Reverberations in America's Attic

From the heady Trudeau years to a new vision of Canada Inc.

Canadian Writer Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz) is known for witty portraits of his native land, most recently in his book Home Sweet Home. Here he takes a typically affectionate look at his country's elections.

I adore it in Canada. Here we are hunkered down mindlessly in the snow, smack in the middle of the shortest possible overland missile, or, if you like, infantry route between those legendary, loving pals the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The 20th century, promised to us by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1904, is almost over, and Canada, so far as pennant-contending nations go, is still fumbling through spring training. Unemployment is running at 11%. Our dollar is teetering at 760 (U.S.). But what had surfaced as one of the most contentious election issues in the first month of the campaign was Prime Minister John Turner's having been seen to pat Liberal Party President lona Campagnolo on the bum. Actually, Turner's condescending gesture reeked more of country club bonhomie, circa 1950, than unbridled lechery. It would be worrying only if he were running for principal of a girls' high school. But Brian Mulroney, understandably, has made the most of it, puffed out with indignation against this unspeakable violation of womankind.

Our election has also been enriched by little ironies. Turner, having acquiesced under duress to confirm a flood tide of patronage appointments demanded by departing Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, has been handicapped since Day 1 of his campaign, with Mulroney jabbing away effectively on the issue. But speaking from the heart to his own potential constituents in Baie Comeau, Mulroney assured them that if he were elected, they would enjoy "priority treatment," which is to say wink, wink, they would be first into the trough.

Patronage, surely, was the sleazy underside of the Trudeau heritage, but it must also be said that after 16 almost uninterrupted years in office, Trudeau did not leave this bickering, fragmented country as he found it. A previous Prime Minister, the engaging Lester B. Pearson, gave us a flag. Trudeau, going one better, brought home a constitution, severing our last official colonial cord. Now that we've got some of the furniture of nationhood, all we need is a proper house.

Trudeau could behave petulantly--yes, indeed--but he also showed grace under pressure, he was eloquent on occasion and easily the intellectual superior of anybody else in Parliament. He entrenched French power in Ottawa to the happy extent that it is now no longer possible for a unilingual leader to be Prime Minister.

Trudeau, washed into office on waves of Trudeaumania, was put in place in the hope that he would keep a smoldering Quebec in confederation, and, in that, he succeeded, even as he also alienated the west. The separatist Parti Quebecois, once a serious threat, is now a spent force, reduced to a 23% following in the latest polls. In the future, it seems likely that the more vengeful clauses of their language legislation will be revoked. I dream that some day it will be legal again for an English-language bookshop in Montreal to mount a bilingual sign on the street, just as it is now possible in Paris, another French-speaking city.

Trudeau, a leader of international stature, a lonely advocate of nuclear sanity in his last year in office, never did put his mind to our economic plight. Either he considered it beneath him or he is easily bored. What he did offer was a vision of a civil, bilingual society.

Now we are being asked to choose between a potential chairman of Canada Inc. and a capable if calculating political boss. It's a safe bet that both Turner and Mulroney are more knowledgeable about economics than Trudeau, but neither of them seems possessed of a vision of this country that extends beyond fancying himself filling the Prime Minister's office. Turner and Mulroney, bless them, are both for a lower national deficit, higher employment and less acid rain on Sundays. Driven to it, they will admit we live in the greatest damn country in the world.

In Yellowknife, for instance, it seldom sinks lower than 50DEG below in winter. Only the third candidate, the resoundingly decent leader of the New Democratic Party, Ed Broadbent, has addressed himself honestly to the kind of society he would like to see us share, which is to say, he doesn't stand a chance of winning.

Indifferent voters will not be endorsing either Turner or Mulroney so much as voting against one or the other. Against Turner because the Liberals have grown fat and insensitive in office, coming to take power as their birthright. Against Mulroney because they simply don't trust him. His suits fit too well.

For every question he has a mellifluous, rehearsed response, more glib than deeply felt. One would be hard put to separate the two contenders with an ideological straw. Both, retreating from Trudeau's economic nationalism, would hasten to put out the welcome wagon again for American investment, though Mulroney, one suspects, wouldn't even ask for a deposit on the empties.

Remember, North America's attic is not where the action is, it's where it reverberates. After you elected J.F.K., we went for Trudeau. Follow-big Reagan, it seems likely we will thrust Mulroney into office. Mulroney would do much more than Turner to beef up our defense forces, which makes me hanker for the Pearson years, when legend has it that a sagacious M.P. stood up and said there is only one possible defense policy for Canada: paint arrows on our rooftops saying this way to Detroit, that way to Chicago.

North America's attic is also where an abundance of riches is stored. We own one-third of the world's fresh-water supply, enough oil and gas to be self-sufficient; there are wheat and timber and iron ore. But we have never been able to put it together. After all these years we remain a loosely knit, quarrelsome federation. Put California into a typewriter and the third carbon will yield British Columbia. Out there, beyond the Rockies, they look upon Ottawa as distant and uncaring. The fulminating west feels, with some justice, that it remains an internal colony, the National Energy Policy's sacrificial goat.

What we are being offered in this election is not a leader of vision but a choice of managers. Interchangeable political parts. For too long this country, like the Expos, has looked good only on paper.

Canadians are weary of being told we will inherit a golden tomorrow. We need something more right now.