RICK SALUTIN
Rick Salutin returned home to Canada, after a decade of study in the United States, on the day Pierre Trudeau declared martial law in October 1970. He has been a writer ever since. His many plays include 1837, on the movement for independence from the British Empire, and Les Canadiens, about the famed hockey team and its relation to the spirit of Quebec nationalism, which received the Chalmers Award for best Canadian play. He has written biography and history as well as two novels, one of which, A Man of Little Faith, was awarded the Books in Canada prize for best first novel. In 1993 he won the National Newspaper Award for best columnist for his Globe and Mail column on media, and he held the Maclean Hunter chair in ethics in communication at Ryerson Polytechnic University from 1993 to 1995.
LET ME START with a personal connection. My political formation occurred in the new left of the 1960s, particularly its American version, since I spent that decade in the United States as a student, first in Boston, then in New York. I was moved by the civil rights movement in the early years of the decade, then shaken by the rise of the anti-war movement in its middle years, then swept up by the new left in full roar, in the final years. Among the main features of this new left were reverence and even adulation for the national liberation movements of the Third World such as Cuba, China and Vietnam; and its revival of what it saw as the revolutionary marxist tradition—as opposed to the social democracies of Europe or the bureaucratic, repressive regimes of the Soviet realm, along with the Soviet-oriented communist parties of the west. Even at the time many of us knew there was a lot of rhetoric posing as theory in the new left, as well as much theatre masquerading as genuine political action. But these were internal blemishes—“contradictions”—to be faced and overcome as the movement matured.
My political view of Canada in those years was fundamentally contemptuous. Canada as I recalled it had room for neither a radical nationalism which aimed to sever its remaining colonial bonds; nor for revolutionary radicalism. The US had both, in deep if perverted forms: it had after all been born from a revolution for national independence. In this state of mind I heard distantly about the rise of a politician named Pierre Trudeau, first as candidate for leadership of the Liberal party, then as newly elected prime minister. I got this news through nothing more weighty than Time magazine and the occasional report in the New York Times. There were Canadians in New York like artists Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow who formed a pro-Trudeau group but I wasn’t part of their milieu. Yet somehow—and I still find this odd—I took Trudeau’s appearance as a sign I should consider going home to Canada, during a time when I felt far more at home in New York City than I ever had in Canada. I announced this … presentiment to my maoist comrades, who found it peculiar.
Now for me in those years, what has since become a great icon of Canadian potential—Expo 67—signified nothing. I had attended Expo but it didn’t make me think even fleetingly about going home. Perhaps it meant more for those already in Canada for the duration and who were seeking proof that things in the country could change. But Trudeau—mere news reports about him—moved me. I don’t mean I returned to Canada because of Trudeau. My return had more to do with the fact I’d run out of money to live on and burned my bridges in the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research—plus a desire to try writing, which for me seemed to require the sense of place I felt in Toronto. Besides, whatever role Trudeau has as my impetus for return- well, I arrived back the same day in October 1970 that he imposed military law on the country to stifle the revolutionary indépendantistes of Quebec. End of romance. Yet there had been that first response, as if there was a … consonance between my sense of Trudeau and the values and vocabulary of the new left.
Trudeau and Violence
Trudeau was a second North American coming of John F. Kennedy: young(ish), hip, sexy and, unlike their predecessors, Ike and Mike, products which seemed tailored to a new political marketplace, the first such items test-marketed into it. Both presented as liberals and progressives. Both behaved as if one of the first things a liberal must do in power is prove he isn’t a weakling himself—despite, or because of, his sympathies for the weak and unequal etc. As if they felt pressure to be manly, or at least prove they weren’t unmanly. Kennedy unleashed the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in his first months. Without that, it’s unlikely there would have been a Cuban missile crisis two years later, when Kennedy seemed willing to take the planet into nuclear devastation, so long as he didn’t look like the guy who blinked first. During his own first term, Trudeau icily declared the War Measures Act and imposed martial rule throughout Quebec. It’s not just that he did it; he seemed to glory in it. When a reporter asked how far he’d go suppressing civil liberties which he’d long advocated, he spoke his famous “Just watch me!” I was working for a weekly satirical radio show then. I wrote a sketch in which Trudeau was a gunslinger à la Clint Eastwood: “They call me … the man with the War Measures Act.” Max Ferguson did a superb Trudeau.
