When Trudeau ruled several decades ago, he decided that the European socialist model was best for Canada over the so-called Anglo Saxon capitalist system championed by the U.S.  So the country made a hard turn to the left.  In Europe today the French and German unemployment rates are 10 and 11 percent respectively with Europe as a whole running at 8.7 percent. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 5.6 percent.

The annual economic growth rate in Europe is 1.5 per cent versus the U.S. 3.7 percent.  In the 1980's and 90's the U.S. created about 40 million new jobs while Western Europe created only 10 million of which over 50 percent were in the public sector.

The results are inescapable that the European social welfare state simply doesn't work to create jobs, wealth or dynamism.  The Europeans created a plethora of legislation cloaked in the seductive rhetoric of compassion, social justice, equality, fairness, multi-culturalism and multi-linguism.  These policies include highly generous welfare benefits, state ownership and subsidies for key industries, bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, difficulties in balancing the workforce,strong labour unions, extended vacation periods coupled with short work weeks, banked sick days, workers compensation constraints and costs, paperwork, and, alas, high taxes on business and labour to pay for these lavish benefits.  In short the European nations penalize work and subsidize non-work, and no surprise, they have gotten a lot of the latter and little of the former.

Under Trudeau, Canada became a forced bilingual nation, taxed to the breaking point, suffering under a government monopoly in health care, a crumbling infrastructure, endless environmental studies (we can't even build a bridge to the U.S.), undisciplined classrooms, and a nation still relying on its natural resources for its wealth. And we have diminished our military and global significance.

So for his failings, in 2002 the Liberal government announced the $125 million tax payer funded Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship to create an advanced study of the humanities promoting social justice, equality, fairness, multi-culturalism run by former left-wing politicians and awarded annually to socialist minded professors, journalists, bureaucrats, and students.

Under Anglo-Saxon norms endowments are created with private money not tax money.

Welcome to European Canada.

During the Trudeau era, Canadians earned the wrath heaped upon them from our southern neighbors "blue eyed Arabs in the North." During the Arab oil embargo in '73 our esteemed "Elder Statesman PET" sought to nationalize the oil industry and extort exhorbitant prices for petroleum from our American friends, thus President Nixon referred to him as "the asshole."