Trudeau, the failed philosopher.

There is no question that Trudeau was intelligent and widely-read. Some years ago, he was interviewed by a British journalist, Lord Chalfont, and when the interview appeared on television the listener could not fail to be impressed by the quality of their conversation. One intelligent man was speaking to another intelligent man, and Trudeau was able to give a lucid and impressive account of his attempt to make French Canadians feel that they were part of the Canadian community.

Trudeau in France

Where did he go wrong? In a talk he gave to the Northern Institute at least ten years ago, Canadian critic John Muggeridge emphasized not the influence of Harold Laski and the London School of Economics on Trudeau, but the influence of the time he spent in France. His Cite Libre, for example, was strongly influenced by the French Catholic intellectual and social scene following the Second World War.

The French think constantly in terms of left and right, and the right, the conservatives, were discredited: they were the followers of Petain and Vichy France. The real opening was towards the left, portrayed as heroes of the Resistance, and the really dynamic force in the nation. It may have been because of his leanings towards them that Trudeau became an admirer of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

The Omnibus Bill 

He was a philosopher who was very fond of Plato, but even an intellectual can go wrong and betray his philosophy. Reading the signs of the times in the way he had learned to do in France, he thought he knew the way the world was going, and what Canada had to do to keep in step. The Omnibus Bill he introduced as Justice Minister in 1968, and pushed through as Prime Minister the following year, reflected the conclusions reached in the Wolfenden Report to the British Government roughly a decade previously. It took a utilitarian view of morality; you could not say that actions were good and bad in themselves, but had to consider their consequences. Should homosexual acts be forbidden by the state? Not really, because there was no evidence that they were harmful.

Also, the report tried to play down the influence of morality on law. Liberal MP and later Justice Minister Mark MacGuigan saw the Omnibus Bill as "an entirely new approach to the criminal law" which "shall no longer be thought of as a mirror of morals." From now on, "crime and sin, law and morals, must be distinguished." Trudeau himself had made his famous remark that "the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation," a remark which referred to homosexuality but was soon taken to apply to abortion as well.

Law and morality are one

The Popes have often said that the objectives of legislators are not necessarily the objectives of the Church; but they have constantly emphasized that the legislator must always seek justice. Trudeau was forgetting the teaching of his beloved Plato in his most famous work, the Republic. There Plato makes it clear that the governor, the man who is fit to legislate or to have an important office in the state, is the man who has gone furthest in knowledge of the good. Law and morality cannot be separated. The law should take cognizance of actions performed in the privacy of bedrooms; it cannot ignore incest, child abuse, or wife abuse, for example.

Before allowing the passage of a bill permitting abortion, Trudeau should have reflected that the killing of unborn children is unjust. He lifted the lid on injustice, and it has not yet been put down. Most regrettably, he has been untrue to his faith and his philosophy.

He was often described as a man of vision, but when Ted Byfield looked for the content of his vision he could not find it. The one distinctive attribute of Canadians which he emphasized again and again was their tolerance of diversity. That is hardly a patch on what the nineteenth century English writer Coleridge considered the role of the state to be--to provide the social conditions of man's perfection. Byfield thought that Trudeau's reign had seen the end of Old Canada, born in the harsh realities of the frontier, and the beginning of New Canada, born in the most affluent civilization the world has ever seen.

"Where Old Canada paid its way, New Canada goes in to debt. Where Old Canada shared common goals that all its political ties aspired to fulfil, New Canada is essentially purposeless and without anything resembling shared agreed-upon goals." That is because Old Canada was Christian, whereas New Canada is "pluralistic." "Meaning apparently that it dare not state what it believes in, and consequently doesn't have a clue where it ought to go." A philosopher should have had more substance to his vision.