Showing posts with label Trudeau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trudeau. Show all posts

Friday, May 21, 2010

A comparison

In an earlier Blog I talked about some of the events which shaped the Boomers, one that I did not mention was the concept introduced or made popular by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, of the idea that Canada was a Just Society.  As I and my generation were growing up we came to accept multiculturalism, we came to believe in Canada as a Just Society. It was in 1968, that Pierre Trudeau campaigned saying Canadians wanted a just society. He asked for support for one nation, with two official languages.
For Trudeau, “…freedom [was] the most important value of a just society, and the exercise of freedom its principal characteristic.”...the value with the “highest priority in the pursuit of a Just Society had become equality.”This emphasis on equality of opportunity enveloped Trudeau’s entire platform during the 1968 elections, a platform that spoke to Canadians as his Liberal government won a majority in Parliament. He won, not only the election but the heart and soul of many of the Boomers. We believed, some of us took longer to understand the dream but  in the end the dream of a building a just society became what we saw ourselves doing (Both the right and the left believe in this concept, but have different ways of trying to achieve this ideal)

Many of the Boomers are now realizing that the dream under Mr. Harper is being destroyed.  Mr. Trudeau helped us believe in the good in people and to build on the good  and use that to create a just society. Mr. Harper uses fear to destroy our faith in people. Tapping into our fear first using the 911 attacks and then the recession,  the neo conservative religious right are consolidating power to move their religious agenda forward.

We are losing, our society is losing. Mr. Harper you are destroying the Canada that I grew up in and creating a society that is unpleasant and hurtful to the poor, the homeless, women, minorities, and the weak.

Judging how well minority rights are protected is one way to assess how democratic a society is in practice, . In two brilliant post "The Creative Revolution" shows that Mr. Harper, by creating his Canada as Jesusland  is destroying the dream that we as Boomers believed would be part of our legacy.