Reformed = Anti-Revolutionary

By Wes Bredenhof

My Dad was a pilot in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and, as a boy, I was so proud of him. In his job, he flew some famous (and infamous) people. Probably the most famous of all was the Prime Minister of Canada. This happened around 1980. Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau took a vacation touring around the Arctic. We were living in Inuvik, NWT. My Dad was tasked with flying Prime Minister Trudeau on from Yellowknife to several other spots in the Arctic. I thought that was pretty cool.

A couple of years later I was trying to impress some friends at my new school in Alberta. I told them my Dad had flown Prime Minister Trudeau. I didn’t really pay too much attention to politics at that time. Just new in town, I had no idea the PM was enormously unpopular in Alberta. So I was taken aback when my friends responded, “Well, why didn’t your Dad do us all a favour and kick him out of the airplane while he was flying?”

Perhaps you can forgive those sorts of sentiments coming from 9 year old redneck wannabes. As I grew older, I developed a similar level of animosity towards the PM, especially for his friendship with Fidel Castro, his introduction of official bilingualism, and the National Energy Program. Today Canada has Justin Trudeau (son of Pierre) as Prime Minister. The hostility towards him amongst some is equal to if not greater than that which existed towards his father. But also here in Australia, there’s a lot of resentment, anger, and even hatred towards government, especially on the state level.

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