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'The evil men do lives after them'
George Jonas
National Post
When Pierre Elliott Trudeau died last month, many Canadians, even among those who recognized the flaws in his legacy -- his support of Soviet tyranny, his taste for command economics, and the deep fissures created by his multiculturalism -- nevertheless suspended judgment as the nation indulged in a reprise of Trudeaumania. Here, George Jonas argues that while Trudeau's charm and charisma are gone, his execrable ideas and institutions live on.
Like a flashback from a bad LSD trip, Canada has been in the grip of Trudeaumania. One standard dictionary defines "mania" as an "obsessional enthusiasm." This is at best. The primary definition is "a mental disorder characterized by great excitement." Perhaps Trudeaumania fit the kinder definition in 1967, but 33 years later it can only be defined in the primary sense. In the year 2000, obsessive partiality to Mr. Trudeau's legacy presupposes either ignorance of what his legacy is, or a mental disorder.
Mr. Trudeau walked among us between 1919 and 2000. He concerned himself with public affairs during the 55 years spanning 1942 and 1997, first as a student and journalist, then as a politician and national leader, and finally as an elder statesman. During those years, the first main domestic argument in Canada was between free enterprise and the interventionist economy, and the second between the unitary and the devolutionary state. Internationally, the main argument was between liberal democracy and totalitarianism.
It's safe to say that in the first and the third of these arguments, Mr. Trudeau took the wrong side. The jury is still out on the second.
Some would argue Mr. Trudeau didn't take the wrong side between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, only the middle ground. This is silly. One cannot take the middle ground between life and death. If one proposes to conduct electricity, declaring neutrality between brass and rubber won't do. Mr. Trudeau did make a choice, and -- to stick with the same metaphor -- he chose rubber. Domestically, he favoured the command economy over free enterprise, and the unitary state over devolution. Internationally, he sided with Marxism-Leninism over liberal democracy. No wonder the lights failed to go on.
The wonder is that many of the same people who wouldn't see eye to eye with Mr. Trudeau on minimally two of the three fundamental questions that confronted him during his stewardship of Canada -- i.e. people who take the failure of Communism and the command economy for granted -- still grew misty-eyed at his passing, and spent the past two weeks extolling his legacy in near-hysterical terms.
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Not everyone got caught up in the hysteria. Notable early exceptions included Robert Fulford in this paper, whose fair and sober assessment on Sept. 29 paid full tribute to Mr. Trudeau's virtues without omitting or minimizing his flaws, adding that "it took some of us years to figure out that there was less to him than met the eye." In the same issue of the National Post, old China hand John Fraser, his fond memories of Mr. Trudeau notwithstanding, fairly reported the renowned Belgian sinologist Simon Leys referring to Canada's leader "with surpassing contempt" while itemizing the rubbish Mr. Trudeau wrote about Chairman Mao's realm in Two Innocents in Red China, a 1961 book he co-authored with the dim-witted Quebec radical journalist Jacques Hébert.
Eventually other commentators began to offer critical assessments of Mr. Trudeau's legacy. David Frum (whose piece in The Wall Street Journal was titled "A Great Man, but a Catastrophic Prime Minister"), writing in this paper, helped to dispel one particularly misleading myth about Mr. Trudeau with his accurate description of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms as "the opposite of a liberty-enhancing document." Though initially even the National Post joined the chorus of weeping and wailing, by Oct. 7, in an editorial titled "His communist pals," the paper put Mr. Trudeau's relationship with totalitarianism squarely on record. Some journalists refrained from writing about Mr. Trudeau for days after his death, because (as the columnist Michael Coren put it) "I thought it fit that he was buried before comment." Seemly as such reticence was, it allowed a deluge of appalling nonsense to inundate the media virtually unchallenged for the first number of days.
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Pierre Trudeau was quick-witted, and wits are generally attractive. The mind, as Raquel Welch once remarked, is an erogenous zone. People who aren't especially smart are especially impressed by nimble brains. This is particularly true of people who have been educated beyond their intellectual means, which describes the majority of this country's, or perhaps any country's, chattering classes. They turned out to be the engines of Trudeaumania.