Now this kind of violent attitudinizing belonged not to the rightwing rhetoric of those years but to that of the left. Algerian psychiatrist Franz Fanon was a Marxist and national liberation advocate. He both theorized and eulogized the need for violence as part of the liberation process: it was therapy for colonial societies and individuals colonized in them. His theory was substantial but the language reached rhapsodic levels in some of Fanon’s books, as if he was doing some therapy on himself. His texts were omnipresent among new leftists in those years, including Quebeckers. Author Pierre Vallières called his people les nègres blancs de l’Amérique. In the US, the Black Panthers advocated armed confrontation with the American state; and if you weren’t part of the solution you were part of the problem. This was a conscious repudiation of the non-violence of the civil rights movement, and the Panthers paid a high price for it in numbers murdered or jailed by the police and FBI. The mood was also widespread among whites in the new left, who often took their cue from radical blacks. Mao’s dictum that power comes from the barrel of a gun was quoted and approved. Left organizations like the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, to which some of my friends belonged, included arms training as part of their requirement for membership. By the early 1970s, a number of former student leftists, mainly white, had gone “underground” as the Weathermen to inspire a violent revolution in the United States on the model of “exemplary action,” associated with Castro’s victory in Cuba. (It vied for popularity with the “maoist model” of mass mobilization.) Were these young, mainly middle-class new leftists using violence to compensate for their radical idealism, in the way that Kennedy and Trudeau may have been trying to prove their liberalism hadn’t made them squeamish? Did their fury imply an admission that the cause they embraced would probably not triumph? At Columbia University in 1968, young women at Barnard College screamed down from their dorms, “Up against the wall, motherfuckers,” at New York police who’d broken student heads to end the anti-war protest there. Was it middle-class rage against parental and other authority—a rage all the stronger when authority hides beneath “tolerant” verbiage—the “repressive tolerance” that new left guru Herbert Marcuse critiqued? At any rate, acceptance of violence was common across race, class, and gender lines on the new left. It showed in the popularity of the term “revolution,” strictly the property of the left in those years, though since appropriated by the right and by every form of merchandising. “By any means necessary,” said the Panthers. “Violent” was more or less assumed within “revolution.” It was necessary to be unafraid of violence, because “the ruling class” would use every means available to sustain their power, as had every such class in history etc.
An aspect of the new left that continues to perplex me is the way it mattered to us that “history was on our side”: as Castro said, that history would “absolve” us. It’s true this was marxist theory: proletarian revolution was, if not inevitable, at least smiled on by history. But that implies that simply fighting the good fight for justice was insufficient. There had to be a seriousness about results, about being hardheaded and “realistic.” One didn’t want to feel involved in quixotic idealism. We wanted to make clear we were not only committed and—in a phrase of the time, usually used ironically—politically correct; we wanted it known that we meant to achieve what we set out to do, to be winners rather than losers, you might say. This kind of “realism” also echoes in Trudeau’s attitude. He personally avoided membership in the CCF/NDP, even though he urged friends to join. In the early 1960s, he abandoned his previous “anti-capitalism” stance in favour of, as Stephen Clarkson and Christine McCall write, a “more impersonal and technocratic, less populist and democratic” position on social and economic issues. By 1964 he joined in issuing a federalist “Manifeste pour une politique fonctionelle” and “An Appeal for Realism in Politics.” This kind of “realism,” which privileges results over principles, is a plausible prelude to a willingness to use violence once in power, as Trudeau did in the FLQ crisis.
