Monday, November 29, 2004
Why Pierre Trudeau should win the CBC's Greatest Canadian contest - Part II
For we are young, my brothers, and full of doubt,
and we have listened too long to timid men.
- Bruce Hutchison
In my last post, I argued that the only people on the CBC's list of the Ten Greatest Canadians who are actually worthy of consideration for the top spot are Frederick Banting, Tommy Douglas, Terry Fox, John A. MacDonald, David Suzuki, and Pierre Trudeau. I shall now proceed to demonstrate why Trudeau is the most worthy of them all - the "Greatest Canadian", if you will.
Pierre Trudeau was a man of public policy unparallelled among any other Western heads of government, let alone Canadian ones. His intellect, tempered with a steely and nearly unshakable resolve, brought Canada some of our most important policies, which are alone enough to give him a spot in the three greatest Canadians of all time. Combine this with his delivery, his style, and his force of personality, and there can be no doubt that no other person has influenced Canada or Canadians as deeply and as positively as him.
In the beginning, there was Trudeau the intellectual. Co-founder of Cité Libre (the magazine that published monthly but had the influence of daily), globetrotter, dabbler in all that interested him (and neglecter of those things, like world wars, that didn't), thorn in the side of the autocratic and demagogic Duplessis régime, Trudeau was among the most important figures in Québec's révolution tranquille. His early writings - among them the essay "Quelques obstacles à la démocratie au Québec" - savaged the pillars of Québec power, be they church, anglo business owner, or roi nègre. As a sage on the front lines of the Révolution, Trudeau took on the establishment.
But the Révolution was eventually won, and the establishment fell into the hands of those who had sought to bring it down. Jean Lesage became Premier of Québec, the radicals became the cabinet ministers, and Trudeau got the University appointment that had hitherto eluded him by reason of his political beliefs. Urban nationalism replaced rural Catholicism as Québec's state religion, and Trudeau found it no less oppressive a creed. Again he took up the pen, and wrote his seminal "La nouvelle trahison des clercs", a searing attack on his province's new Gods, separatism chief among them. In response to poet Jean-Guy Pilon's assertion that "when the day comes that this cultural minority, hitherto only tolerated in this country, becomes a nation unto itself in its own borders, our literature will take a tremendous leap ahead, because the writer, like everyone else in this society will feel free. And a free man is capable of doing great things", Trudeau wrote:
So Trudeau the intellectual became Trudeau the contrarian, and as his contemporaries sought a "free" Québec he decided to take full advantage of the freedoms already available by becoming federal justice minister (the feds didn't want him, of course, but Jean Marchand made Trudeau's acceptance into caucus a condition of his own entry into federal politics), where his intellect proceeded to impress. "Unlike the unreconstructed political dinosaurs of the Liberal party who still occupy most of the positions of power," wrote Peter Newman, "Trudeau is an agent of ferment, a critic of Canadian society, questioning its collected conventional wisdom."
In hindsight, it has the look of inevitability, but Trudeau was a very odd choice to lead the Liberals. For one thing, he was interesting, which in and of itself marked a radical departure from a hundred years of Liberal tradition. For another, he had criticized the Liberals sharply in the past (Mike Pearson was "the defrocked priest of peace" for accepting nuclear warheads on Canadian soil), and there is no value more prized in the Liberal Party than loyalty to label. But choose him the Liberals did, setting the stage for at once the most impressive and the most entertaining (MacKenzie Bowell's excepted) Prime Ministries in Canadian history.
Both the enterainment and the impression stemmed largely from Trudeau's unwillingness to yield on those issue that truly mattered to him. This was captured, visually, by his scowl at bottle-throwing protesters on the eve of the 1968 election, while other dignitaries ducked for cover. Two years later, this resolve manifested itself in his behaviour towards the FLQ crisis, as he refused to negotiate with terrorists (famously, he told his wife that if she or their sons were kidnapped, there would be no negotiation for their release). Make no mistake: Pierre Trudeau was wrong to invoke the War Measures Act, just as previous parliaments were wrong to create it. But at a time when almost everybody, especially Québecois intellectuals, was advocating meaningful concessions to the terrorists, Trudeau, to his enduring credit, didn't make any. Since then, there has never been a politically-motivated terrorist action against the Canadian state.