Brightness is overrated, though. Certain errors actually require high IQs. Oscar Wilde, who knew something about wit, warned that "the intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all." It's easy to forget that wit can go hand in hand with qualities of other kinds. A. Y. Vishinsky, who came from an aristocratic family but ended up as chief prosecutor of Stalin's purges between 1936 and 1938 and later became Soviet foreign minister and permanent delegate to the United Nations, was a master of the quick retort. When British foreign minister Ernest Bevin, a lifelong Labour politician and dockworker's son, told him he needed no lectures about workers from an ex-prince, Vishinsky dryly replied: "My dear Bevin, we have one thing in common. We've both betrayed our classes."
Mr. Trudeau was cut of the same cloth. He was bright, had an acid tongue and didn't suffer fools gladly. This might have been fine, except he regarded everyone who disagreed with him as a fool. Such leaders run the risk of surrounding themselves mainly with groupies, sycophants and nonentities. Mr. Trudeau was no exception. As Mr. Fulford wrote, his cabinet eventually "turned into a collection of mediocrities."
Moxie, wit, allure and grace are exclusive properties of the living. They don't survive, except as flashes of memory. It's only a heritage of ideas, moral exemplars, institutions or possessions that continue to shape the lives of those left behind. In Mr. Trudeau's case, this is unfortunate. His perishables were comely, but his heritables execrable. He left us with little beyond an amusing pirouette behind the Queen's back. "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Shakespeare gave these lines to Mark Antony to speak at Julius Caesar's funeral, but they fit Mr. Trudeau as well.
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Many Canadians prided themselves on having a world-class leader in Mr. Trudeau. As it happened, only two current or former national leaders attended his funeral. One was Jimmy Carter, one of the most unsuccessful presidents in U.S. history. The other was Fidel Castro. It may be instructive to recall something about this honorary pallbearer walking behind Mr. Trudeau's Maple Leaf-draped casket. In Richard Nixon's memorable phrase, "Castro couldn't even go to the bathroom unless the Soviet Union put the nickel in the toilet."
In 1962, Mr. Castro invited the Kremlin to set up a base in Cuba, bringing the people of Canada within range of hostile nuclear weapons for the first time. When John F. Kennedy stared down Nikita Krushchev and the world stepped back from the brink of Armageddon, Mr. Castro's guerrillas proceeded to spread Communism through Latin America. In 1967, it was one such attempt that cost the life of his comrade Che Guevara in Bolivia. In 1974, Mr. Castro's protege, Maurice Bishop, led a coup in Grenada against Eric Gairy, the former British colony's first post-independence prime minister. Nine years later Mr. Bishop disappointed Mr. Castro, so he had his new protege, Bernard Coard, murder Mr. Bishop along with most of his cabinet. It was this last coup in 1983 that prompted U.S. president Ronald Reagan to rescue Grenada by sending in the Marines.
In 1976, Mr. Castro extended his efforts to export Communism to Africa. He dispatched Cuban troops to support MPLA, the Marxist-Leninist Popular Liberation Movement. Mr. Trudeau aided this Soviet-backed effort by letting Cuban transports refuel in Newfoundland. For the next 15 years, Mr. Castro's soldiers did their bit to keep Angola in a state of civil war, until the collapse of the Soviet Union forced their withdrawal in 1991.
Meanwhile Mr. Castro did his best to make life unbearable for his own people. In 1980, during a particularly scandalous episode of his rule, nearly 11,000 Cubans rushed into the grounds of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana to seek asylum. Between April and September that year, until Mr. Castro closed down the port of Mariel, more than 125,000 Cubans fled the country. Since taking power in 1959, Mr. Trudeau's pallbearer has murdered, purged or forced into exile significantly more human beings than Yugoslavia's indicted war criminal ex-leader, Slobodan Milosevic.
Mr. Castro acted as pallbearer at Mr. Trudeau's funeral because he and the former prime minister of Canada were friends. On a 1973 visit to Havana, Mr. Trudeau felt moved to shout "Viva Castro!" Returning to this country, he defended his gesture by saying it was just a customary greeting in Cuba, a bit like "good morning" in Canada. On this basis we might have expected him to shout "Heil Hitler!" in Nazi Germany.