I’d like to cite as a sample of this realism in the Trudeau-new left era a conversation I had with Sidney Newman, named by Trudeau as head of the National Film Board from 1970 to 1975. Newman began his career in Canada but worked at the BBC for many years, doing successful dramas and series, including the action-adventure show The Avengers. When he took the NFB post, one of his actions was to kill support for Denys Arcand’s documentary history of exploitation in Quebec’s textile industry, On est au coton. (Arcand released the film underground, then used the experience as a plot hinge in his feature Gina.) When I asked Newman about this blatant censorship, he was unapologetic. “Those guys actually think you can use a government agency to do propaganda for class war,” he snapped. It had the sound of “Just watch me!” But it also had the sound of someone who had firsthand experience with naive idealists. Newman, like many young Canadians, got his start in film at the left-leaning NFB created by John Grierson in the 1940s. Newman told me he hadn’t actually been a member of the Communist Party in those days but said, proudly I thought, that he’d been “very close” to it. The Canadian Communist Party of those years, the Stalin years, with its strong Soviet tilt, was also “realistic” about its idealistic enemies, whether they were dissident workers or dissident Marxist intellectuals. Stalinists and redbaiters in the early Cold War years would have agreed: what mattered was knowing you were right, then doing whatever was necessary.
So Trudeau the gunslinger, thumbs tucked into his belt, feet astride, unapologetic about imposing the War Measures Act in peacetime, shared a romance with decisiveness and righteous violence, that characterized the new left. Each delighted in the rawness of power and was bent on being hardheaded and realistic. Showing beneath this posture like a slip was a striking absence of democratic scruples. In a crisis, it didn’t really matter what “the people” said or how they voted because they were victims of false consciousness, of separatist propaganda etc. It seems to me Trudeau’s espousal, early in his political career, of “participatory democracy” rings as hollow as that of the (old and new) left for “people’s democracy.” Beneath each lurked a disrespect for the capacities of “the people” to determine what’s in their own interest. As for how realistic such realism really is: it seems to me Trudeau’s unprecedented peacetime use of state violence engendered a deep despair about the “Quebec problem” which is still with us: for nationalists in Quebec, a sense of the impossibility of working within Canada; for those outside Quebec, a sense that, in the end, only heavy-handedness will work, or nothing will.
Trudeau and National Liberation
I returned to Canada after ten years in the US by way of Quebec City. I made my way back to Canadian politics, after the American new left, by way of discovering Quebec as the Canadian version of a national liberation struggle. That’s how the world made sense in the era of Vietnam, Cuba, or Portugal’s African colonies. Canadian poet Milton Acorn had published his poem Where is Ché Guevara, about the spectre of an itinerant South American revolutionary who haunts the bloody and complacent days of western leaders (“President Johnson busy breaking a treaty/ As his forebears used to do on the Indians,/ And now he does on the entire world/ … pauses just an instant in the middle of/ handing out a souvenir pen/ to think/ ‘Where is Ché Guevara?’ ”) Like many notions that look limited in retrospect, the national liberation take on reality had a lot of limited truth in it. (Almost everything looks quaint after some passage of time. Think how clunky our computers will look a short while from now—or the gobs of naked wiring in our houses and streets.)
National liberation was the model on which many of those on the left in Quebec perceived their situation. They identified with anti-colonial struggles. (Another quaint-sounding term now. But think how quaint today’s self-help argot about survivors of abuse, recovering victims etc. will some day sound.) They identified with Vietnamese or Cubans or—to some degree especially—Palestinians. Vallières published his Nègres blancs. Michèle Lalonde’s poem Speak White carried the identification far beyond anything narrow or parochial: “Speak white/ tell us again about freedom and democracy/ We know that liberty is a black word/ as misery is Black/ as blood is muddied with the dust of Algiers or Little Rock/ … We know now/ that we are not alone.” Even in less subtle versions, there was something vital and imaginative in this approach. It was a nationalism built not on European models but on those from the colonized Third World. It was at the very least an interesting way to be an indépendantiste. Compare that élan with the doughy, hectoring visages of Jacques Parizeau or Lucien Bouchard today and try to decide which was the more dynamic, or maybe just more human, approach to the Quebec “problem.”
