Was Trudeau a Disaster for Canada? Yep.

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Three subsequent important prime ministers — Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper — invested their energies cleaning up the wreckage left by Pierre Trudeau. Finally, nobody speculates any more about Canada defaulting on its debt, or splitting apart, or being isolated from all its major allies.

his is the full text of David Frum’s opening statement at a debate over the late prime minister’s legacy hosted by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute. Arguing for Trudeau was Lawrence Martin. The debate, moderated by Michael Bliss, was held Tuesday Sept. 27, 2011 at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.

Under the strict rules of debate, my opponent can win if he proves that Trudeau was something less than a disaster for Canada: a misfortune or even merely a disappointment. I hope you will hold him — and Trudeau — to a higher standard. I hope you will require him to prove that Pierre Trudeau was affirmatively a good thing for Canada, actually a successful prime minister.

If so, he cannot possibly win.

Debating this resolution in Toronto against Prof. John English, I was very struck that my opponent readily conceded that Pierre Trudeau was a very poor manager of the Canadian economy. Prof. English argued more strenuously that Trudeau’s foreign policy record was not as bad as it looks. I’ll take up that issue later.

Prof. English hung everything on Pierre Trudeau’s alleged services to national unity. He described Pierre Trudeau as a very flawed man who also happened to be the savior of his country.

My answer then, which I’ll repeat again tonight, was that on the contrary, Pierre Trudeau did more than almost anyone in Canada to strain and break national unity. Through his own tactlessness and arrogance, he consistently aggravated the problem. In order to justify his own mishandling of the national unity issue, Trudeau in his retirement, concocted a ridiculous story that separatism had been defeated by him in 1980 — shrugging off the inconvenient fact that separatism raged for another two decades, that a second referendum in 1995 proved even closer than the first — and that in the end separatism was quelled not by Trudeau-style constitutional amendments but by economic and demographic change inside Quebec itself. If Pierre Trudeau had spent his entire life as an international playboy — instead of just the first half of it — the story would have ended in almost exactly the same way, except very possibly… sooner.

Canada today is a very successful country. It has suffered less from the global economic crisis than any other major economy.

So Canadians may be tempted to be philosophical about disasters in their own past. Hasn’t all come out right in the end? But I want to stress: Canada’s achievement overcoming Trudeau’s disastrous legacy should not inure Canadians to how disastrous that legacy was.

Three subsequent important prime ministers — Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper — invested their energies cleaning up the wreckage left by Pierre Trudeau. The work has taken almost 30 years. Finally and at long last, nobody speculates any more about Canada defaulting on its debt, or splitting apart, or being isolated from all its major allies.

Yet through most of the adult lives of most people in this room, people in Canada and outside Canada did worry about those things.

And as you enjoy the peace, stability and comparative prosperity of Canada in the 2010s just consider — this is how Canadians felt in the middle 1960s. Now imagine a political leader coming along and out of ignorance and arrogance despoiling all this success. Not because the leader faced some overwhelming crisis where it was hard to see the right answer. But utterly unnecessarily. Out of a clear blue sky. Like a malicious child on the beach stomping on the sand castle somebody else had worked all morning to build.

That was the political record of Pierre Trudeau.

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Good policymakers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. Yet between 1969 and 1979 — through two majority governments and one minority — Trudeau tripled federal spending.

In 1981–82, Canada plunged into recession, the worst since World War II. Trudeau’s already big deficits exploded to a point that Canada’s lenders worried about default.

Trudeau’s Conservative successor Brian Mulroney balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again — and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992. Trudeau’s next successors, Liberals this time, squeezed even tighter, raising taxes, and leaving Canadians through the 1990s working harder and harder with no real increase in their standard of living.

Do Canadians understand how many of their difficulties of the 1990s originated in the 1970s? They should.

To repay Trudeau’s debt, federal governments reduced transfers to provinces. Provinces restrained spending. And these restraints had real consequences for real people: more months in pain for heart patients, more months of immobility for patients awaiting hip replacements.

If Canada’s health system delivers better results today than 15 years ago, it’s not because it operates more efficiently. Canada’s health system delivers better results because the reduction of Trudeau’s debt burden has freed more funds for healthcare spending.

Pierre Trudeau was a spending fool. He believed in a state-led economy, and the longer he lasted in office, the more statist he became. The Foreign Investment Review Agency was succeeded by Petro-Canada. Petro-Canada was succeeded by wage and price controls. Wage and price controls were succeeded by the single worst economic decision of Canada’s 20th century: the National Energy Program.

The NEP tried to fix two different prices of oil, one inside Canada, one outside. The NEP expropriated foreign oil interests without compensation. The NEP sought to shoulder aside the historic role of the provinces as the owner and manager of natural resources.

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Source: David Frum | HuffPost Canada

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