Margaret Trudeau - Life After Divorce

Life After Divorce

The Trudeaus officially divorced in 1984, and a short time later Margaret married Ottawa real-estate developer Fried Kemper, with whom she had two children, Kyle and Alicia. After her second marriage, Margaret virtually disappeared from the public eye.

In November 1998, the Trudeaus' youngest son, Michel, an avid outdoorsman, was killed when an avalanche swept him to the bottom of British Columbia's Kokanee Lake. The loss of her son was devastating for her and Margaret suffered another mental breakdown that led to her second divorce.

When Pierre Trudeau died in 2000, Margaret was at his bedside, with their sons, Justin and Alexandre. Speaking in 2010 about her marriage to Trudeau she said; “Just because our marriage ended didn’t mean the love stopped,”.

Today, she is the honorary president of WaterCan, an Ottawa-based organization dedicated to helping the poorest communities in developing countries build sustainable water supply and sanitation services.

She was stopped by police on May 30, 2004, and charged with impaired driving and driving with 107 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood. The impaired driving charge was not pursued at trial and she was acquitted of the second charge by a judge who ruled that her rights had been violated by police who had no grounds to pull her over and denied her the right to counsel. She praised the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which had been enacted by Pierre Trudeau, for her success. The Crown's appeal from this decision was denied.

On May 5, 2006, Margaret announced that she had been suffering from bipolar disorder. Since then, she has advocated for reduced stigma of mental illness — bipolar disorder in particular — with speaking engagements across North America.

In 2007, Trudeau left Ottawa to live in Montreal to be closer to her sons, Justin and Alexandre.

She wrote Changing My Mind, a book about her personal experience having bipolar disorder, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2010.