The CBC is having a series on “The Greatest Canadian”. I haven’t been following it, mostly because we don’t get CBC TV here in Rochester NY. (Yeah, we get two channels in Russian and one in Vietnamese, but the closest neighbour country, and one that speaks the same language as us? No way!)
Anyway, my pick for the Greatest Canadian would be Pierre Trudeau – Joe, the “I AM CANADIAN” guy in the beer commericals isn’t in the running. My dad probably wouldn’t agree with that, because I don’t think he ever forgave Trudeau for that time he did a pirohuette behind the Queen’s back. I know my western friends like Les never forgave him for the National Energy Plan and the time he gave the finger to protesters in Salmon Arm, B.C. In the last couple of years he was in power, I hated his arrogance – but that was before Mulroney and Cretien showed us just how arrogant a Canadian Prime Minister could get.
But Trudeau was Prime Minister from the time I was 6 until just before I went to college. So he was Prime Minister during my most formative years. And to me, he *was* the epitome of “the Canadian character”.
I didn’t really become aware of “the Canadian character” until I started living down here in the US. I found that things I assumed were just “normal”, my basic assumptions about the role of government, are just not the norm here. In Canada, even the so called “right wing” party, the Progressive Conservatives (since deceased), believed in universal health care. Here in the US, I encountered people who felt that *every* dollar taken from them by the government was theft, even the money that went to maintain the roads that they were driving on and the police that were patrolling it.
But thanks to Trudeau, I grew up believing that the government was there to protect the weak from the strong, make sure everybody had the basic necessities of life, that those who have should share with those that need, that understanding the “other” was the way to remove the barriers between you and them, and (to quote him directly) that the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Unlike Trudeau, I believe that the government should pay for these programs by taxing those who could most afford it, not by running huge deficits, but nobody’s perfect. By American standards, I’m a socialist. By Canadian standards, pretty middle of the road.
I think that when a typical Canadian sees a homeless person in the street, he is apt to think that the government has failed. Failed in providing proper schooling and mental health care to prevent the person from being homeless, and failed in providing homeless shelters and other services after. An American is as likely as not to think that a person is homeless because of personal failings. Certainly that’s the neo-con Republican viewpoint.
And another thing that is different down here: When was the last time that anybody in Canada made more than a passing reference to a candidate’s or MP’s religion? Here in the US a candidate has photo-ops in front (or worse, inside) his church, and will make a big deal of his religion, and how his beliefs guide the way he governs. I think if a Canadian Prime Minister were to say that he prays for and receives guidance directly from God every day, we’d laugh him out of Parliment. Ok, sure, we had a Prime Minister who used to have seances to ask his dead mother (and his dead dog) for guidance, but nobody knew about that until long after he was dead and they published his diaries.
Anyway, I had a bunch more thoughts on the drive home, but I want to get this published.