A rchive Date
[ 20-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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['Father' Pierre didn't always know best
We remember him now through rose-coloured glasses
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Toronto Sun
October 1, 2000
So have we all forgotten how much we hated him?
Not at the beginning, when we adored him, and not at the end, when we revered him and time had mellowed us all.
I mean at the end of Pierre Trudeau's political career, first in 1979, and then, since he always fooled us, again in 1984, by which time we reviled the man for his arrogance.
Indeed, the ongoing deification of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, now that he's gone, is so typically, predictably, boringly, insecurely Canadian. The same sort of insecurity we saw, oddly enough, in so much of the Olympics coverage of the past two weeks.
That is, when scribes who don't lose a moment's sleep over a 23-1 Blue Jays' blowout that has just finished off the playoff chances of a bunch of foreign millionaires who summer here, start babbling from Sydney how they feel personally humiliated because some Canadian athlete whose name they barely know didn't medal in an obscure sport they only cover once every four years.
Now that's insecurity. The sort of insecurity that ties a person's, and a nation's, sense of self worth to a medal count.
Russia and China did wonderfully at these games if you go by medal haul. Perhaps our media would be proud living there.
And given that the sure way to Olympic "success" these days is to: a) rip young children pre-selected for their athletic prowess away from their families at an early age and send them off to training camps for most of their young lives; and/or b) pump them full of drugs so they can "go for the gold," is this what we want in Canada? What's wrong with just admiring what our athletes do, whatever they do, as long as they do it clean?
And yet every Olympics we go through the same public agony and national self-flagellation over the medal count.
That's being insecure! And so is the national nostalgia underway in an attempt to deify Trudeau, to portray him as a national father figure who loved us all best, and whom we all loved. For pity's sake, let's not insult the man this way.
Let's at least look back on him as he was. Admire him for being a good, loving father to his three fine sons, yes. But to the whole of Canada? Some dad!
He flipped us the finger, asked farmers why he should sell their wheat, called MPPs nobodies and the media trained seals. Okay, so maybe many would agree with the last two, but this was no warm and cuddly dad.
Sure, Trudeau could inspire, although far more in Ontario than either in Quebec or the West. Problem is, some of his inspirations (official multiculturalism, bilingualism, deficit financing, lax immigration laws, gutting the army) left a train wreck in their wake. Like most who inspire the masses, it was the individual components of that mass whom Trudeau generally considered as his intellectual inferiors, that he always had trouble relating to. In other words, to us.
This is not to say that Trudeau wasn't a brilliant man, a dynamic politician - perhaps the most dynamic we've ever had - and a fine father to his own sons. Was there a parent anywhere unmoved when we saw that harrowing photo of Trudeau leaving the memorial service for his youngest son, Michel, who died in an avalanche in 1998? Accompanied by his two surviving sons and ex-wife Margaret, who could forget that look of utter despair on the face, now grown so old and frail, of the man who had once been our indestructible PM?
Any parent, no matter what they thought of Trudeau politically, felt for him, and recognized with a horrible shudder of self-awareness, what he had to be going through.
That all-consuming desire to rail at God, to cry "No, no, take me, not him" and the final, horrible, despairing realization that no amount of reasoning, pleading, or love would do any good. That his youngest child was gone in the most awful violation of the natural order that decrees, rightly, that sons should bury their fathers, never fathers their sons.
Trudeau didn't deserve that. No one does. He deserved to end his years - which one suspects would have been longer had Michel not died - surrounded by all his sons, taking pride in their accomplishments.
But the political Pierre Trudeau? That's something else.
We remember him now through rose-coloured glasses, denouncing modern-day politicians as Pygmies compared to him. Trudeau inspired us to dream, we cry, he was like no other, and today we are beset by imposters who close hospitals and shut down schools and call that leadership.
As if there is no cause and effect in politics. As if the orgy of spending, and deficits that began under Trudeau, and, yes, continued under later Tory governments, were never to have a day of reckoning. Well, that day of reckoning is now! And has been for a decade.
One thing inevitably led to the other, like a homeowner who takes out a massive mortgage to build a house far beyond his means, and then leaves the family to pay it off.
What must Trudeau have thought of us all along? My guess is he was equally bemused by the uncritical love we showered on him at the beginning - Trudeaumania - and the irrational hatred we had for him at the end of his political career - only to go back to worshiping him in his final years.
The thing of it is, Trudeau never needed or cared about our approval. He was never that insecure.
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com. Or visit his home page.
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