In 1980, he refused, as Jean Chrétien fifteen years later did not, to grant federation-altering concessions to the nationalists. Then, two years later, he managed to put through a Constitution that attained his major goals - patriation and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms - without any of the decentralization that the Premiers were seeking.
Which leads us to Trudeau's concrete record of policy. Beginning with his reform, as Minister of Justice, of the Criminal Code and of divorce laws that legalized most sexual activity between consenting results and effectively made divorce completely discretionary (reforms he famously defended with the line, not his own, that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation"), this was a man who was as able to generate ideas as to implement them. Inheriting Pearson's royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism, Trudeau breathed life into its recommendations. For anglophones in Québec and for francophones elsewhere, this represented one of the most important moves ever made in advancing Trudeau's true passion, the empowerment of the individual in the face of the state.
And then there was multiculturalism, which constituted endorsement by the state of the idea - unique among the family of nations - that multiple cultures could and should exist in one state, without having the interests of the individual in any way subordinated to them. While it has not been articulated as such, multiculturalism amounts to the right for the individual to practise a culture of his/her choice.
The culmination of these trends was the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which entrenched the most important rights in the Canadian Constitution, and which has shaped the law in this country ever since (it's been speculated that a time will come in which all cases heard by the Supreme Court will be Charter cases, on the rights of individuals in the face of the state). Despite two imperfections forced upon him - the removal of property rights insisted upon by the NDP and the notorious Section 33, a sop to provincial premiers - the establishment of the Charter ranks as the greatest accomplishment by any Prime Minister during the twentieth century.
Often overlooked in the (deserved) hullaballoo over the Charter is the issue of patriation itself. For one hundred and fifteen years, Canada existed as a state constitutionally subordinate to the United Kingdom. It was Trudeau, through the 1982 patriation, who granted this country its real independence. And it was Trudeau, even in retirement, who protected it, coming out swining against the entire Canadian political establishment to play a decisive role in the defeat of both the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accords.
Surely the above is enough for any thinking person to rank him as among the most deserving of the "Greatest Canadian" title, though we've yet to touch the question of the intangible effect he had on Canadians. As Hutchison said, up until 1968 we had truly listened too long to timid men (excepting, of course, John Diefenbaker to whom, to our eternal credit, we fast stopped listening). Mike Pearson's idea of snappy dressing was a bowtie, while MacKenzie King's idea of a sound byte was "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription". Louis St-Laurant was Prime Minister for a decade, and he's been all but forgotten a scant fifty years later. In 1979, Canadians threw Trudeau from office and discovered, to our horror, that we'd replaced him with Joe Clark, who we turfed at our next opportunity. Canada was through with listening to timid men.
Quite apart from the staged stunts, the somersaulting into swimming pools, the kissing of young women, and the pirouetting behind the Queen's back to protest Buckingham Palace's distinction between heads of government and heads of state, Trudeau had that intangible known as "charisma". Marlon Brando called him "the most intimidating man [he'd] ever met". John Lennon visited in 1969, and it was the Beatle who came away overwhelmed, saying "He is beautiful people." He dated Margot Kidder, Kim Catrell, and Barbara Streisand. And when confrontational - which he often was - he was no less magnificent: telling (partisan P.C.) Tim Ralfe and others who doubted his commitment to beating terrorism to "just watch [him]"; demolishing Renée Levesque's criticism of his "anglo" middle name ("That, my dear friends, is what contempt is. . . it means saying that the Quebecers on the No side are not as good as the others and perhaps they have a drop or two of foreign blood, while the people on the Yes side have pure blood in their veins. . ."); responding to Nixon's label of "that asshole Trudeau" ("I've been called worse things by better men"); wistfully bidding the Parliamentary Press Gallery adieu upon his retirement ("I regret that I won't have you to kick around anymore."). He had style, man. While it's fashionable to discount the importance of style, I defy anybody to look me in the eye and tell me that Canada's national character, to the extent that it exists, was not been shaped by the force of Trudeau's personality as much as by the force of his ideas.
