O come on all you Trudeau faithful
PET’s reputation has shrivelled globally but you’d never know it from these adoring tomes
MARK STEYN | Jun 01, 2006
The other day, the Forward, New York’s Jewish newspaper, ran a story headlined “Book offers new image of Canadian pol.” Given that most New York readers don’t have any old images of Canadian pols, this seemed an unlikely proposition. But the pol in question was the Canadian pol: Pierre Trudeau, who served as prime minister from 1968 to . . . well, in Vienna in 2002 a middle-aged German said to me, “Canadian? Trudeau is still prime minister?” “Of course,” I said, not wishing to detour the conversation down unrewarding paths.
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Anyway, the so-called “new image” derives from Young Trudeau: 1919-1944 by Max and Monique Nemni, who reveal that as a young man Trudeau had fascist sympathies, was prone to the routine anti-Semitism of mid-century Quebec francophones, blamed Britain for the Second World War, and spent it riding around Montreal wearing a German helmet. All this is the “old image” for some of us, but every few years the stories are dusted off and Trudeaupian experts are quoted professing shock and puzzlement. Morton Weinfeld, the McGill sociologist, put it down to “youthful stupidity”: after all, young Pierre was in his twenties; he couldn’t be expected to know any better – though those other twentysomethings without benefit of his great intellect, the young Canadians and Englishmen and Scotsmen and Americans scrambling ashore at Normandy, all managed to figure it out. But professor Weinfeld says the new biography will “remind people how deeply entrenched in the Quebec of the 1930s those right-wing views were. Even someone who became as progressive as Trudeau was not immune to their seductive power.”
“Right-wing” and “progressive” aren’t terribly useful labels in this regard, and all indications are that no great seduction was required to win Trudeau over to the dreary bigotry of wartime Quebec. It would be truer to say that he evolved from the conventionally parochial statism of the 1930s to the conventionally multicultural statism of the 1970s, which isn’t quite as dramatic a leap as professor Weinfeld thinks.
Nonetheless, the Nemni book sounded worth a read, so I wandered into Indigo in Montreal and picked it up – in the French section. Then I toddled along to see if they had it in English. Not yet, apparently. Evidently Quebec Anglos aren’t in the market for Trudeaupian revisionism. Instead, it was wall-to-wall hagiography. There was Pierre: Colleagues and Friends Talk About the Trudeau They Knew, and The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith Behind the Politics. That’s hidden, all right, as in Da Vinci Code hidden.
Oddly enough, Pierre also begins with a section called “Faith.” You’d almost think a sustained campaign was under way to persuade those Canadians who carelessly figured Trudeau didn’t become a practising Catholic till the funeral that we’ve got him all wrong. It seems his life was, as Michael W. Higgins puts it, a "spiritual pilgrimage."Obviously, in respect of Margot Kidder and Liona Boyd and Barbra Streisand and so on and so forth, it was more shagadelic than the average spiritual pilgrimage, but nonetheless it was, as Higgins says, a life “defined by spirituality.” In The Faith Behind The Politics, B. W. Powe of York University contributes an essay called “Soul’s flow: Pierre Trudeau’s Hidden Current.” Here’s how it begins:
"Stephen Clarkson referred to the Zen statement that the fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. I won’t try to interpret this enigmatic koan, except to add a McLuhanesque twist: a fish is not(usually)aware of the water in which it lives. In short, our environments are mostly invisible to us.
“I will look at the mythopoetic aspects of Trudeau’s time – the mythic impact he made on Canada, and on me. The word ‘myth,’ in this context, I take to mean narrative, symbol, allegory, the wedding of image and word, the crystallization of quintessential story, the poetry of existence, our intimations and intuitions of what may be transcendent . . .”
Etc., etc. I struggled on through the middle of the sixth paragraph, by which point Powe’s essay had no doubt won a Governor General’s Award. Yes, yes, I know I sound bitter. As the old Zen saying has it, the fish is in the chip and the chip is on my shoulder. But you quickly realize that in this context “faith” means not Pierre Trudeau’s faith in God, but these various writers’ faith in Trudeau as a god. More conventional deities get short shrift. Stephen Clarkson opts for the old plague-on-both-their-houses routine: “George W. Bush in the White House and Osama bin Laden in his dark house(wherever that may be)represent two civilizations in which God or Allah is invoked as justification for wanting to destroy the other.” Powe doesn’t pussyfoot around with lame-o equivalence and cuts to the chase, citing “Bush’s plan to trigger Armageddon in the Middle East, following the prophecies of ‘The Book of Daniel,’ of which the President is especially fond.”
As these passing swipes suggest, there seems to be a certain resentment that the Trudeaupian faith hasn’t made much headway in the wider world. Although Michael Valpy confidently hails him as “our one truly mythological Prime Minister,” I wonder if, fish-wise, he’s already off the menu. I got to the end of David Suzuki’s autobiography, for example, and it suddenly occurred to me he hadn’t so much as mentioned M. Trudeau, which must be a first for any memoir by a Canadian of this generation. I riffled through The David Suzuki Reader, his big compendium from a couple of years back, and could find only one reference to the great man: “The turbulent era of the 1960s and 1970s ended with the retirement of Pierre Trudeau and the end of the Vietnam War” – i.e., just a bit of slapdash generic signposting.
In The Autobiography, Suzuki finds time for the contractually required shot at George W. Bush – “The country founded on a separation of church and state has seen the intrusion of a Christian fundamentalism into the very centre of power” – and has some rather good royal anecdotes, the ones on the Princess of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh being marvellous distillations of their respective characters. He also has an enjoyably snarky aside about A Peter Gzowski Reader, bemoaning his CBC comrade’s pitiful obsession with royalty, prime ministers and governors general, and chiding him for his habit of doing a big interview on whatever the apocalyptic eco-doom story of the day was and then shrugging it off and moving on to an item about Canada’s world yodelling champion. But, given that he subscribes to all Trudeau’s banalities about the wickedness of capitalism and American foreign policy, you’d think Suzuki would put in a word for the old boy.
Perhaps this is merely one deity declining to worship at the altar of another. It’s a depressing feature of contemporary life that quite so many places in the All-Time Top Ten Greatest Canadians Hit Parade are held by narrow, doctrinaire, mushy-left figures – Trudeau, Suzuki, Tommy Douglas – whom we’re supposed to regard as gods in human form. If these are truly Canadian all-time heroes, their shelf life is distressingly short: on his retirement, Trudeau took his sons to Siberia because “that is where the future is being made.” In 1984? Suzuki’s beloved Kyoto treaty is melting faster than the ice caps. And, barring some malign convergence of SARS, bird flu and C. difficile in Montreal’s Royal Victoria, we’ll all live to regret our Tommy Douglas health system. Trudeau’s reputation has shrivelled globally to all but undetectable levels, as the international A-listers at his funeral sadly confirmed(Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, and Najib Zerouali, minister of scientific research for Morocco, a nation renowned for its scientific research). It would be nice if the book trade caught up to reality. As it is, these professions of faith sound like Matthew Arnold’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
Fortunately, Conrad Black is on hand to keep things in proportion. In Pierre, he concludes his appreciation thus:
“I always found him a delightful conversationalist and a gracious host, though perhaps slow to reach for the bill in a restaurant, even when we were there on his invitation.”
Too true. He left us with the bill, in every sense.
macleans.ca/culture/books/ar … 892_127892
