JT Pride Photo
© Toronto PrideJustin Trudeau indicating to his supporters the place where his heart used to be.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as the saying goes. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his son Justin represent a shining example of this age old idiom. From their admiration for communism to their exponential growth of Canada's national debt, these two ideologues contribute fantastically to the deterioration of the Canadian economy.

Getting friendly with Communism

Both Justin and Pierre Trudeau have publicly supported communism. In the Financial Post Gwyn Morgan writes:
Pierre was once asked for his views on democracy and communism, and stated that a one-party state would be the ideal government under certain conditions. That might sound familiar.

Added Pierre: "I wouldn't be prepared to think I would be successful in arguing that (communism) for Canada at the present time. But such times might come, who knows?" Five decades later, here's his son, Justin Trudeau: "You know, there's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime."
Even when Pierre was a young lad, he traveled to Stalin's USSR and actively involved himself in regime-sponsored propaganda activities. He also wrote in praise of Mao's murderous regime in China. Pierre is heralded as a positive figurehead of Canadian history (at least on Wikipedia...) but in reality his legacy is nothing short of a disaster for Canada.
Pierre Trudeau opted not to serve in World War II, although of age and in good health. He traveled to Josef Stalin's Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities. He wrote in praise of Mao's murderous regime in China. Trudeau lavishly admired Fidel Castro, Julius Nyere, and other Third World dictators. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik scathingly recalled Trudeau's 1971 prime ministerial visit: Trudeau visited the Siberian city of Norilsk and lamented that Canada had never succeeded in building so large a city so far north - unaware, or unconcerned, that Norilsk had been built by slave labor.

As prime minister, Trudeau to the extent he could tried to reorient Canada away from the great democratic alliance.

It's telling I think that Trudeau came to the edge of endorsing the communist coup against Solidarity in Poland in December 1981. Hours after the coup, Pierre Trudeau said: "If martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I cannot say it is all bad." He added "Hopefully the military regime will be able to keep Solidarity from excessive demands."
Now if your father was Pierre Trudeau then it would be easy to understand why young Trudeau has been possessed by postmodernist ideology which, as we all know, is founded in Marxism. The difference with Justin is that he's still in power, so you can watch him in real time as he pushes this ideological insanity.

Driving the Economic Disaster Train

Canada has suffered less from the global economic crisis than any other major economy, due to many reasons I'm sure. Aside from the Great Depression in 1929, Canada experienced many decades of peace and growth. Until Pierre Trudeau came along and plummeted Canada into it's second and third worst recessions in 1981-82 and 1992-93. In an article in the National Post, David Frum has this to say:
Pierre Trudeau inherited a strong, growing and diversified Canadian economy.

When Trudeau at last left office for good in 1984, Canadians were still feeling the effects of Canada's worst recession since the Great Depression. Eight years later, the country would tumble into another and even worse recession.

The two recessions 1981-82 and 1992-93 can both fairly be laid at Trudeau's door.

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Then as now, rising commodity prices buoyed the Canadian economy. Good policymakers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. A wise government does not make permanent commitments based on temporary revenues. Yet between 1969 and 1979 - through two majority governments and one minority - Trudeau tripled federal spending.

Nemesis followed hubris. Commodity prices dropped. Predictably, Canada tumbled into recession and the worst federal budget deficits in peacetime history.

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. By 1993, default on Trudeau's debt loomed as a real possibility. 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. The Canadian socialist Tommy Douglas anticipated the Trudeau disaster when he said that the great enemy of progressive government was unsound finance.

Pierre Trudeau was a spending fool. He was not alone in that, in the 1970s. But here's where he was alone. No contemporary leader of an advanced industrial economy - not even the German Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt or the British socialist James Callaghan - had so little understanding as Pierre Trudeau of the private market economy. "Little understanding?" I should have said: "active animosity."

Trudeau 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. I'll return in a moment to the consequences of the NEP for Canada's political stability. Let's focus for now on the economic effects.

Most other Western countries redirected themselves toward more fiscal restraint after 1979. Counting on abundant revenues from oil, the Trudeau government kept spending. Other Western governments began to worry more about attracting international investment. Canada repelled investors with arbitrary confiscations. Other Western governments recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s by turning toward freer markets. Under the National Energy Policy, Canada was up-regulating as the US, Britain, and West Germany deregulated. All of these mistakes together contributed to the extreme severity of the 1982 recession. Every one of them was Pierre Trudeau's fault.
Pierre's legacy left Canada in near ruin and it took 30 years to overcome these disasters.
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.
Now fast-forward to the present time and we have Pierre's son riding the same disaster train that brought near ruin to the country. The difference though is that Justin Trudeau is more of a puppet than his father. Gwyn Morgan puts the situation into perspective nicely when he compares Pierre and Justin's impact on Canada:
Accessing risk capital was virtually impossible when government bonds were yielding 19 per cent. By the time he retired in 1984, national debt had grown by 700 per cent and Canada's international debt rating had collapsed. Canada was transformed from one of the financially strongest countries in the world into an economic basket case. It would be two decades before tough fiscal discipline was able to overcome compounding interest payments and begin to reduce the country's real-dollar debt.

Five decades later, son Justin has Canada on a similar path. After inheriting the Stephen Harper government's zero-deficit balance sheet a little over two years ago, Trudeau's budgeted 2017-18 deficit has rocketed to $18 billion, with continuing deficits forecast to add $117 billion to the national debt by 2023. That's reason enough to worry, but the picture is certain to get much worse. Why? For the same reason that Pierre Trudeau's deficits spiralled out of control: the imposition of ideologically socialist government policies on a capitalist free-market economy.
Well that's just great. I guess the threat of looming climate shift in the form of an ice age - studiously ignored by the warmongering psychopaths in power across the anglosphere - isn't enough to usher in hell on Earth: let's sprinkle in a couple of dictator-loving ideologues to shake things up even further.

Conclusion

The Trudeau lineage has brought nothing but chaos for Canadians and it needs to go. These two figureheads are only capable of thinking under a narrow ideology, namely a socialist government, and the imposition of their ideological policies will bring nothing but ruin to Canada.