One more -- probably the last -- from the National Post.
He haunts us still. Unfortunately
Mark Steyn
National Post
Question: What do the following have in common?
a) The impending election
b) The injunction by our Supreme Court judges that they are not to be addressed as "Lord" and "Lady"
c) The attempted renaming of Mount Logan
d) The National Post from Friday September 30th to Wednesday October 4th
Answer: They are all manifestations of the rictus grip in which Pierre Trudeau still holds this country. To take them in order:
a) The impending election is not only "unnecessary" but also a constitutional affront. The Parliament of 1997 was elected for five years and just because poor old Jean Chrétien is the premature ejaculator of Canadian politics and sadly incapable of going the distance is no reason for the Governor-General to keep passing out writs of dissolution like Viagra prescriptions. Mr Chrétien's two feeble three-year terms are the shortest majority governments in Canadian history with the exception of Laurier's last ministry, which he cut short for the "Reciprocity" election of 1911. (Incidentally, if you're one of those Trudeaunecromaniacs who believe that the great man is the "Father Of Our Country" or that "he gave us our country" or that "we are all his children," you may find allusions to anything more than 30 years old disorienting and confusing. "1911" in our calendar would, of course, be year 57 PET, or Pre-Era of Trudeau.)
If you question the Prime Minister's right to call an election for his own convenience, Mr. Chrétien flips you the finger and says, "Just watch me." Under the Liberals' one-party Monopoly, the object is to pass Go and collect $200 as often as possible. But there's nothing in constitutional convention that says the rest of us have to go along. A prime minister has no right to a dissolution before the fifth year of a Parliament unless there is a pressing new issue of public policy (as in 1911), or there is no alternative government. That's why Lord Byng refused Mackenzie King in 1926. The circumstances are far more clear-cut this time: Not only does the Prime Minister have no right to an election, but the country has the right not to have his flaccid three-year electoral cycles enshrined as precedent. The Governor-General would do the state a great service if she told Jean to take a hike. If ever there were a time to say, "I'm Adrienne Clarkson and you're not," this is it.
But, alas, I seem to be the only one who holds out any hope that her viceregal eminence will resist Mr. Chrétien. In his later years, Pierre Trudeau would occasionally tell friends in Montreal that the monarchy was a lot of nonsense and that he would have got rid of it if he could. He was, to put it mildly, dissembling. He was no believer in republican government, unless it was the "people's republics" of his late chums Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu. He was an ambitious man of autocratic bent and an attenuated, nervous monarchy suited him well, as it did Mussolini. So he weakened the institution, undermined its legitimacy -- and then lodged it permanently in place in what I see we now call the "Trudeau Constitution" of 1982, thereby ensuring that the only monarch in Canada would be the prime minister. Just to make the point, he began the tradition of installing third-rate non-entities in Rideau Hall. Whatever one thinks of those English toffs or the first generation of native viceroys -- Vincent Massey and Georges Vanier -- they would have seen the Prime Minister's crappy little scheme to gerrymander the electoral cycle for what it was, and they would have had the stature to resist it. Madame Clarkson should politely reject the notion that Canadian democracy, like Mount Logan, is just another one of the Prime Minister's baubles to dispose of as he wishes. She should tell Mr. Chrétien that he has no basis on which to make his request, unless, of course, the elderly gentleman is feeling tuckered out, in which case she naturally understands and could he ask if there's anyone else in the building who'd like to have a go -- Mr. Martin, say? Go on, Your Excellency, do it. A grateful nation would be eternally in your debt.
b) The Supreme Court has been passing out little notes saying, "Counsel are asked to refrain from addressing the judges as 'my lord', 'my lady', 'your lordship' or 'your ladyship'." Why? "You know, it is so foreign to be called 'my lord' at a hockey game," says Supreme Court justice Jack Major. "It's just embarrassing for some of us."
I don't know how often Jack --I'm sure he won't mind me calling him Jack -- goes to hockey games or how often he's regaled with a cheery "My lord, would you like fries with that?", but I suspect it's not a pressing problem.
Jack points out that these "anachronistic" titles date back to the Middle Ages, and that judges who hanker to be addressed as such should "get into the 21st century." It says much for our obsession with novelty that our customs' longevity should now be their principal offence. In the Caribbean, the Speakers of those tiny, British-derived island parliaments love their wigs and maces and copies of Hansard: they advertise, in stark contrast to their neighbours in Cuba and Haiti, that they are the legal heirs to centuries of peaceful constitutional evolution. Blessed are those societies whose institutions endure long enough to become "anachronistic." In a superficial sense, it may be more comfortable to wander into the Supreme Court and address the bench with "Wassup, dudes?" But it's more comforting to be reminded that you're part of a continuing legal tradition tested by centuries rather than being merely subject to whatever fancy Madame L'Heureux-Dubé has picked up at her latest international gay and lesbian conference. But Trudeau turned Canada into a country that scorns its past, that, like him, is now the oldest swinger in town, concerned only to demonstrate that we can still, metaphorically, climb into the beads and kaftan and get a date with Margot Kidder. So by all means, if our legal traditions are old, toss 'em out: If Jack finds it all so "foreign," let him cast aside his robes and sit on the bench wearing a reverse baseball cap and an "I'M WITH STUPID" T-shirt.
