CKNW Editorial
for October 10, 2000

Some say that it's too soon to evaluate the impact of Pierre Trudeau but 1 think not... after all, he's been out of office, which is not to say out of power, for over 16 years. What I'm about to say is not particularly complimentary which might offend those who wish the glow of the funeral moment to obscure judgments. I believe that one must evaluate Mr Trudeau now because Jean Chretien is about to try to ride back into power on his shroud. I have already said that he was a great man - that there should have been such a fuss made of his death is ample proof of that. The question is, what part of his legacy should we now be examining in light of contemporary events. Yesterday I spoke of the area where Jean Chretien and the Liberals cannot claim to be the heirs of Pierre Trudeau namely his constitutional position visa-vis Quebec and how he stood against a "distinct society" designation for Quebec and, indeed, a Quebec veto over constitutional change. This legacy Jean Chretien and his lickspittles have no right to poach upon since in December 1995 they passes a resolution giving Quebec "distinct society" in federal matters and its own veto over constitutional change. Today I would like to canvas a much more serious question and something that is a direct legacy from Mr Trudeau to the Liberals and a legacy they are bound to exploit to their advantage ... I'm speaking of the death of the national party and the creation of a balkanized country. That this is the state of affairs in Canada can hardly be denied. The Liberals can claim national party status only if you ignore the fact that west of Winnipeg Liberal representation is minuscule and mostly in urban enclaves. The Liberals until the time of Trudeau tried to represent all regions of the country giving powerful cabinet posts in each region and campaigning hard across the country. I'm not so naive as to suggest that they didn't concentrate their major effort in Ontario and Quebec ... of course they did. But they recognized that their mandate was not just to govern but to keep the country together. This ended in 1974 when the forces of Jim Coutts and Senator Keith Davey combined to convince Trudeau that he didn't need Western Canada. Ontario and Quebec were enough as indeed it proved in 1974 and 1980 and again in 1993 and 1997. The Tories, after gaining power on national campaigns in 1984 and 1989 frittered that away with Meech Lake and Charlottetown and certainly haven't the remotest claim, except in Joe Clark's dreams, to national party status. The New Democratic Party, is one of the last socialist parties fighting the capitalist hordes left in the world and no one, not even Alexa McDonough, would claim it was a national party. In the electoral sense, then, Jean Chretien and the Liberals can claim to be Trudeau's heir. They will campaign in Ontario and Quebec and leave the rest to chance. That there is a Reform Party cum Canadian Alliance at all is testimony to the fact that the Liberals don't give a damn about Western Canada because there's no need to. This is very bad for the country. We are isolated one from another. One doesn't get any feeling of participation through Liberal MPs because we never hear them standing up for our province. They say they do so behind closed doors but as Mandy Rice Davies said in the Profumo scandal in the sixties, when John Profumo denied having sex with call girls "he would say that, wouldn't he." We may have loved his pirouettes, his banister sliding, and his flair for pretty women. We may have admired his lack of coziness with the United States. It might have made us feel good that we had a Prime Minister that actually made the news in other parts of the world. The fact remains that Pierre Trudeau created the nation of two solitudes - no longer the two solitudes of Hugh Maclennan's classic jibe about Ontario and Quebec but the two solitudes of Western Canada, especially the far west and what we call eastern Canada.

That's one of Pierre Trudeau's legacies and we must wonder how long a country can exist when there is so little in common politically from one great region to another.