But when Trudeau became a national leader, he remained mired in the notion of Quebec nationalism as the conservative, backward force he’d fought as an intellectual in the 1950s—the Quebec nationalism of the Catholic church and Duplessis. He had no ear for the élan or idealism the new version involved—though he himself helped spawn it by his critiques of the old nationalism. (“Cité libre and Trudeau,” said the late Gérald Godin, poet and Parti Québecois cabinet minister, when I asked how he overcame the martyr-soaked version of Quebec history he’d received as a child in church schools. “Trudeau?” I asked in surprise, since Godin and his partner, singer Pauline Julien, had both been imprisoned in the roundup of all nationalists during the FLQ crisis. “Surtout Trudeau,” said Godin, unwilling to disavow the importance Trudeau once had for him.) But for Trudeau, there was no change in his valuation of the new nationalism as against the old. Lévesque might as well have been Duplessis.
It’s hard to know whether this intellectual obstinacy on Trudeau’s part is the sign of a grand obsession and idée fixe or just shows he grew intellectually lazy—and stopped examining his ideas, despite a reputation as an intellectual giant among Canadian politicians. The reputation may be an effect of context. It was possible to view him as the best mind in the country whereas he may have been just the best mind in the Liberal party—not the same thing. I don’t believe you can find a serious issue on which his thought developed after he entered politics—and certainly not this, the great passion that drew him into the public arena and with which he stayed preoccupied to the end of his career as prime minister and beyond.
An enduring myth about Trudeau is that he was a Canadian nationalist. But he was above all an anti-nationalist, focussed obsessively on nationalism in Quebec. To the extent he acted as a Canadian nationalist at all, it was mainly in response to Quebec nationalism: the nationalism that is the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is nationalism by default, without any root or heart; a device manipulated without passion for the sake of extirpating that other nationalism he so ardently loathed.
By contrast, the kind of Canadian (as opposed to merely Quebec) nationalism born in the new left years when Trudeau came to power also owed something to the national liberation model. In fact what the new Quebec nationalists were saying about Quebec in relation to English Canada could be said of Canada altogether—vis à vis the United States. So the new Canadian nationalism of the Trudeau years had an empathy for the aspirations of the new Quebec nationalism. The main vessel of the new Canadian nationalism in conventional politics at that time was the Waffle faction within the New Democratic Party; it urged an original and sympathetic approach to the possibility of an independent Quebec. Trudeau’s Canadian nationalism, such as it was, looked far more like the traditional version, which always viewed the suppression of Quebec’s national impulse as essential to Canada’s success, and continues to do so.
The odd upshot of this situation in our own era is that the inheritors of Trudeau’s position on Quebec and Canadian nationalism are not Jean Chrétien’s Liberals but Preston Manning’s Reform Party. They hold what Manning calls—claiming it’s something new—the equality option, though that is pretty much what Trudeau implied whenever he insisted that while Quebec may be unique, so are Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island. At least Trudeau spoke in conscious bad faith—knowing as he must that Quebec is unique in a far different sense than any province; that it is really a country within a country with its own language, history, culture, cuisine, legal and political institutions, etc. Whether Manning and his party know any better is a murky area. But they are also Trudeau’s inheritors as tepid and contradictory Canadian nationalists, having discovered what Manning calls, in the words of his mentor David Frum, “the sleeping giant of Canadian nationalism.” This, like the Trudeau version of Canadian nationalism, is a mainly anti-Quebec entity, largely lacking in positive economic, political or cultural content. To be sure there was more content in Trudeau’s Canadian nationalism, in his loose foreign investment rules, for example. But Trudeau was trying to tempt Quebeckers to stay within Canada, and had to put something on offer. Manning is willing or possibly happy to see Quebec depart, and need do nothing to prove his “nationalist” position, besides attacking Quebec. So Reform welcomes foreign control of the Canadian economy and is uneasy at even mild signs of disrespect toward the US. Both however turn away from facing what seems to me the unresolved conundrum of Confederation: that Canada is a country composed of nine provinces and another country.
