Filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd -- who was apparently an active Young Liberal back in the day -- lets it fly on Obama (via David Mader) and makes some interesting parallels to Trudeau:
I have seen this virus before; it devastated a country I loved, a place that nurtured me and raised me up. In that Canadian day, we called it "Trudeaumania," the suggestion of "Beatlemania" pop idol glitter being no accident. Even those of us in his Liberal party were powerless to stop the mad embrace millions of Canadians threw around Pierre Elliott Trudeau with his promise of reconciliation of the two founding peoples, a happy era when the English (more correctly, Scottish) heritage would join hands with the French legacy and take us forward into a brave new age. And he'd reforge our relationship with "The Elephant to our South."
That he was completely non-specific, avoiding policy questions in favour of depending entirely on his style and panache (and goodness knows, he had a surfeit of both) would surely undo him -- or so those of us who believed him to be a hard line leftist (because we'd read his essays in Cite Libre and studied his record) reassured ourselves.
Of course, we were wrong; his very lack of specificity was his strength. A brilliant orator, he spun webs around huge crowds, proposing big ideas in obscure terms, making it possible for the listener to impose any dream they wished upon his smiling, Savile Row-suited tabula rasa. He was all things to all people. In service to "party loyalty" and civility, we held our tongues.
And, in the meantime, the delighted English-language media, at last faced with a French-speaking Canadian they could love, dubbed him "Canada's JFK." By the time he and they were done, the damage would be staggering, even two generations later.
In the 1960s, Canada still basked in the glory of the extraordinary achievements of its own Greatest Generation. She had raised the largest army in the world, per capita, to fight Hitler (1.4 million out of a population of 11 million) and had emerged from the Second World War as the world's second-largest industrial power, devoting a vast part of this treasure to financing the Colombo Plan, "the Marshall Plan of Asia." To this day, much of the infrastructure of Pakistan, India and South Asia was paid for by Canadians. Those Canadians had scarcely any quotas or laws against American popular culture; indeed, they generally viewed the United States with affection, some even with admiration. True, many harboured a residual anger at America's over-two-year delay in entering the war, but it was a family squabble that could be put aside. The greatest bloom of that Canada was 1967, the summer of Expo.
Amazing that we have to go to Lionel Chetwynd, who hasn't lived in Canada for years, for a decent history lesson.
