Pierre Trudeau - Not A Eulogy
By Charles W. Moore

It is cliched but true to say that I respected Pierre Trudeau for his intellect - he was almost certainly the most intelligent Prime Minister Canada has ever produced - but I did not admire him. Trudeau was an exemplar of the fact that intelligence and wisdom are distinct and sometimes exclusive qualities.

I detested Trudeau the politician from the time he first registered on my consciousness in the mid-'60s, and nothing he subsequently did ever altered my assessment. Consequently, while I join other Canadians in extending my sympathy to the Trudeau family for their loss, I cannot join in eulogizing his dubious accomplishments or his alleged greatness.

Pierre Trudeau's legacy as Prime Minister for all of 16 years save for Joe Clark's brief interregnum in 1979-1980 is, in my estimation, a horror, and I would rank him as easily the most disastrous and destructive leader Canada has ever head.

When Trudeau finally stepped down after his 1984 "walk in the snow," he left in his wake an alienated West, much of Quebec likewise, and Canada's economy (which by broad consensus he never took much interest in) in a shambles, with a national debt that had risen from 18 billion in 1968 to a crushing 206 billion in 1984, with a pattern of catastrophic deficits established whose momentum only began to be checked 15 years after he left office. Trudeau's watch was also signalized by chronic high inflation, and interest rates that rose to over 20% in the early '80s.

Canada's moral fabric was left hanging in tatters as well, in no small measure due to both the tone and substance of Trudeau leftist, secularist, ideological agenda which attacked and eroded the country's erstwhile perception of itself as a Christian nation.

Likewise, English-speaking Canada's real and legitimate heritage as British North America had been essentially disowned and purged by the Trudeau Liberals, leaving in its stead a contrived and banefully shallow nationalism themed on the misbegotten notions of programmatic multiculturalism, political correctness, and knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

As for Pierre Trudeau's supposed "crowning achievement" of repatriating the Constitution and embellishing it with the Charter of Rights (still unsigned by Quebec), that was probably his most enduring act of legislative vandalism, tossing aside the supremacy of an elected and democratically accountable Parliament, to be replaced by what amounts to in practical terms governance by unelected and democratically unaccountable judges.

Trudeau was of course not entirely personally responsible for these developments and distempers, but it is fair, I believe, to say that he enthusiastically advocated and approved the policies that engendered them, and aside from his government's pathetic economic record (which he would no doubt dismiss with a patented shrug of his shoulders as an issue of little consequence), I expect he would be happy to take his share of credit for all of them.

Pierre Trudeau was essentially not a liberal, but a socialist. His leftist sympathies were manifest in is penchant for chumming it get up with communist dictators like Fidel Castro and the Red Chinese Politburo - mass murderers all - far beyond what was required by diplomacy.

Having detested and reviled socialism for all of my politically-conscious life, it is not surprising that I never warmed to Pierre Trudeau as a politician, but his personal style rubbed me the wrong way as well; his colossal ego and arrogance, his serial affairs, his 1971 marriage at age 51 to a 22 year-old trophy wife, and his fathering of a publicly unacknowledged daughter out-of-wedlock at age 71.

Nevertheless, were I given a choice of any Canadian Prime Minister to spend six months marooned on a desert island with, I would pick Trudeau without a second thought, for the conversation potential if nothing else. I expect he would be more useful when it came to getting a campfire going than most of the others as well. But as Prime Minister he was a one-man wrecking crew.