‘He haunts us still,’ Pierre Trudeau Canada's best prime minister since 1960s, says new Forum Research public opinion poll

PARLIAMENT HILL—Nearly three decades have passed since Pierre Trudeau took his famous “walk in the snow” and announced he would be stepping down, but a new poll shows Trudeau still tops the list when Canadians are asked to select the country’s best prime minister since the 1960s.

The Forum Research poll found one quarter of Canadians selected Trudeau over every prime minister, going back to Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lester Pearson in the 1960s, and 14 per cent selected Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.), who came second. Trudeau led the country from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984.

Young Pierre Trudeau and the creeping decay of Canadian democracy

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, it has often been noted, was indifferent to economics. How did he manage to get away with this, let alone govern Canada for the better part of 16 years, becoming in the process a "modern father of Confederation"? The pragmatic necessities of the marketplace, we take for granted now, rule our political choices. Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks of economics incessantly. Have things changed so much?

It seems a worthwhile question to ask, with the elder Trudeau's legacy front and centre in the emerging Liberal leadership race. Is Justin Trudeau in any way his father's son, apart from their mutual charisma? Is anyone in the Liberal fold, constitutional lawyer Deborah Coyne perhaps, the intellectual heir of Trudeau the elder?

Harper is the anti-Trudeau

While the 15th and 22nd prime ministers actually have their similarities, it seems Harper has devoted himself to dismantling what was left of Trudeau’s legacy.


It seems every Canadian political columnist passed judgment on the one-year anniversary of Harper’s majority government. But, oddly enough, the punditry on the man and his vision were all over the map. To some he is an authoritarian with a bully club in his right hand, but to others just a hard-nosed PM maintaining party unity. To some he’s a principled radical and to others a moderate populist.

I have a different take. If you want to understand Stephen Harper, think Pierre Trudeau.

It’s hard to believe that Harper was once a Liberal campaign volunteer, but, somewhere in the early 1980s, Harper embraced a political mission to undo the damage that Trudeau inflicted on the country and to destroy the Liberal party in the process.

Pipelines, Provinces, and Oil Politics

Poised to seek their revenge on one Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Albertans – and Harper – are unlikely to back down.

Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline will probably be approved and built. Prime Minister Stephen Harper will do what Pierre Trudeau did – tell the provinces concerned that the project is a federal issue because it is inter-provincial and international, and that it’s a national development and security issue. Trudeau created the National Energy Program in the 1980s and told Alberta that it had provincial jurisdiction over the oil itself, but that he had the federal jurisdiction over moving it out of Alberta. If the province wanted to sell its oil, it had to make a deal on oil prices within Canada – or it could go sit on its oil. Trudeau avoided travelling to Alberta for quite a while after that, at least partly for security reasons. Many Alberta bumper stickers said, “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” and they meant it.

I lived in Manitoba at the time, and I sympathized. All of the West hated Central Canada. Western anger was further stoked when Trudeau gave an aircraft-maintenance contract to a Quebec company even though BAE in Winnipeg had the best technical proposal and price. Trudeau said it was better for the contract to be given to a company close to the existing infrastructure, which westerners correctly interpreted as meaning that they would never be allowed to develop technological infrastructure.

Alberta had tried for years to get federal funding to develop its oil, but Ontario and Quebec always quashed its attempts because oil from the Middle East was cheap. So Alberta developed its oil with money from private investments. Then OPEC and the oil crisis hit in the 1970s and Albertans were told that their oil was “Canadian oil.” From Albertans’ point of view, the term “bastards” was too mild. In the next federal election, Trudeau’s Liberals were virtually wiped out in the West.

Now the tides have turned: Alberta has prosperity, a larger population, more seats in Parliament, even more oil with the tar sands, and an Albertan Conservative prime minister with a majority government. With this chance for revenge, do you think Albertans will let Harper back down on the Northern Gateway Pipeline or anything to do with tar-sands development? No way. For years, the West felt that Quebec and Ontario relegated it – through their words, attitudes, voting, and funding decisions – to the position of colonies that supplied the East with raw materials. Now Alberta is saying: “Guess what? We are Canada.” As for Eastern Canadian Liberal and NDP concerns about the environment, I can hear the Albertans chuckling. They’re probably remembering that Trudeau made “FU!” famous, and now they can say it back.

Harper is currently in the process of shutting out American conservationist funding and “streamlining” the environmental-review process. He will negotiate with the Aboriginal Peoples and succeed in pushing the pipeline through. Harper has drawn a line in the sand, and clearly and publicly made his stand – he won’t back down now. He’s an Albertan at heart, and it’s his tar-sands oil in more ways than one.

Original Article
Source: the Mark 
Author: Roger Green