c) On the matter of renaming Mount Logan, the Liberals appear to have had a rethink. It is certainly appropriate to rename something for Mr. Trudeau since he so much enjoyed renaming things himself -- not changing them, just renaming them. So he renamed the Royal Mail "Canada Post." The notion that, while he was ordering up the new letterheads, he might also endeavour to improve the delivery of mail seems never to have occurred to him. Like many of his totalitarian friends, he disdained to be bound by such humdrum concepts as meaning and reality. If he declared the country bilingual, why then, it must be so. "Like our first controversial Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald," said Joe Clark, "Pierre Trudeau would have built the railway." I doubt it. But he did build Mirabel International Airport, an airport which is not an airport by any agreed definition of the word -- in the sense that one can take scheduled flights hither and yon -- but it is the most luxuriously appointed parking lot in Quebec and conveniently situated between Laval and the Laurentians. On the same principle, I would be in favour of renaming Mount Logan "Lac Trudeau."
Others will differ. Some have suggested renaming the Plains of Abraham after Trudeau. We could call it the Planes of Trudeau and pretend it's Quebec City's new international airport. But why stop there? Let's go for the big one. Trudeau's is, after all, an incredible accomplishment: No political leader of a long-established Western nation has ever succeeded so exhaustively in reinventing the state as a projection of his own identity. Political comparisons are useless. One thinks instead of Liberace, who once insisted that a young lover have his face reconstructed to look more like his own, because he wanted to gaze on himself during sex. And so it was with Trudeau: he loved the nation the more it looked like him. Standing in the rubble of the old Dominion of Canada, we his children should complete his grand project and rename the entire country Trudeaupia. It would be a fitting tribute to the collossus who bestrides our times like a, er, collossus.
On a related note, I am proposing, as a mark of respect to our current Prime Minister, to rename my bottom after him, secure in the knowledge that this seems likely to catch on. ("I see Steyn is talking out of his Chrétien again.")
d) Which brings me to the National Post. I was asked the other day why I hadn't weighed in to bid adieu to our philosopher-king as he began his pirouette through eternity, as we columnists like to say. Well, as it happens, I did crank out a few thoughts on the subject, but late on the weekend after his death I got a call saying the paper's policy was not to run any "anti-Trudeau" pieces until after the funeral, so David Frum and I were being held and instead the Post's Monday Comment page would be devoted to two riveting pieces by a Liberal apparatchik and a chap who works at Cité libre, the magazine Trudeau founded, both arguing the novel position that his genius has been insufficiently appreciated.
Now I've never paid much attention to questions of press ethics, though Maude Barlow and Co. have been warning for many a moon that Conrad Black has been jeopardizing Canada's journalistic integrity by using his papers to advance his extreme right-wing agenda. Still, after all my years of toil in the Black boiler room, you'll understand why I'm a little startled to find the one thing he and his sinister henchmen draw the line at is saying beastly things about Pierre Trudeau.
To be honest, I don't think it was Conrad's decision. On the day after Trudeau's death, even the boss was in generous mode, at least to those of us who'd been hoping for a reprise of his magnificent review of the Trudeau memoirs, which appeared under the headline "Clichéd, Superficial, Nauseating." This time round, the headline was "He Taught Us 'Our House' Is All Of Canada," which sounds like the winner in a Name-The-Most-Unlikely-Headline-For-A-Conrad-Black-Column-On-Pierre-Trudeau competition. To be fair to him, I can find nothing in his column indicating that Trudeau "taught" him anything whatsoever and, if Mr. Black were half the power-crazed whacko he's made out to be, whichever editor appended that sappy, driveling headline to his column would now be seeking alternative employment.
The Post's determination to outdo the inane pieties of conventional Trudeaumania was distressing to behold. Andrew Coyne went so far as to measure PET's decisive role in our history with that of Winston Churchill in 1940 -- a comparison that only underlines our woeful triviality. If the defence of the West had rested with Trudeau in May, 1940, I think we can all guess how the Second World War would have turned out. (In his memoirs, the young Trudeau sums up the great conflict of the century thus: "So there was a war. Tough.")
I don't mind that so many of my colleagues rushed to prostrate themselves, but I do object, as the tide of sychophantic drool threatened to swamp the nation, that those of us who dissented were excluded from the Post's pages. The National Post was founded in 1998 as an alternative to the stultifying homogeneity of much of the Canadian media. But when it came to our first great test we failed, abysmally, and undid much of the good work of the last two years.
Trudeau did not unite the country, he exacerbated its divisions. He did not "put us on the map," he took us off it -- and, if you doubt it, glance over the guest list for the funeral. By comparison with Canadian ululators, the Iranian reaction to the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini was a model of self-restraint. That even the National Post felt, for five days, that it had no choice but to join in a such a dismal performance speaks poorly for Canada, and for us.
Some of us are not yet ready to accept the national myth. Some of us think the four and a half centuries before 1968 are also relevant to modern Canada. And, if Jean Chrétien wants to run an election on the Trudeau legacy, I for one think we should call his bluff. But, if on November 28th da liddle guy is presiding over his one-party state for another three years, we at the National Post will have played our shameful part. |
