By Elizabeth O’Brien and Steve Jalsevac
WINNIPEG, July 31, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s history magazine The Beaver hit the news yesterday with the results of an open vote that resulted in former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau being placed at the top of the list as the worst Canadian. Henry Morgentaler came in as number three.
Boasting a 50,000 circulation, The Beaver is the magazine and voice-piece for the National History Society. The magazine gained international media coverage over the past months after deciding to host the open vote for worst Canadian; the voting finished up at the end of July with just under 15,000 votes submitted.
The official top-ten list runs as follows:
1. Pierre Trudeau, 2. Chris Hannah, 3. Henry Morgentaler, 4. Brian Mulroney, 5. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, 6. Stephen Harper, 7. Céline Dion, 8. Jean Chrétien, 9. Clifford Olson, 10. Conrad Black
At the same time, a panel of 10 Canadian historians and writers developed an alternate list for the Beaver. This list included John Diefenbaker, Sir John A. Macdonald, military leaders John Reiffenstein and Sam Hughes, Japanese army torturer Inouye Kanao, Duncan Campbell Scott, Joseph Trutch, Nazi Party of Canada founder Adrien Arcand, Winnipeg Daily Times journalist Edward Farrer and Lord Beaverbrook.
In a recent press release, the president of Canada’s National History Society and The Beaver publisher Deborah Morrison compared the two lists and dumbed down the official results, stating, “Not surprisingly, our history panel’s list provides a more considered and measured response. They have a deeper perspective of time itself, as well as the restraint of the discipline in assigning cause and impact to certain people and events.”
She continued, “But the survey also provided a rare opportunity to engage the broader public in developing some of that historical perspective. The project is successful for the many conversations it has started around kitchen tables, water coolers, and elsewhere.”
Commenting on the vote results, National Director of REAL Women of Canada Gwen Landolt told LifeSiteNews.com, “The truth is finally emerging about Mr. Trudeau. The media thought he was wonderful, but he really created a lot of harm for Canada.”
She continued, “He alienated the West and brought in the Charter of Rights, which resulted in the loss of democracy. We now have elite judges making decisions, not parliament.” In the meantime, the Conservative government has committed $100 million taxpayer dollars and another $20 million per year operating expenses toward the Winnipeg Museum for Human Rights. The project will above all be dedicated to the glorification and international promotion of the concepts of Trudeau’s Charter of Rights.
In addition to the harms cited by Landolt, Trudeau introduced the legalization of abortion by burying the proposal deep within a list of over one hundred issues in the 1969 Omnibus Bill. According to a previous LifeSiteNews.com special report, Trudeau’s amendments to the Canadian criminal code also led to the widespread acceptance of and increase in contraception, divorce and homosexuality.
As Landolt commented, “The problem was that Trudeau never understood or cared about Canadians. He was very isolated and removed from Canadian life. Canadians initially thought he was great with the great ‘Trudeaumania’, but it didn’t take long to see that he was a disastrous individual and made disastrous decisions. We’re still paying the price now.”
Many senior Catholic leaders also thought very highly of Trudeau and were seemingly mesmerized by his supposed intellectual ability and charisma. Trudeau appeared to follow a private, but regular Catholic life and was known to attend daily mass. This also seemed to endear him to many Canadian Catholics, including many bishops and some cardinals. However, true to his highly independent nature, Trudeau’s Catholicism was his own unique brand that included rejection of many important aspects of the faith.
There are questions as to whether Trudeau’s confident practice of his destructive pseudo-Catholicism was more a product of various Catholic, especially Jesuit, theologians known to have actively affirmed him in some of his wrong beliefs and Canada’s bishops avoiding their responsibility to publicly chastise his deadly errors.
Trudeau’s elaborate Oct. 2000 state funeral in Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica, presided over by the archbishop of Montreal, Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, and with one pallbearer being Cuba’s communist president Fidel Castro, was a cause of great scandal for many Catholics. The service was seen as yet another official church sanction of Trudeau’s major role in the demolition of Canada’s moral code or, at the least, serious negligence on the part of the Church to ensure that the effects of this particular Catholic on the nation were not to be affirmed in any way.
The Globe and Mail reports that in 1975, Trudeau hailed notorious Canadian abortionist Dr. Henry Morgentaler as a “good friend, a fine humanitarian and a true humanist.” Nevertheless, Morgentaler gained his fame by repeatedly breaking criminal law in order to push for legalized abortion; he is also guilty of botched abortions and patient abuse.
Landolt told LifeSiteNews.com, “Morgentaler broke the law, not as he claimed to advance the cause of women, but really to advance his own personal financial benefit. We knew that as soon as he achieved the breakdown of the abortion law, he would set up his own private clinics in order to make more money.” She added that this is something, “he’s certainly done. He never did anything but exploit the situation and the law to serve his own purposes.”
Landolt concluded, “Canadians saw [Morgenatler] for what he was, and they know he’s a self-serving individual. It’s not surprising that he’s on the list.”
Read LifeSiteNews special report on Pierre Trudeau:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/oct/001003a.html
Read previous LifeSiteNews report:
The Real Pierre Trudeau: Father of Canada’s Permissive Society
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2000/oct/001003a.html
CTV Television Airs Special on Canada’s Most Notorious Abortionist
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/jan/05010509.html
Morgentaler Warns Voters against Conservatives to Ensure Abortion Remains Legal
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jan/06011702.html