By Daniel Velarde
It’s the same old story. Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939-1993 attacks Pierre Trudeau for flirting with fascism instead of signing up to fight the Nazis. On cue, Liberal faithful form ranks to defend their departed messiah, whom they fully expect to come down from the sky one day and form a government.
A flood of letters and editorials then fills newspaper columns across the country. The cavalry to the rescue, and it’s out for blood.
“Mulroney looks like a liar,” writes one would-be Cicero in the Toronto Star. Compelling. In fact, why don’t we hang Lyin’ Brian right away?
Stéphane Dion must have whipped up the usual suspects of the Liberal party around their big red altar, setting an empty chair aside for Trudeau. After all, he is watching.
And maybe it worked. But none of the outraged columnists seemed to remember that Mulroney had come out of the womb crying against Trudeau. Twenty-four years ago, the Tory leader published a pamphlet disguised as a book called Where I Stand.
“Every Liberal worthy of the name,” it said, “should have the decency to be embarrassed by the charade the Trudeau government has made . . . of democracy.”
Brian never pulled his punches against Trudeau, and for all that we convince ourselves of the contrary, he was usually right.
Liberals may still tell horror stories of days before Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, when jackboots and firing squads presumably prowled every city. But the fraud only goes so far. Trudeau governed like a Peruvian colonel, all tangled up in his laurels. History will outlive Trudeaumania.
But those who would reproach Trudeau’s weakness in war should be sparing in their comments and thankful that they were never dealt a similar crisis. Judging, after all, is best left to those willing to be judged. And no Canadian can fail to notice the conspicuous absence of military medals on Mulroney’s own chest.
Looking back, iit is not clear what Mulroney expected from a French Canadian like Trudeau when Hitler bombed Warsaw in 1939. That trumpets would blast and bayonets gleam at the sound of
a whistle from Ottawa?
That Trudeau would jump in a boat to die for Danzig – a German-speaking town sliced from the fatherland by a resurrected Poland – all in good humour, too?
War in Europe was as alien to Quebec as a military adventure in Afghanistan is to it now.
And when Germans tanks overran Paris? The truth was that no Catholic shed any tears at the collapse of the hated French Republic, that bourgeois, apostate country that had forced priests from its schools and whose defeat only confirmed its corruption.
A Revolution and an Ocean sat between France and Quebec. And only one could be crossed.
And how to imagine a French Canadian throwing himself in front of the Panzers for Britain – “perfidious Albion” – a country whose habit had always been to appease the strong and to bully the weak?
What was this business of killing Germans? Hadn’t they seen it before? What good had come of it? In the last war, French Canadian bodies had filled up graves in Flanders while the provinces trampled the rights of French speakers across Canada.
But what no one seems prepared to admit is that young Trudeau’s right wing, militant ideas were nothing unusual in Quebec, a land that lit candles to Salazar, Mussolini and Franco.
For all the devotion they later gave Charles de Gaulle, French Canadians in the 1940s were more inclined to salute the French dictator, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and his criminal lackeys who helped the Nazis deport French Jews to the gas chambers.
French Canadians believed war would purify France, which would claim the fruit of her sacrifice and be reborn in rural Quebec’s image, stripped of atheism, liberty, and democracy. The Bastille would be rebuilt. Meanwhile, Quebec would do well to get rid of Anglo-Protestants and Jews.
In 1940, a Quebec City crowd mocked General de Gaulle’s Free French soldiers. Were these not traitors who turned their backs on Pétain to serve under the blasphemous colours of a renegade?
But it gets worse. Quebec intellectual Abbé Lionel Groulx stood behind his pulpit in Montreal and told French Canadians they were the lions of God, a cosmic race kept pure by its isolation from degenerate Jews and English rabble. A small-town Hitler preached hatred on our doorstep.
Mulroney was wrong on one point. Neither Groulx nor Trudeau knew about the Holocaust until the war’s end, and the gruesome discovery brought them both to their senses. But neither had lifted a finger to bring it to an end.
All this makes the pious silence of the separatists understandable. Any talk of the old chiefs would embarrass their well-rehearsed sense of eternal victimhood.
But theirs is a guilty silence all the same. Just listen to Jacques Parizeau’s outburst over “the ethnic vote.”
So Liberals need to stop acting like Mulroney has blasphemed the Holy Ghost. Yes, he still hates Trudeau, and the Pope is still Catholic.
If he wants to talk about morality, Mulroney could start by making war on the living, not on the dead.
But we should not allow controversy and regret to hold the truth in a Babylonian captivity. Ordinary Canadians must gather the courage to look their own past in the face instead of hiding behind partisan politics. We have an option: We could do better.