Shouting "Viva Castro!" was by no means an aberration. Mr. Trudeau embraced Communist despots wherever he could find them. On his four visits to China between 1960 and 1979, he continually played the role of appeaser and apologist, first to Mao Zedong, and later to his heirs. In 1973, he defended Mao's policies in Canada's Parliament, oblivious to (or uncaring about) the fact that he was seeking accommodation with a system responsible for the deaths of some 80 million people. In 1981, Mr. Trudeau expressed sympathy for Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski. This was after the notorious general in his trademark pink Neophane glasses banned Solidarity and jailed or sent into hiding its leaders, including Lech Walesa. In 1983, Mr. Trudeau argued with some passion in Parliament that he simply "couldn't believe" the Soviets would knowingly destroy a commercial airliner. This was after the Kremlin finally admitted knowing that Korean Air Flight 007 was a passenger plane, and justified shooting it down along with its 269 passengers because it was "spying."
Mr. Trudeau had only contempt for Soviet dissidents. Off the record he talked about the Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov as "hooligans." He went on record about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, shrugging it off as a "straight sphere-of-influence question."
After leaving office, Mr. Trudeau took his sons on a tour of Siberia. It was to show them "the place where the future is being created," as he told the Novosti Press Agency. He also said he wanted his children to see Siberia "about which so many prejudices are held in the West."
It was a close call, but, as it turned out, the world's future was not being created in Siberia. But Mr. Trudeau's sympathy for Communism in its various guises had manifested itself to the last. A few people went so far as to argue over the years that Mr. Trudeau had been a Kremlin agent of influence. There never was the slightest evidence for this. The confusion arose, I think, because Mr. Trudeau, with no inducement and completely on his own, had entertained opinions other people would only entertain if they had their arms twisted by the KGB.
In a free country, people are entitled to their opinions. Still, having a soft spot for a Mao, a Castro or a Jaruzelski exceeds ordinary political latitudes. There's a material difference between alternative ways of looking at the world and apologizing for mass murder. Consorting with killer despots may be viewed as a fundamental flaw. If Mr. Trudeau had a similar weakness for Nazi-type regimes and rulers, it would have made him a pariah, and rightly so. But in an astounding reversal, even the mention of Mr. Trudeau's Communist associations has been viewed as not quite comme il faut in Canadian society.
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As many pundits have pointed out over the years, Canadians chose Mr. Trudeau in 1968 primarily because he seemed to have an answer to the question: "What does Quebec want?"
But did he?
In one sense he did, considering that a generation later Quebec is still part of Confederation. In another sense, he didn't. Bilingualism never took hold of the country's imagination beyond a coterie of intellectuals, faux-intellectuals, Trudeamaniacs and career civil servants. Francophone Quebec, openly and defiantly unilingual, is no more at home in Canada today than it was in 1968. Separatism, underplayed as it may be at present, continually simmers beneath the surface. It is, after all, the official program of both the federal Bloc Québécois and the ruling provincial Parti Québécois.
To give Mr. Trudeau his due, in the FLQ days of the 1960s separatists weren't reasonable people in business suits. They were an amalgam of the New Left and the irredentist Right, terrorists as often as not, in the mould of the Italian Red Brigades and West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang. Even the separatist leader René Lévesque shrugged off the bombing of the Montreal stock exchange as an unfortunate outcome of understandable frustration. Standing up to them, Mr. Trudeau was on the side of the angels.
Mr. Trudeau offered French Canadians the vision of a bilingual, bicultural country in exchange for giving up the dream of an independent Quebec. He also had an unspoken agenda. Why should francophones be satisfied with ruling Quebec, Mr. Trudeau intimated, when it was within their grasp to rule the entire country? "Masters in our own house," he said in 1968, turning around the Quebec nationalist slogan, "but our house is all Canada." If Canada was to be a bilingual country with power concentrated in Ottawa's federal government, it would be francophones who would occupy most positions of authority in it. This was simply in the nature of things.