Trudeau and Sex
The most lasting, compelling component of the new left was feminism, though it arrived in the mix at a late point, well after, say, the rhetoric of revolution. Yet the language of leftwing revolution is almost entirely absent today, while feminism remains a preoccupation of our society. It didn’t go away. Feminism in the new left began as a challenge to the movement’s utopian and sanctimonious claims. The first time I heard the term “chauvinist,” as in male chauvinist. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew a new and powerful weapon had been added to the arsenal of political discourse on every level, interpersonal to global.
Now I don’t believe you could say anything like a feminist attitude marked Trudeau’s time in power, with the possible exception of his last term. By conventional measurements like the number of women in his cabinet, both Diefenbaker and Pearson before and Clark and Mulroney after him, did more. His government did have to deal with the rise of the women’s movement and feminist claims. But it did so in traditional Liberal fashion, attempting to set up institutions it could control, in order to accomodate or defuse the demands. The strength of Canada’s women’s movement, embodied in the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, owes more to Trudeau negatively: it was created in reaction to Liberal efforts at co-optation. Overall there is a strange lack of personal connection between Trudeau himself and the feminist environment which pervaded the social and political environment in those years. During his final term in the early 1980s, prominent women held prominent positions, not just in cabinet but as Speaker of the House and governor general, but by then that had become typical of the times. As for policy, the Trudeau years saw liberalization in areas like divorce and abortion rights that were high on the feminist agenda. But it’s more plausible to locate these reforms within Trudeau’s concern for individual rights, a concern that runs from his years as justice minister through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in his final term, than to view it as a reaction to feminism.
What stands out about Trudeau’s time in power, especially the earlier years, has more to do with sexuality than feminism. Sex was part of the ambience on the new left. There often didn’t seem to be a gap between the political and sexual components of what was routinely referred to as just “the” revolution. During protest “occupations” of universities, having sex with random partners in the office of some professor seen as the mouthpiece of establishment ideology etc., was part of the anti-authoritarian nature of the event. A “liberated” sexuality seemed to be a natural part of liberated politics—though in truth the sexual revolution of the time owed as much to the pharmaceutical industry and the contraceptive pill, along with changes in the economy that led to economic self-sufficiency for many women, as it did to revolutionary theory.
Now Trudeau had this air of sexuality—you could even call it “new” sexuality—about him. It accrued partly as a result of his not being or having been married at the time he became prime minister. It had even more to do with his open sexual interests. This was enough to locate him within the adventurous, “revolutionary” spirit of the times, though his own sexual attitudes were basically traditional. He was more a rake, a playboy or a ladies’ man than a new sexual being, an old-fashioned guy with an old-fashioned approach to sex, even prissy in his way—or so say some in a position to know—who took advantage of a situation in which he possessed the attractions of power and celebrity. He married a woman who hardly seemed his intellectual equal but who provided him with a family. I’m not judging that, just saying it conforms to traditional notions of partnering; and he beat her up when she humiliated him by having a good sexual time on her own and not concealing it. Perhaps he was bisexual; those rumours have circulated endlessly. If so, that, along with keeping it secret, hardly makes him unusual among members of his class, or gender. The fact he fathered a child outside of marriage at age 71 and acknowledged paternity, as well as maintaining a relationship with his daughter, stands as more unusual and admirable in my book. It’s not pathbreaking in the last decade of the 20th century, but in the context of his life and practices, it looks good on Trudeau.
