Trudeaumania

When I see the name Trudeau in a headline I still think of Pierre before I think of Justin.  That comes from being of a certain age.

I remember that on the day to the 1968 election (when I was six) my sister and I walked down to the post office and she asked whether I preferred Trudeau or Stansfield.  To me they were nothing but two names, and I chose Stansfield because it sounded more familiar to me.

When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa where we got to meet our MP (and cabinet minister) Romeo Leblanc.  He even arranged for us to meet Trudeau briefly!  One of the girls kissed him.  I'm ashamed to admit that I poked him in the back.

Trudeaumania was the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy cult in the U.S.  If you ask me, J.F.K. was an oddly overrated president whose biggest legacy was the escalation that led to the American invasion of Vietnam.  And I'm not so sure that he would have got out if he'd only lived longer.

I thought that Trudeau's opposition to the Meech Lake Accord was petulant and short-sighted.  And don't get me started on the October Crisis! (I remember one schoolboy joke from the time: "When did the alphabet have only 23 letters?  When they couldn't find the F.L.Q.!")