But there was another matter. Even before Mr. Trudeau came along, Canada has been condescending about the American ideal of a "melting pot." We felt it was a crude notion that people from different parts of the globe should shed their old identities and blend into a new identity and culture. We believed it was not only possible, but more mature and dignified, to build our own nation of founders and immigrants in a different way. To the American melting pot we opposed the Canadian ideal of a "cultural mosaic."
As a counterweight to Quebec's special status in Confederation, Mr. Trudeau took the idea of the cultural mosaic one step further. He advanced multiculturalism. According to this notion, all inhabitants of Canada from any part of the world could retain -- forever, if they wished -- their separate identities and traditions. The whole mosaic would be Canadian, while the constituent bits in it could remain as distinct as they have ever been. But none, not even the Québécois, would be more distinct than any of the others. Mr. Trudeau cleverly proposed to abolish special status by offering special status to all.
Did this multicultural ideal lead Canada to a colourful but harmonious pattern, or did it lead to a fragmented country of ever-multiplying solitudes? There is little doubt about one thing. By 1990, it led straight to Meech Lake.
Ironically, at Meech Lake French Canada wanted from English Canada only what it had all along: a distinct society. And just as ironically, English Canada refused to acknowledge in the abstract what it had, in practice, acknowledged long ago.
Most Canadians who said "no" to Meech Lake and later to Charlottetown weren't rejecting either French Canada or unity. They were merely refusing to carve group politics into stone. They were saying no to a country whose people draw their identities not from being citizens but from belonging to this or that "distinct" tribe, this or that race, this or that income bracket, or even this or that sex or sexual orientation.
People said no to replacing Canada with a patchwork of inward-looking, hostile fragments: Francos and Anglos, whites and blacks, immigrants and natives, perhaps even men and women -- strangers who co-exist in a state of uneasy truce like passengers on a subway train, sharing a destination but no destiny.
Mr. Trudeau did, of course, urge Canadians to say no to such a country at Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Yet in many ways it was his influence that brought the choice about. Canada has always been a country of two nations. Nothing can cure this, but nothing needs to cure it. It's not a sickness; it's just a fact: a fact Mr. Trudeau preferred never to face. In fairness, neither have many other Canadians.
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Mr. Trudeau flirted with the command economy. More precisely, he liked to command, and neither knew nor cared much about economic matters. Since he couldn't control a free market by definition, it held little fascination for him.
Mr. Trudeau's economic ideas embraced wage-and-price control, deficit financing, confiscatory taxation, intrusive social engineering and the National Energy Policy. The last, apart from the harm it did to individuals, created a sense of alienation in Western Canada second only to the separatist sentiment in Quebec.
It's possible to quantify the economic results of Mr. Trudeau's legacy of Big Government, as the columnist Eric Margolis did recently. The national debt grew from $11.3-billion in 1968 to $128-billion in 1984. The annual federal deficit went from zero to $25-billion. Ottawa's spending rose from 30% of Canada's total economic output to nearly 53%; our dollar plummeted from around US$1.06 in 1970 to 66 cents today. The unemployment rate has been running between three and five percentage points higher here than in the United States, and Canada reduced itself from being one of the world's three richest nations 30 years ago (along with Switzerland and the U.S.) to one of the three leading debtor nations in the West, alongside Belgium and Italy.
Though Canada no longer runs an annual deficit, the debt Mr. Trudeau entrenched, and Brian Mulroney continued to cultivate, remains. Today it exceeds half a trillion dollars. To service it, Canada's taxpayers paid $41.5-billion in interest in 1999 alone -- four times more, as Mr. Margolis pointed out, than they spent on national defence.
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One of the most telling examples of Mr. Trudeau's thinking occurred many years ago when it came to light that the RCMP had burned down some barns belonging to Quebec separatists. There was a big fuss in the media. Mr. Trudeau shrugged, and said that if people were so upset by the Mounties burning barns illegally, perhaps he'd make the burning of barns by the Mounties legal. It seemed not to occur to him that it isn't wrong to burn down barns because it's illegal, but it's illegal to burn down barns because it's wrong.
Like other statist politicians, Mr. Trudeau seemed to think his ability to set out for his country what is legal and illegal also entitled him to set out for his citizens what is right and wrong. He either didn't see, or resented, that right and wrong are only reflected by the laws, not determined by them.
