Pierre Trudeau, former Prime Minister and one of the most memorable politicians in Canadian histroy passed away today from prostate cancer at his home in Montreal.
While not universally loved throughout Canada, Trudeau will be remembered for a number of things including:
God speed P.E.T.
He’ll also be remembered for flipping the bird to people who didn’t like them. He’ll also be remembered for the nightmareish “6 and 5” policy.
While it is sad for his family and friends, I can almost gurantee that many people in western Canada (Alberta for sure) are not that upset by his passing.
Being an Albertan working in the oilpatch I can tell you that I have no love for many of Trudeau’s policies whether they were related to the oil industry or not. Many of them were assinine and a lot of the time Trudeau couldn’t tell a sound economic policy from the hole in the ground. But having said all that, you gotta admit the man had personality. Just like you said, he flipped the bird to people he didn’t like. Now when was the last time you saw a nation’s leader do that.
[ign’rnt 'murrican]That’s awful. No more Doonesbury and poor Jane Pauley must be devastated. [/ign’rnt 'murrican]
I can use this giant mirror at the northern border to comb my hair.
I’m a redneck from the Prairies, and I liked Trudeau. There was a lot of good about the man.
the man accidentally spilled my strawberry marguerita on me at Carlos and Pepe’s quite a few years ago…he bought me another one and invited me to lunch with he and his son, sacha…
he was a god…
oh yeah…he bought me a double…
Oh FEK’.
We’ve lost one of the Great Ones. Pierre Trudeau: the Wayne Gretzky, the Terry Fox, nay, the very Cecil Adams of Canadian politics…
We may not have agreed with him, and things he was involved in cause controversy to this day (the National Energy Program and the October Crisis come to mind) but by the Goddess he was charismatic, brilliant, passionate, dangerous, smart, and sexy–and he put Canada on the map in a way no-one else ever has.
He wasn’t just a politician; he had something more. In some way, he demonstrated that we Canadians could be equals with anyone in the the world, rather than just ex-British colonials, wanna-be aspirants to United Statehood, or custodians of resources for whoever happened along. He showed the world that there was a Canadian way.
We’re still trying to live up to his example.
Check out the lead item on the CBC website: http://www.cbc.ca/. The RealAudio report is worth listening to.
He was cool and had a cute wife. What more needs to be said?
I accidently met him once, it was sure intimidating being with him and the media scrum that surrounded him. I’ll miss him, it didn’t matter if you agreed or disagreed with him you couldn’t take your eyes off of him.
Keith
Pierre Elliot Trudeau was a brilliant intellectual, a superb athlete, an exceptionally passionate man, and we will be lucky to see that caliber of politician again. Many hated him for good (economic) reasons but he was a class act and did many great things. He said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the people” and he freed up abortions and ended laws against homosexual acts. He may have been a closet communist and was a close personal friend of Fidel Castro but I think he was intellectually grappling with a new world order where the white first world could no longer ignore the suffering on the rest of the planet.
I disagreed with him on a lot of things (such as screwing Barbra Streisand) but he is a hero of mine and I will mourn him. During the hippie era he had a nude cocktail party in the Prime Minister’s residence. When he told the opposition to “fuck off” in the House of Commons he told reporters he said “fuddle-duddle”. He fought the Quebec separatists brilliantly.
His son was swept into a mountain lake by an avalanche a couple of years ago and this probably hurt his health. A great man has died.