Thursday, September 30, 2010

Trudeau Made Us, Helas

Ten years after the death of Pierre Trudeau, the National Post surveys the wreckage of his well-intentioned but observably insidious initiatives:
...He imagined that multiculturalism would unify us in our diversity -- although he never explained how that logical oxymoron was supposed to occur. Instead, multiculturalism has led to divisive ethnopolitics and political correctness dictating national immigration and refugee policy.
Human rights commissions are also part of his legacy, as is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which enshrined important individual liberties, but also authorized judges to "read in" new rights. Special interest groups, backed by funding Mr. Trudeau put in place for court challenges, quickly learned they could use Charter-empowered judges to force changes in Canadian society that they never could have won through free elections.

The CRTC -- the agency that for decades has tried to tell us what we may watch on television and listen on radio --is also a Trudeau creation.

But as bad as that litany is, it is probably to the economy that Mr. Trudeau did the most damage. Inflation, national debt, lost opportunities due to protectionism and economic nationalism -- he left us all of these...
To recap: he is the game-changer responsible for a battery of  malign measures that froze us in a rictus of over-regulation, trashed our more precious freedom--free speech (a loss he thought we might not notice since he were too distracted making whoopee in our bedrooms, which he assured us were off limits to state instrusion), and fatally compromised our social fabric via idiotic multiculturalism, which, speaking metaphorically, has turned out to be both an Achilles heel and a Trojan horse. (Would that it were at least a Trojan Horse with an Achilles heel.)

Merci, Pierre. Here's hoping we never see your like again.

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