[4] Her grandmother, Rose Edith (Ivens) Bernard, with whom she had an especially close relationship, lived in Roberts Creek, British Columbia, in later life, and was from Virden, Manitoba.

[5] Her grandfather, Thomas Kirkpatrick Bernard, was born in Makassar, Dutch Celebes, now in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and immigrated in 1906 at age 15 with his family to Penticton, British Columbia, eventually working as a payroll clerk for Canadian Pacific Railway.

Her maternal grandmother was an Ono Niha ranee (a term covering every rank from chieftain's daughter to princess) who married a prominent Dutch colonial official and merchant.

[14] Acclaimed British harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, and Hawaiian settler Edward William Purvis, according to popular belief, was the namesake of the ukulele, are Margaret Trudeau's first cousins, three times removed.

[20] Although she had accompanied Pierre Trudeau in public a year before to ice skate and dance at an event at Rideau Hall, official residence of Canada's Governor General,[17] it was a complete secret except to immediate family members and close friends that she was in a romantic relationship, then in a six-month engagement to the Prime Minister.

"From the day I became Mrs. Pierre Elliott Trudeau," she writes in her memoirs, "a glass panel was gently lowered into place around me, like a patient in a mental hospital no longer considered able to make decisions and cannot be exposed to a harsh light.

Trudeau tore apart a quilt made by Canadian conceptual artist Joyce Wieland[25] on the wall in the prime-minister's official residence in Ottawa because it celebrated "reason over passion".

)[27] Over time, the marriage disintegrated[28] to the point where, as recounted in her 1982 book Consequences, Trudeau had affairs with Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, Lou Rawls, and a friendship with US Senator Ted Kennedy.

[citation needed] On the eve of the 1979 election, in which Pierre Trudeau's party lost the majority of seats in the House of Commons, she was dancing at Studio 54 nightclub in New York City.

On April 18, 1984, with her three sons attending, she married Ottawa real-estate developer Fried Kemper in a civil ceremony in the chambers of Judge Hugh Poulin.

[34][35][31] 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.

[40] From 2002 to 2017, Trudeau was the honorary president of WaterAid Canada, an Ottawa-based organization dedicated to helping the poorest communities in developing countries build sustainable water supply and sanitation services.

[46] In July 2019, she attended an opening ceremony of WE College in Narok County (Kenya) with former Prime Minister of Canada Kim Campbell, Kenyan First Lady Margaret Kenyatta and Craig Kielburger, a co-founder of WE Charity organization.

[48] In 2013, Trudeau received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Western Ontario in recognition of her work to combat mental illness.