9/29/00 3:45 p.m.
The Importance of Pierre Trudeau
The end of Trudeaumania.

By Neil Seeman, writer for the Canadian National Post

s chance would have it, I was attending a lecture by Robert Mundell, the Canadian-born Nobel laureate in economics, when I heard the news that Pierre Elliott Trudeau had died. Prof. Mundell, whose groundbreaking ideas during the '60s and '70s gave birth to the concept of the euro, was about to address a gathering of the conservative Donner Canadian Foundation in Toronto on the topic of "Should the Western hemisphere adopt a common currency?" when, as graciously as he possibly could under the circumstances, the foundation's chairman abruptly stood up and told the audience: "I think it would be remiss of me if I didn't tell you all that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, aged 80, died just minutes ago."

People in the back rows dashed home to turn on their television sets. I stayed put and listened to Prof. Mundell sketch out his captivating vision of a free trade hemisphere. When someone asked Mundell about the spectre of an economic union of interlocking fixed currencies leading to even higher taxes here in Canada, he laughed: How could things get any worse? All the while I kept thinking, Where was this guy 30 years ago when we really needed him?

Thirty years ago, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the 15th prime minister of Canada, would not have had much patience for the likes of Prof. Mundell. After riding to power on a wave of popularity the media dubbed "Trudeaumania," Trudeau quickly drove the country into quicksands of debt and a web of social-welfare programs from which we would take decades to escape. And because he was more rock star than politician, people scarcely noticed. A tireless intellectual, Mr. Trudeau was what writer David Brooks might call the ultimate Bobo: He was a tea-sipping idea-monger first and a politician second. By his own admission, Trudeau was a reluctant candidate for the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968. One of the founders of Cité Libre, the French-Canadian equivalent of Partisan Review, Trudeau preferred to talk politics in Montreal coffee houses. But the Zeitgeist — and the fact that he spoke French better than any of his colleagues in the Liberal cabinet — propelled him onward and upward.

Like many leftish intellectuals of his time, Trudeau maintained a deep distrust and belligerence toward all things American. Once in office, he shepherded his prejudice into policy, first by extending diplomatic ties to Red China in 1970, then later by recognizing and ultimately befriending Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

On the domestic front, Trudeau championed divisive and fashionably left-wing causes, such as official bilingualism and multiculturalism — under which new immigrants were spoiled with government riches designed to help preserve their foreign heritage and culture in Canada. Most notably, though, Trudeau enshrined into law Canada's new constitution — he called it a "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" — thus making the country's divorce from Britain almost complete.

Trudeau was a great admirer of Rousseau, and the phrase "La volonté générale" (i.e. "the general will") could be found strewn throughout his essays of the time. Not surprisingly, then, Trudeau's Charter entrusted citizens with "positive rights" as well as "negative rights," Trudeau's liberal appointments to the bench cemented his vision of a "just society," expansively interpreting the Charter's right to security of the person to include the right to economic security, welfare benefits for refugees, and so forth.

By far and large the greatest priority for Trudeau, however, was tamping Quebec's secessionist impulse. Almost every one of the syrupy eulogies that has poured forth during the last 24 hours has made mention of the fact that Trudeau's death comes just weeks before the 30th anniversary of the so-called "October Crisis," when the terrorist Front de Libération du Québec kidnapped and murdered Pierre Laporte, a Quebec cabinet minister. Mr. Trudeau responded by temporarily imposing martial law, ordering Canadian troops to patrol city streets for the first time since the Second World War. Asked how far he was willing to use armed force, Mr. Trudeau insouciantly responded: "Just watch me."

Although comments like these betrayed the hypocrisy of the Canadian Left on matters of individual liberty — troopers were found later to have uprooted many innocuous organizations, thereby making a mockery of the Charter's guarantee of "freedom of association" — also showed in Trudeau a devil-may-care bravado that secretly appealed to a new generation of Canadians who were fed up with their country's bland image.

Canadians were both puzzled and awed by the charismatic Trudeau. Many Canadians fondly remembering him giving "the finger" to protesters in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, and cursing aloud in the House of Commons. Women and men alike cooed over his romantic liasions with many beautiful ladies, including guitarist Liona Boyd, singer Barbra Streisand, and actor Margot Kidder. This was not your typical dull Canadian.

Today, however, we have woken from the hypnotic reverie called Trudeaumania. A new breed of Canadians, like the economist Robert Mundell — and most notably, Stockwell Day, the new firebrand leader of the Canadian Alliance party — have demonstrated that the country's peculiar blend of weedy welfare liberalism has failed us. A recent study showed that Canada loses a small city — about 60,000 people — of our brightest and most talented people to the United States each and every year. Post-Trudeau Canada strives to end what Canadians call the "brain drain." It wants to become a nation of unbridled free trade with the United States, a policy Trudeau's party vehemently opposed, and to emerge as a land of low taxes and individual rights.

If new Canada has its way, the economic and ideological agendas of our two nations will become one. It is, I predict, the beginning of new and beautiful friendship.