In Pierre Trudeau's last term, he managed to win the Quebec referendum and repatriate the Constitution, with a shiny new Charter of Rights to boot. Bilingual, multicultural, liberal (in the small-"l" sense) Canada - these are Trudeau's legacies.
Chretien and his most-of-the-era finance minister Paul Martin managed to keep Canada's economy rolling, eliminate the deficit, keep interest rates low, and generally kept the country from spontaniously combusting, despite its best efforts to do so. The Prime Minister will be remembered for none of that. Instead, we're going to remember that Chretien was PM while we as a country learned to hate the United States.
I attended a rural wedding this past weekend, and I've never heard so many rural Albertans say some variation of "Goddamned Americans." They don't like Chretien, but they don't blame him, either, no matter how hard the new Conservative Party will try to convince us that we should.
(I posted months ago that I don't hate Americans at all. The political atmosphere is awful right now, but the people remain the same people I wrote about back then - America still has my respect and admiration, even if Dubya needs to be seriously bitch-slapped back to Crawford)
Who's to blame? Why do Canadians feel so much antipathy toward the USA right now? I suspect part of it is that we feel slighted somehow by a President that refuses to acknowledge our existence. Take Hesoid's word for it:
A President who takes everything personally, is a danger to the United States and the world.(forgive the lack of accented "e"s on the Prime Minister's name - apparently, my current character set wants to publish those as "Chrétien")
This is just more evidence, in my opinion, that Bush does not have the temperment or common sense to be the manager of an Iraqi Burger King, much less President of the United States.
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