Fidel Castro came to his funeral. So did Jimmy Carter. Helmut Schmidt eulogized him for MacLean's magazine. The world had never bothered to listen to timid men from Canada, but when we produced a Trudeau, watch out.
Not that Trudeau was ever able to cultivate this international respect for the purpose of furthering Canada's foreign policy. Indeed, his record in foreign affairs was matched only be his record in domestic ones for day-to-day futility. Trudeau was, in many ways, a disappointment. But he was a disappointment only because he had heightened our expectations to the point that disappointment was not only a possibility, but an inveitability. Could the same have been said for King, or St-Laurent? Could the same now be said of Paul Martin?
He was wrong on the War Measures Act. He was ineffective of all matters economic. He let the debt get out of control. He approached issues unrelated to the sovereignty of the individual with a disinterest bordering on indifference. But if you can look at the Charter and at bilingualism and tell me that a few extra points of inflation thirty years ago make up the basis on which we should judge this man, well, I'd hate to have your priorities.
To sum up, I'll throw things over to Allan Fotheringham:
Or Geoffrey Stevens:
It's okay, Pierre: Canadians didn't always give you your due when you were alive, either. Give us a few decades; we'll come around.
Next post: Trudeau head to head against Banting, Douglas, Fox, MacDonald, and Suzuki.
|
For we are young, my brothers, and full of doubt,
and we have listened too long to timid men.
- Bruce Hutchison
In my last post, I argued that the only people on the CBC's list of the Ten Greatest Canadians who are actually worthy of consideration for the top spot are Frederick Banting, Tommy Douglas, Terry Fox, John A. MacDonald, David Suzuki, and Pierre Trudeau. I shall now proceed to demonstrate why Trudeau is the most worthy of them all - the "Greatest Canadian", if you will.
Pierre Trudeau was a man of public policy unparallelled among any other Western heads of government, let alone Canadian ones. His intellect, tempered with a steely and nearly unshakable resolve, brought Canada some of our most important policies, which are alone enough to give him a spot in the three greatest Canadians of all time. Combine this with his delivery, his style, and his force of personality, and there can be no doubt that no other person has influenced Canada or Canadians as deeply and as positively as him.
In the beginning, there was Trudeau the intellectual. Co-founder of Cité Libre (the magazine that published monthly but had the influence of daily), globetrotter, dabbler in all that interested him (and neglecter of those things, like world wars, that didn't), thorn in the side of the autocratic and demagogic Duplessis régime, Trudeau was among the most important figures in Québec's révolution tranquille. His early writings - among them the essay "Quelques obstacles à la démocratie au Québec" - savaged the pillars of Québec power, be they church, anglo business owner, or roi nègre. As a sage on the front lines of the Révolution, Trudeau took on the establishment.
But the Révolution was eventually won, and the establishment fell into the hands of those who had sought to bring it down. Jean Lesage became Premier of Québec, the radicals became the cabinet ministers, and Trudeau got the University appointment that had hitherto eluded him by reason of his political beliefs. Urban nationalism replaced rural Catholicism as Québec's state religion, and Trudeau found it no less oppressive a creed. Again he took up the pen, and wrote his seminal "La nouvelle trahison des clercs", a searing attack on his province's new Gods, separatism chief among them. In response to poet Jean-Guy Pilon's assertion that "when the day comes that this cultural minority, hitherto only tolerated in this country, becomes a nation unto itself in its own borders, our literature will take a tremendous leap ahead, because the writer, like everyone else in this society will feel free. And a free man is capable of doing great things", Trudeau wrote:
It would seem, too, that Pilon is a good poet. I would like him to tell me - in prose, if he likes - how national sovereignty is going to make him 'a free man' and capable of doing great things'. If he fails to find within himself, in the world about him and in the stars above, the dignity, pride, and other well-springs of poetry, I wonder why and how he will find them in a 'free' Quebec.