To the dismay of Plato's latter-day disciples who are forever trying to set up the Just Society by central edict, right and wrong are resolved by the inner moral compass of people, though modified from time to time by their religion, common experience, climate, technology, social organization, historic period and cultural fashion. Even commissars or ayatollahs have to deal with something akin to Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. Philosopher-princes find this a hard pill to swallow, and Mr. Trudeau was no exception. He had no patience with anyone's moral compass but his own.
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If Mr. Trudeau's answers to the major questions of his period were so obviously wrong, and if his grace, wit, sex appeal and charisma do not quite explain the bright flashback of Trudeaumania that swept the country over the past two weeks, what exactly does explain it? Is it the Boomer generation's nostalgia, recalling their own illusions with fondness? Is it Mr. Trudeau's ageing followers feeling (in David Frum's words) "young again and their theory fresh and unsullied"? Or is it all this, and yet something more?
One possible answer lies in something Andrew Coyne wrote in the National Post on the day Mr. Trudeau was interred, namely that the passion we are showing for Mr. Trudeau now "is really a passion for Canada -- for a Canada of ideals." It's because Mr. Trudeau stood with Canadians in saying no to Meech Lake, saying no to a Canada of "perpetual self-denial, without purpose or meaning, constantly on the verge of extinction."
Fair enough. Nationalism is potent and inexplicable. Perhaps in spite of being so abysmally wrong about so many things, Mr. Trudeau somehow managed to embody in his sexy, witty, pirouetting, graceful, daring, passionate self the idea of a nation. He became more than the sum of his parts, something larger than himself, a symbol for the mystery of Canada, as far beyond rational analysis as love or hate. Which takes us back to the definition of a mania. For me, at any rate, it's something easier to diagnose than to share.
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Young people have been puzzled by the frenzy in the media. As the undergraduate columnist Rachel Sa pointed out in The Toronto Sun last week, Mr. Trudeau is just a name to her generation. Perhaps this isn't entirely Mr. Trudeau's fault, i.e. it isn't inherent in the paucity of his legacy. It cannot even be laid wholly at the door of our educational system, which is raising a generation (as Ms. Sa writes) "without a sense of its history." In an age in which 200-channel fragmentation goes hand in hand with Internet information overload, disdain for the past defines our entire culture. Ignorance may be an inevitable by-product of an era that worships immediacy, that isn't comfortable with anything except the latest people and trends -- and not even with those unless they can be reduced to five-second film clips and sound bites.
Having said this, Mr. Trudeau's legacy has been particularly forgettable. The social models he promoted and admired, from outright Communism to the lib-left's peculiar quasi-Marxist, quasi-Keynesian structures of command economy, have not only been discarded and discredited, but ended up "in the dustbin of history," to borrow the Politburo's favourite idiom. Mr. Trudeau's promise of unifying the country also came to nothing. Bilingualism didn't do the trick. Non-traditional immigration and multiculturalism may have changed the face of Canada, but they did little to either unify or imbue it with a new sense of identity. Today, Canada is as much a nation of "two solitudes" as it was in 1945 when Hugh MacLennan used the term for the title of his novel.
If anything, Canadian society is more fragmented than it was before the Trudeau era. Some of the concepts that contributed to Canada's splintering into hostile, self-seeking xenoliths were inspired by Mr. Trudeau's ideas, and some evolved as reactions to them, but in either case the result was the same. Multiculturalism, Western alienation, interest-group politics, the gender wars, and aboriginal separatism created only an increasing number of solitudes. In this sense, Mr. Trudeau still walks at night. Even driving a stake through his heart may no longer make a difference. The mini-vampires of his legacy have taken on bloodthirsty lives of their own. His repatriated Constitution has turned a relatively respectable judiciary into a seething army of Frankenstein monsters who lurch around making law without regard to the original purpose of the legislation. By now the country resembles an elaborate survival game, in which hostile tribes of Canadians clamour for the attention of governments and courts to enforce their claims against other Canadians. It's not a pretty picture, and Rachel Sa's contemporaries shouldn't worry if they don't recall much about the man who conjured it up. |
