By William Gairdner
williamgairdner.com, March 28, 2012:
This is an excerpt from Chapter One of The Trouble With Canada ... Still! (BPS Books, 2011)
As it happened, in his very person Trudeau embodied
the French and English styles described above, for he had a
French-Canadian father, and a Scottish mother. Canadian scholars burn a
lot of energy debating whether Trudeau was a “socialist” or a
“libertarian” and assume the two things are contradictory. For he
famously said that “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the
nation.” But he also entrenched coast-to-coast radical equalization
policies in his Charter. Here was a man very comfortable with
multiple mistresses, with legislating homosexual rights, and who, even
as Prime Minister did not mind taking off his clothes and sunbathing
nude in mixed company.[1] He was a flamboyant libertarian who imposed the most controlling and expensive Statist regime on Canada in its history.
So was he a socialist or a libertarian?
My answer: he was a “libertarian socialist,” and
we Canadians all now live under his libertarian socialists regime. But
how? How can this circle be squared? These things are opposites, aren’t
they? Not really. It’s just the two labels are applied to different
things. Think of what is individual, private, and physical: your body.
Then think of what is public and general: a service like health care, or
education, or a language right. Trudeau’s Charter combined and
enabled these two conflicting styles by encouraging the separation of
the private body, from the public body. He was a libertarian in that he
believed matters of the private body are no one else’s business. But
when it came to goods he felt we all deserve from the State? Why, then a
powerful system for providing, equalizing, and controlling access to
such goods must be set up, and this would be done through taxation and
fiscal bribery of the provinces; that is, through shared-cost programs
or grants financed by exorbitant levels of individual taxation and
unconscionable borrowing. But what kind of socialism was it? What kind
of libertarianism?
His Socialist Conviction
Trudeau was trying, as mentioned, to spin the wheel
slowly, so that without realizing the change of direction, a Canadian
would find himself “disembarking at a different island than the one he
thought he was sailing for.” Fundamentally, on the public level, all
that he did was clearly and resolutely substitute the French-Statist
style for the English-Liberty style at every opportunity. By the time he
was finished, Canada had changed from a fiscally stable, low-debt,
reasonably free, only mildly-socialized nation under limited government,
to one bending under huge public debt, highly managerial, and much more
thoroughly socialist in its fiscal and social commitments. In his first
and only major book, Federalism and the French Canadians,
Trudeau clearly outlined this plan for Canada. At the time, most
leftists argued that socialism could not successfully be planted in a
nation such as ours with an existing federal system because the powers
of governance in such nations are already divided as between central and
local jurisdictions, and this division of powers is entrenched forever
in their constitutions. So the general conclusion was that Canada was
not and never would be a candidate for socialism. But Trudeau disagreed.
He spoke admiringly of "that superb strategist, Mao Tse-Tung" who
argued that “planting socialism” in various regional strongholds was
"the very best thing." Accordingly, Trudeau developed the argument that
systems such as Canada’s, contrary to the advice of all the theorists,
can indeed be made socialist, and that our British-style federal system
"must be welcomed as a valuable tool which permits dynamic parties to plant socialist governments in certain provinces, from which the seeds of radicalism can slowly spread"[2]
His Libertarian Conviction
Trudeau probably wrote as much about individual
rights as about socialism, and most scholars, and the public in general
continue to believe these two political philosophies are in clear
contradiction. Certainly, in their party platforms, socialists and
libertarians are sworn enemies. But as mentioned, Trudeau’s genius was
to combine these contraries by splitting their domains between what is
inside our skin, and what is outside it: private body, and public body;
person and polis.
He was throwing the Canadian people a bone by reducing the
larger realm of freedom to which they had been accustomed, to their
persons and bodies. But all the “public” freedoms having to do with
economics and trade, private property, education, provision of health
care, welfare, and so on, would fall under Statist regulation. He knew
that if he could leave us unfettered and free with respect to most of
our personal bodily pleasures, we would be fooled into believing we were
still free in all our former ways. But those were precisely
the freedoms he despised: the bottom-up political, economic, and
legislative realities essential to the creation of the British-style
that produced what he called scornfully, our "checkerboard federalism."
To him, Canada’s parliamentarians were “just nobodies,” and “a crummy
lot” (this, he uttered publicly in 1969). The British Style was a
reality that stood in the way of his French-style plan for Statism. So
the system had to be changed. Trudeau was Canada’s Procrustes, doing his
utmost to make a one-size-fits-all political bed for Canadian citizens.
His libertarian ethic, which is based on the idea that
liberty means doing whatever you want as long as you don’t harm anyone
else, was absorbed from typical English individualist thinking that was
radicalized by John Stuart Mill in his canonical booklet, On Liberty (1859). It is called Mill’s “Harm Principle,” and it neatly articulated Mill’s simplistic argument for the privatization of morality
that it has by now become the standard reasoning in defence of personal
moral autonomy all over the Western world. Prior to Mill, throughout
our long Judeo-Christian tradition, morality – codes of right and wrong
behavior - had always been considered a community good. Moral standards
reflected common religious and community standards. The metaphor was
that we all live under a common moral bubble wherein by means of
conviction, belief, and debate we sustain a common set of shalls and
shall-nots that defines us morally … who we are. Mill argued instead
that we each ought to live under our own private self-defined moral
bubble, and be concerned for others only if we bump into them. Then we
just apologize, or negotiate a solution to any harm done.
Mill failed to see that if you are completely alone in the
universe it is true that you can do whatever you want, and call it
“morality” if you like. But because there are no other human beings in
existence and you cannot therefore help or harm anyone else, you can
also call it Winnie-the-Pooh. However, as soon as someone else exists in
addition to yourself, you must take into consideration whether your
actions will help them, or harm them, now, or in the future, directly or
indirectly. Suddenly, what was a personal and private act, becomes
public, and thus falls under the term “morality,” rightly considered. In
his person and in his politics, Trudeau combined two conflicting
styles: the personal libertarianism articulated by Mill, and the Statism
of Rousseau.
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