[...]
I was in Ghana during the first months of her independence. The poets were no better, the chemists were no more numerous, and, on a more tangible level, salaries were no higher. Since the intellectuals were unable to explain to the people why this should be, they distracted their attention to some obscure island in the Gulf of Guinea which needed to be 'reconquered'. To this end a large slice of this economically destitute state's budget was earmarked for the army - which ultimately served to put the parliamentary opposition in jail.
So Trudeau the intellectual became Trudeau the contrarian, and as his contemporaries sought a "free" Québec he decided to take full advantage of the freedoms already available by becoming federal justice minister (the feds didn't want him, of course, but Jean Marchand made Trudeau's acceptance into caucus a condition of his own entry into federal politics), where his intellect proceeded to impress. "Unlike the unreconstructed political dinosaurs of the Liberal party who still occupy most of the positions of power," wrote Peter Newman, "Trudeau is an agent of ferment, a critic of Canadian society, questioning its collected conventional wisdom."
In hindsight, it has the look of inevitability, but Trudeau was a very odd choice to lead the Liberals. For one thing, he was interesting, which in and of itself marked a radical departure from a hundred years of Liberal tradition. For another, he had criticized the Liberals sharply in the past (Mike Pearson was "the defrocked priest of peace" for accepting nuclear warheads on Canadian soil), and there is no value more prized in the Liberal Party than loyalty to label. But choose him the Liberals did, setting the stage for at once the most impressive and the most entertaining (MacKenzie Bowell's excepted) Prime Ministries in Canadian history.
Both the enterainment and the impression stemmed largely from Trudeau's unwillingness to yield on those issue that truly mattered to him. This was captured, visually, by his scowl at bottle-throwing protesters on the eve of the 1968 election, while other dignitaries ducked for cover. Two years later, this resolve manifested itself in his behaviour towards the FLQ crisis, as he refused to negotiate with terrorists (famously, he told his wife that if she or their sons were kidnapped, there would be no negotiation for their release). Make no mistake: Pierre Trudeau was wrong to invoke the War Measures Act, just as previous parliaments were wrong to create it. But at a time when almost everybody, especially Québecois intellectuals, was advocating meaningful concessions to the terrorists, Trudeau, to his enduring credit, didn't make any. Since then, there has never been a politically-motivated terrorist action against the Canadian state.
In 1980, he refused, as Jean Chrétien fifteen years later did not, to grant federation-altering concessions to the nationalists. Then, two years later, he managed to put through a Constitution that attained his major goals - patriation and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms - without any of the decentralization that the Premiers were seeking.
Which leads us to Trudeau's concrete record of policy. Beginning with his reform, as Minister of Justice, of the Criminal Code and of divorce laws that legalized most sexual activity between consenting results and effectively made divorce completely discretionary (reforms he famously defended with the line, not his own, that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation"), this was a man who was as able to generate ideas as to implement them. Inheriting Pearson's royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism, Trudeau breathed life into its recommendations. For anglophones in Québec and for francophones elsewhere, this represented one of the most important moves ever made in advancing Trudeau's true passion, the empowerment of the individual in the face of the state.
And then there was multiculturalism, which constituted endorsement by the state of the idea - unique among the family of nations - that multiple cultures could and should exist in one state, without having the interests of the individual in any way subordinated to them. While it has not been articulated as such, multiculturalism amounts to the right for the individual to practise a culture of his/her choice.
The culmination of these trends was the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which entrenched the most important rights in the Canadian Constitution, and which has shaped the law in this country ever since (it's been speculated that a time will come in which all cases heard by the Supreme Court will be Charter cases, on the rights of individuals in the face of the state). Despite two imperfections forced upon him - the removal of property rights insisted upon by the NDP and the notorious Section 33, a sop to provincial premiers - the establishment of the Charter ranks as the greatest accomplishment by any Prime Minister during the twentieth century.