The generation of the new left was obsessed with its own youth. This had to do with mere size and with a generational circumstance: those who returned from the Second World War were near enough retirement that the young could foresee taking over from them—unlike, say, the experience of the young in the 1950s or 1980s. “Never trust anyone over thirty,” they said in the new left. That they were obsessed with their own youth rather than youth per se showed when they reached middle age and announced, “Never trust anyone under thirty.” They apotheosized their own experience as if going on a protest march was as formative as riding the rails during the Depression or slogging across Europe in a world war. Some of them took to claiming that no good music had been written after 1968, which in any other demographic would have looked like traditional Old-fartism. Trudeau, who became prime minister in 1968 at the age of 48, somehow became an honourary member of this cult of youth.
As John F. Kennedy had been. Kennedy was boyish, in contrast to his predecessor, General Eisenhower. But Kennedy had also been an officer during the Second World War, he was married and a parent. There was no hint he used drugs or was a sexual hobbyist—that came years later and partly as a result of changes in sexual attitudes that began at the time. Trudeau, though older than Kennedy when he came to power, was unmarried, hadn’t fought in some ancient war—and, above all, it was eight years later, post sexual revolution, the era of flower power and the cult of youth. He smoked grass and hash. Everyone knew. I don’t know how they knew but they knew. I guess some of them smoked with him. And he was into sex, he said so, more or less. He seemed to scorn authority and had a playful way.
In fact he was as ill-suited to the role of youth avatar as he was to being a symbol of the new sexuality. He was middle-aged, self-absorbed and intellectually rigid. He’d played an important and principled role in the deep changes Quebec had gone through during the 1950s and early 1960s, something his privilege enabled him to do. If the young gravitated to him—and they did—maybe they were covertly in search of a parental figure who looked as if that’s just what he wasn’t: in other words, a cool dad. For this task too, Trudeau was right guy in the right place at the right time. Like Chauncey Gardner in the movie, Trudeau was there. 90 percent of the job, as Woody Allen or someone said, is showing up.
Trudeau and Culture
The new left was, a friend of mine said at the time, a trip. It may not have accomplished much or left a lot by way of legacy and continuing influence—except for feminism—but it was a powerful, often joyous experience. By mid-1970 it was clear that this experiential quality was likely to characterize it more than any practical effects. One sensed this, like so much else, in the popular music of the time: the Beatles’ quiescent “Let It Be” or Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” It was only a few years but a long way from “The Times They Are A-Changing.” When those anthems of resignation were on the jukeboxes at the same time, in the same bars where I’d seen patrons fling beer bottles at the TV screen as Nixon announced his “incursion” (“This is not an invasion, it is an incursion”) into Cambodia, it felt as if any practical place for the new left in politics had drained away. The new left by then, perhaps all along, was more about culture than about politics. It had always placed culture—the music, drugs sex—at the very centre of its concerns, right beside the politics. By way of contrast, leftists of the 1930s would announce at their meetings, “We’ll now have the cultural part of the evening,” which true communists took as a sign to go out for a smoke.
Now setting aside the Charter of Rights as something not primarily “political,” Trudeau has also left relatively little by way of continuing effect—aside perhaps from ongoing bitterness and incomprehension within English Canada of what Quebec “wants” and is about—and in this respect, I’ve argued, Preston Manning’s Reform party, with its implicit preference to have Quebec just leave, is his true successor. Yet the presence of Trudeau remains strong. As Clarkson and McCall say at the outset of their work on Trudeau: he haunts us still—in books by and on him, TV series, curiosity, celebrity gossip, along with a sense that he remains the country’s only political star. In fact, more or less, its only star.
