Vancouver Province
for October 20, 2000

What have the Pierre Trudeau funeral and the dustup at CKNW over the possibility of Glen Clark doing a talk show got in common? Is this a mighty big stretch coming? Perhaps. But they both demonstrate an essential truth about Canadians.

When Pierre Trudeau, on Leap day 1984, took his walk in the snow there was joy across the land. He was disliked in his home province of Quebec, hated in western Canada and tolerated, barely, in Ontario. His record as a Prime Minister was mixed at best. His War Measures Act pleased the deep-seated Canadian love of authority but horrified the liberals; his National Energy Policy, probably permanently, alienated the Far West; he had taken the country close to bankruptcy. Why, then, this national outpouring of grief?

CKNW is a radio station – the world has gillions of them. It is corny – it still has an Orphan’s Fund decades after the last orphanage disappeared, it sells herring on the docks of New Westminster to raise money for the Fund and, even after moving to downtown Vancouver from New Westminster (hence the ‘NW), it still seems like a down home radio station. But isn’t it just another talk station?

Why, then, the outpouring of anger and the mass sense of betrayal when it leaked out that CKNW was going to hire former Premier Glen Clark as a talk show host?

I think the explanation for both phenomena lies in a deep-seated need in this country for something to admire. This is why there are headlines for a winner of the Olympic bronze in an event we’ve mostly never heard of before. We have no heroes despite millions of dollars spent by the federal government to create them. And there is a reason – we are not a real country but an amalgam of huge regions held together by an antipathy towards union with the United States. We had no revolution to start our country and no civil war to settle how it would be run. We did not plough inexorably westward, killing everything in sight as we marched to our "manifest destiny" making heroes of what were often brutal killers and sociological misfits as we went. We killed no Indians (though we stole their heritage and self respect); we circled no covered wagons.

Sir John A. Macdonald, a hero to historians is seen in Quebec as the anti-hero who, amongst other things, hanged Louis Riel. Laura Secord is best known to most Canadians for good chocolates and Sir Wilfred Laurier is best remembered more for looking like a Prime Minister than anything else.

Pierre Trudeau probably wasn’t even a good prime minister much less a great one but he was an international figure, something we’ve never ever had before. We may have hated Trudeau the politician but we admired his style whether it was handling a difficult divorce or squiring an international songstress to a flashy collection of people mostly famous for being famous. We mourned his losses with him. We may have hated him for his policies but we loved him for being Canada’s only player on the international stage and a good one at that.

As all of us at CKNW found last week this is more than just a radio station. It’s more than just a "heritage station", whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. It’s a station that is part of tens of thousands of families – three generations of British Columbians have grown up expecting something special from CKNW. Listeners put up with a lot, too, as CKNW often lurches like a drunk in an alley from one idea to another, from one colourful performer to the next. But through it all this station meant one thing – that indefinable word, integrity. This radio station would do a lot of goofy things and often bring listeners to hand-wringing despair but somehow it always represented all of us, with all our warts, as through it all it demonstrated a kind of community leadership that we admired and expected. There was always a line that CKNW would never cross – and never did until the Glen Clark affair.

Pierre Trudeau on the national scene and CKNW locally reminded us that we badly need heroes such that we will forgive a dead hero a great deal and a live one very little.