A summary of entertaining reading from the Post and other sources... some of this has appeared in previous posts.
George Jonas, National Post
Rod Macivor, Ottawa Citizen
Gord Croucher, The Province
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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. |