But maybe this is what he always was. His impact and meaning were mainly cultural, not political. He was an iconic figure, a media presence, a star. This is the sense of Trudeau that Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond caught by listing him in their book on pop culture, Mondo Canuck. His classification as pop culture icon rings truer to me than most historical or political analyses. It’s where he belongs, where he endures. I believe you could see this during his interventions in the Meech and Charlottetown debates; he was less a part of the debate than the return of a beloved pop figure: the Beatles re-unite, the Stones tour again. Kids at a high school where he spoke clamoured for a look; they begged him to return to politics, far less for what he said than for the sake of the figure he cut.
In this respect I’d say his significance anticipated the politics of a later age, our own, in which politics has become mostly a show. I mean this in more than the sense that politics in Canada has always been partly entertainment; in 19th-century Canada, elections were often the best or only show in town. But back then politics was also more than show. Today, with the proliferation of culture and imagery in the society of the spectacle, you hardly need politics to fill cultural needs. But with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of a socialist alternative to capitalism, along with the capitulation of most sources of opposition to the neoconservative economic agenda—from communist China to social democratic parties in the west—there is little left for politics to be about except show. This does not mean pace the rhetoric of the right, that government ceases to be important; it remains crucial to the maintenance and enhancement of the neoconservative agenda. But for the moment politics in the democratic, electoral sense, is no longer about making choices regarding social and economic direction, since all parties agree and no matter who you vote, for you know you’ll get the same government in essential respects. In Britain, Tony Blair’s New Labour explicitly adopts the legacy of Margaret Thatcher; in Canada, Chrétien’s Liberals adopt and even exceed the thrust of Mulroney’s Tories—a party that hasn’t so much declined as, having fulfilled its historic mission by transforming all others in its image, gone to its reward in heaven. What’s increasingly clear to voters is that they are not choosing the direction of their society—that has already been settled; they are voting for a cast of characters who will play the role of The Government on television and in the House of Commons for the next five years. The script is set, but you get to decide who plays the parts on TV. As politics qua culture, and as a pre-eminent media personality with a special bent for the understated timbre of TV, Pierre Trudeau was already there long ago. Maybe what people were always voting for when they voted for him was the guy they preferred to watch on TV, over the alternatives.
In one other way, Trudeau anticipated the political culture—or the politics as culture—of our era: it’s with regard to the rhetoric of change. Trudeau was presented in the political arena and the media—much like Kennedy before him—as the personification of necesssary change. In the 1960s, this had to do with the inevitability of generational change. In the mid-1990s, the inevitability of change is again a central feature of discourse in the media, the academy and the political realm. But this time the inevitability has to do with technological change and in its wake change in social and economic expectations. In the 1990s, change is treated fatalistically, as something technology has made and which human beings and society resist only futilely. Some benefit: primarily those already well-endowed; others suffer. But there is little you can do, resistance is futile, as a new spirit of the age, The Phantom of the Opera—a Trudeauesque figure, come to think of it—says. As usual, popular culture mirrors these claims. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing,” which epitomized the 1960s, gets revived as a Bank of Montreal ad in the 1990s. But the new left, as a sub-element of the 1960s experience, talked about change in a particular way: not just as something inevitable, but as something that could and must be made, enacted by people choosing their future together. The kind of change invoked in our own fatalistic age has to do with acceptance and submission, not creativity and agency. Trudeau, in his time in politics, participated in a pallid way in the language of agency, by speaking, especially early on—about participatory rather than parliamentary democracy—though mostly he meant expanding the participation of MPS and of the Liberal party in the exercise of power, not an inspired notion of the concept. And even that language faded, just as the new left faded, after the early promise and exuberance. Now, looking back on that time of both Trudeau and the new left, in the shadow cast by current grim demands for submission to technological and economic “change,” if there’s anything I miss about the often shallow, always self-infatuated phenomenon of the new left, it’s the fervent and joyous sense that human beings acting together in the name and under the inspiration of ideals really can change their own world and society: profoundly, within their lifetimes. I’m happy I once was part of a time and movement that believed in that possibility, and I regret that others, who have lived through their youthful years since then, have yet to experience it.