Pierre Elliott Trudeau (2009)
“A big bang at the beginning—the Asbestos Strike, the October Crisis—but then nothing much to show for all his hard work by the end. His fledgling attempts at putting in play his notion of “participatory democracy,” the committees and white papers and weekend retreats, got bogged down in procedural issues and endless debate. His Just Society initiatives—in unemployment insurance, in regional development, in equalization programs—not only had dubious results but fed a national debt that rose from a mere $18 billion in 1968 to $100 billion by 1979, so that in eleven years Trudeau’s Liberals accumulated four times as much debt as the preceding administrations had done since Confederation. The constitution, despite the conferences and tentative accords, was no closer to patriation than it had been in the fifty years of attempts by various governments, and Trudeau’s cherished Charter of Rights and Freedoms remained a pipe dream. Meanwhile the one big initiative that Trudeau had pushed throu...gh, official bilingualism, had not even been his own, and had done nothing to stem the tide either of western alienation or of Quebec separatism.MoreLess
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