Often overlooked in the (deserved) hullaballoo over the Charter is the issue of patriation itself. For one hundred and fifteen years, Canada existed as a state constitutionally subordinate to the United Kingdom. It was Trudeau, through the 1982 patriation, who granted this country its real independence. And it was Trudeau, even in retirement, who protected it, coming out swining against the entire Canadian political establishment to play a decisive role in the defeat of both the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accords.
Surely the above is enough for any thinking person to rank him as among the most deserving of the "Greatest Canadian" title, though we've yet to touch the question of the intangible effect he had on Canadians. As Hutchison said, up until 1968 we had truly listened too long to timid men (excepting, of course, John Diefenbaker to whom, to our eternal credit, we fast stopped listening). Mike Pearson's idea of snappy dressing was a bowtie, while MacKenzie King's idea of a sound byte was "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription". Louis St-Laurant was Prime Minister for a decade, and he's been all but forgotten a scant fifty years later. In 1979, Canadians threw Trudeau from office and discovered, to our horror, that we'd replaced him with Joe Clark, who we turfed at our next opportunity. Canada was through with listening to timid men.
Quite apart from the staged stunts, the somersaulting into swimming pools, the kissing of young women, and the pirouetting behind the Queen's back to protest Buckingham Palace's distinction between heads of government and heads of state, Trudeau had that intangible known as "charisma". Marlon Brando called him "the most intimidating man [he'd] ever met". John Lennon visited in 1969, and it was the Beatle who came away overwhelmed, saying "He is beautiful people." He dated Margot Kidder, Kim Catrell, and Barbara Streisand. And when confrontational - which he often was - he was no less magnificent: telling (partisan P.C.) Tim Ralfe and others who doubted his commitment to beating terrorism to "just watch [him]"; demolishing Renée Levesque's criticism of his "anglo" middle name ("That, my dear friends, is what contempt is. . . it means saying that the Quebecers on the No side are not as good as the others and perhaps they have a drop or two of foreign blood, while the people on the Yes side have pure blood in their veins. . ."); responding to Nixon's label of "that asshole Trudeau" ("I've been called worse things by better men"); wistfully bidding the Parliamentary Press Gallery adieu upon his retirement ("I regret that I won't have you to kick around anymore."). He had style, man. While it's fashionable to discount the importance of style, I defy anybody to look me in the eye and tell me that Canada's national character, to the extent that it exists, was not been shaped by the force of Trudeau's personality as much as by the force of his ideas.
Fidel Castro came to his funeral. So did Jimmy Carter. Helmut Schmidt eulogized him for MacLean's magazine. The world had never bothered to listen to timid men from Canada, but when we produced a Trudeau, watch out.
Not that Trudeau was ever able to cultivate this international respect for the purpose of furthering Canada's foreign policy. Indeed, his record in foreign affairs was matched only be his record in domestic ones for day-to-day futility. Trudeau was, in many ways, a disappointment. But he was a disappointment only because he had heightened our expectations to the point that disappointment was not only a possibility, but an inveitability. Could the same have been said for King, or St-Laurent? Could the same now be said of Paul Martin?
He was wrong on the War Measures Act. He was ineffective of all matters economic. He let the debt get out of control. He approached issues unrelated to the sovereignty of the individual with a disinterest bordering on indifference. But if you can look at the Charter and at bilingualism and tell me that a few extra points of inflation thirty years ago make up the basis on which we should judge this man, well, I'd hate to have your priorities.
To sum up, I'll throw things over to Allan Fotheringham:
And Pierre Trudeau? Since him we have had Joe Clark, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien. They don't make giants anymore.
Or Geoffrey Stevens:
Can you imagine young people today defying their parents to attend a Stockwell Day rally? Pushing and shoving to touch the garments of Joe Clark? Swooning at the sight of Paul Martin? Or girls (and their moms) clawing their way through police lines to plant a big kiss on the lips of Jean Chrétien?
Yes, bring on the historians.
It's okay, Pierre: Canadians didn't always give you your due when you were alive, either. Give us a few decades; we'll come around.
Next post: Trudeau head to head against Banting, Douglas, Fox, MacDonald, and Suzuki.
