Mike Pearson helped build Canada

Two Trudeau's have tried to destroy it

Lester Bowles Pearson became Prime Minister in the 1963 election. I was a few months short of eighteen at the time and a high school student in France. Pearson was relatively unknown until awarded the Nobel peace prize for his work in organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the 1957 Suez Canal crisis and becoming Liberal leader in 1958. Pearson served in both WWI and WWII and flew as a pilot with the Royal Air Force. The nickname “Mike” came when an instructor reportedly told him a pilot could not be named “Lester” and tagged him “Mike”. He was right - my own service in the RCAF as a fighter pilot would have been less notable had I been named “Lester”.

On November 22, 1963 I was at a movie in the Astra theatre in Metz, France when the theatre manager, George Rae, interrupted the movie to announce in an emotional moment that president John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Not long after, I saw Pearson on television giving a powerful speech (despite his squeaky voice and lisp) that captured the shock of JFK’s murder. I voted Liberal in the 1965 election in which Pearson was re-elected to a second minority government. I voted Liberal in every following election until 2015 when the divisive and destructive policies of Justin Trudeau persuaded me that the Liberal party of the 1960’s no longer exists and the concept of free markets, free speech, and small government had become the domain of Conservatives.

Under Mike Pearson the Liberal party made sense. Budgets were close to balanced and policies to assist those in need were introduced within budgets. Pearson was the person most responsible for universal health care in Canada (often attributed to socialist Tommy Douglas for enacting universal health care in Saskatchewan), the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Student Loan Program, and establishing Canada’s own flag by replacing the Union Jack with our current flag. Pearson rebuffed Lyndon Johnson’s request for Canada to support the U.S. in the Vietnam war, created the Order of Canada to recongize Canadians who had made a contribution to our country, and, introduced the world’s first “points based” immigratin system. Ottawa became the home of common sense. He resigned as Prime Minister in 1968 and died in 1972. His legacy was a better Canada.

Pearson’s cabinet included future Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, John Turner and Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Pearson chose Trudeau as successor when he retired from politics in 1968, wanting to ensure Canada had a French Canadian Prime Minister who would support Pearson’s view that Quebec was a “distinct society”, a nation within a nation, and that a Francophone Prime Minister would help unite Canada.

He could not have been more wrong. Trudeau avoided military service, dodged WWII, and spent his years in office doing his best to tear down the legacy of Mike Pearson, well chronicled in an article by David Frum in 2011 entitled “The disastrous legacy of Pierre Trudeau”. He tripled Canada’s national debt, enacted the divisive National Energy Program (NEP), and, traipsed around the world dating celebrities like Barbra Streisand and marrying flower child Margaret Sinclair only to divorce her and father a fourth child named Sarah with lawyer Deborah Coyne. Keep that in mind when you read articles by her cousin - journalist Andrew Coyne - or see the trash he posts on Twitter.

Colorful, flamboyant, a great speaker and a strong personality, Pierre Trudeau engendered an almost cult-like following notwithstanding his destructive policies. Despite a history of claiming credit for the accomplishments of Mike Pearson, Pierre Trudeau did repatriate the Constitution, enact stricter gun control legislation and end the tyranny suffered by homosexuals introducing legislation on human rights including statements to the effect that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. No doubt he had his own bedroom in mind.

Pierre Trudeau in my opinion held the informal title of “worst Prime Minister” in Canadian history until the 2015 election of his son, Justin, who clearly outpaces his father’s disastrous legacy. Justin Trudeau has followed in his father’s footsteps by doubling Canada’s national debt (adding more debt since 2015 than all debt Canada incurred since Confederation) and attacking both Alberta and the oil & gas industry much as did his father with the NEP. Not satisfied with merely decriminalizing homosexuality, Justin Trudeau promotes diversity, equity and inclusion and eschews knowledge and competence in his cabinet in favor of gender, sexual orientation, race or some other irrelevant attribute of those he chose to appoint. His “climate change” policies are a thinly disguised attack on Canada’s energy industry based on the nonsensical theory that CO2 causes climate change and despite the reality that Canadian fossil fuel emissions are miniscule and Canada is host to over 1 billion acres of boreal forest which sequesters far more CO2 than Canada has ever produced.

Mike Pearson’s legacy is a stronger Canada that may be strong enough to resist the damage the two Trudeau’s have done and earned Pearson enough respect that Canada’s largest airport is named after him. If Canada is lucky, nothing will be named after any Trudeau who held the Prime Minister’s office and the current Trudeau, a hapless and failing drama teacher, can go back to teaching, a career that ended before he entered politics ostensibly owing to his sexual interference with a student kept from public view by a Non-Disclosure Agreement and payment of money according to some. The Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, his father’s one namesake organization, had already stained its copy book with ties to Chinese donors to Liberal candidates and a mass resignation of its board.

In the the meantime, Trudeau-lite can keep up appearances by claiming to be part of a happy family while carousing internationally with gorgeous cabinet Minister Melanie Joly, holding hands with her in public, and embarassing Sophie Gregoire much as his father embarassed Margaret with his pecadillos. At this point, the only thing Justin Trudeau can do that will make Canada a better place is to resign.