string medallions around his neck. Teen-age girls line up to kiss him. After a summer in office, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau is still prodigiously popular among Canadians, who are clearly as delighted as they can be with the new national image that he is shaping.

Last week, as Parliament assembled for the first time since his election, Trudeau promised that the House of Commons would be "a jumping place." That will be in keeping with the pace that the Prime Minister has set. While Canadians are enjoying the Trudeau panache, he is savoring the perquisites of his office. On a 9,780-mile swing through the Arctic last month, he acquired a sealskin parka, drove a motorcycle across the permafrost, and danced with an Eskimo go-go girl. During a recent visit to Montreal, he spent an evening clinking glasses at Man and His World, this year's version of Expo. On a jaunt to see Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, Ont., he was able to command the Prime Minister's private railway car and, naturally, a backstage visit with Juliet: 24-year-old Actress Louise Marleau.

Bounds of Propriety. As Canada's most eligible bachelor, the 48-year-old Trudeau has dated a succession of smashing girls during the summer, most of them some 20 years younger than himself. Presumably to their disappointment, he has not been known to overstep the bounds of prime-ministerial propriety. Asked if he intends to marry any particular girl, Trudeau's stock reply is: "Yes, but she changes from hour to hour."

In affairs of state, the Trudeau style is something else again. Last week he won high marks from Canadians for his handling of Canada's only international dispute: General de Gaulle's persistent encouragement of Quebec separatists. When De Gaulle at his press conference brusquely lumped Canada with Nigeria and Malaysia as federations in trouble, Trudeau shot back that the general was "not overly impressed with reality." Nor, apparently, with diplomatic good manners. Trudeau at the same time blistered the French government for sending a cultural emissary to French Canadians in Manitoba in an "underhanded and surreptitious" manner without so much as a by-your-leave from the Canadian government.

Paris' help is hardly needed. French Canadians share more power in Trudeau's government than in any previous administration. The Prime Minister's office itself is run by what has inevitably come to be called "the French Canadian Mafia." French-speaking ministers, long confined to portfolios with more prestige than power, now for the first time command important economic offices. Partly as a result of Trudeau's drive to give them a fair share of power, French-speaking intellectuals are beginning to turn their attention to Ottawa, rather than to Quebec City, and militant French Canadian separatists are becoming rebels with a less appealing cause.

Uncertain Journey. Trudeau is a fresh phenomenon in Canada's capital, where furled-umbrella stuffiness has long been the norm. He works in an open-necked shirt, often sniffing or fondling a flower on his desk. His Cabinet meetings are as intellectually demanding as his University of Montreal law classes used to be, and during last summer's 90DEG heat they sometimes ran for more than six hours. One result is that in two months he has set in motion the most sweeping overhaul of Canada's government machinery since 1946.

Pending thoroughgoing policy reviews in every department, Trudeau plans no startling innovations for the new parliamentary session. More important in the long run to Canadians is Trudeau's commitment to constitutional reform, by which he hopes to give Canadians a bill of rights and reapportion the powers between federal and provincial governments. Promising to "plug the people into the decision-making process," Trudeau has urged all Canadians to join in the coming constitutional debate, challenging them "to embark wholeheartedly on a journey whose destination is uncertain. Our country deserves more than a blind rush to some imagined Utopia, or a blind faith in the prejudices of the past."

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