CONRAD BLACK
...the
Canadian newspaper magnate
PIERRE TRUDEAU led a somewhat important country for 16 eventful years and has a demonstrated aptitude for elegant writing. Memoirs should have been a good book, but instead it is a monument to human vanity and narcissism, made more irritating by the inclusion of hundreds of photographs, many with self-idolizing captions.
Trudeau, by his own account, never made a mistake. It was, for instance, the fault of Quebec society that when he arrived in Harvard University at the age of 25, a few months after D-Day, he had no idea of "the historic importance of the war".
Trudeau unabashedly acknowledges Nye Bevan and Harold Laski as his political mentors, the Labor Party of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan as his policy ideal, and declares Thatcherism and Reaganism in all their manifestations as "wrong, wrong, wrong".
He is unembarrassed at having admired the sanguinary efforts of Mao and Stalin to develop "a new man." He is unapologetic about facilitating Castro's outrages in Angola (by granting Cuban transport planes landing rights in Newfoundland).
His 15-year drive to discourage Canada's trade with the United States and promote trade with Europe and Japan was a complete failure because Canadian exporters were "lazier" and lacking in "initiative."
The lunacy of his National Energy Program of 1980, which led to the squandering of billions of public and private dollars in uneconomic Arctic and offshore drilling, was entirely the fault of experts who forecast a $100 per barrel oil price. (The Canadian oil industry leaders loudly warned the government at the time of the likely inaccuracy of its price assumptions.)
Trudeau wisely omits all mention of his infatuation with the notion of "North-South," the absurd fad which held that all the world's poor, whether resident in slums, jungles or deserts, could be helped by grouping them as the "South."
He is proud of having made Canada the only country in the history of the world to entrench regional economic equality as a constitutional raison d'être of the country. It has been a disastrous and often corrupt waste of money and a Sisyphean objective.
Trudeau purports to believe that he transformed Canadians into a mature nationality with his charter of rights, which is, in fact, a pastiche of platitudes which had been established in common law but which can now be vacated by any provincial legislature and often has been.
At times his statements verge on psychotic self-delusion: "When I signed an agreement on cooperation and fair dealings with general secretary Leonid Breshnev, I laid the foundations for what would later be called the detente in East-West relations."
In three different places Trudeau takes credit for President Reagan's famous assertion that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought." He represents his sophomoric arms-control plan, which called for more conferences and unverifiable limits on defence spending, as the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In fact it was an irrelevancy that only Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu--scarcely central arms-control figures--listened to seriously.
Trudeau also favored more, not less, state intervention, with the goal of redistributing wealth to achieve economic equality--almost regardless of merit. His socialist enthusiasm was no less fervent for his having lived all his life from the avails of a large commercial inheritance from his father. In the 20 years before his election as an MP at the age of 46, he spent only two years in what could reasonably be called gainful employment.
He bitterly laments the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. with which he was generally in greater sympathy than with the United States. Great civil libertarian though he professed to be, he did not lift a finger to preserve the 210-year-old status of English as an official language in Quebec when that status was abolished by the government of Quebec, to the considerable irritation of the English-speaking majority in Trudeau's own constituency.
Trudeau had some outstanding moments as prime minister, especially in his protection of the integrity of the federal state, but even these episodes are indifferently described. This book is self-worshipful and platitudinous. In its banality it is contemptuous of his loyal admirers in Canada. Their disillusionment with him must now be complete.
(article accompanied by photograph of Conrad Black, captioned:
This review appears in this week's Sunday Telegraph, London, a sparkling link in Conrad Black's globe-girding media chain. Black's Vancouver-based Hollinger Inc. and Paul Desmarais' Power Corp. own about 35 per cent of Southam Inc., which owns The Vancouver Sun. Sun photographer Glenn Baglo got Black, a salmon and a copy of the paper together last November when Black was in town to promote his autobiography, Conrad Black: A Life in Progress.)
(article also accompanied by (IAN BARRETT/Reuters) photograph of Pierre E. Trudeau, captioned:
AUTOGRAPH SESSION: Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Montreal. Writes Black: "His socialism enthusiasm was no less fervent for his having lived all his life from the avails of a large commercial inheritance from his father)
(text of March 11, 1994 Vancouver Sun article)
DON'T THINK THE
WISDOM OF THOMAS JEFFERSON IS
PASSÉ YET IN WHAT YOU ARE ENTITLED TO FROM YOUR
GOVERNMENT? LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD: TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE TO SIGN MY
GUESTBOOK.