IPINIONS Right Hook JJ McCullough, OP Columnist no secret that we live in an era where politicians are easingly packaged, sold, and marketed like consumer prod- s, rather than people. As the old saying goes, in advertising sell the sizzle, not the steak, and the same is true in poli- s, where more often than not you sell the image, and not P man. Usually it takes many years before we finally get around to onstructing the clever marketing campaigns built up bund our leaders. The recent shifting opinions of John FE nnedy provide a good example. Revisionist biographers w argue that the real-life JFK was rather far removed from p devil-may-care athletic playboy he was popularly presented In actuality, the 35th president of the US was a deeply ill, happy man, nearly crippled by muscular dystrophy brought by Addison’s disease, while simultaneously suffering with uts of severe depression. It’s likewise now a well-known t that behind Kennedy’s happy-family image, the President s also something of a chronic philanderer, who routinely eated on his wife by night, despite staging smiling photo- s by day. Pierre Trudeau was in many respects the JFK of Canada. bright, charismatic, progressive “outsider” to the political ablishment, Trudeau’s flamboyant personality and lifestyle the sparks that ignited the “Trudeaumania” love-fest of p 1960’s. A swinging bachelor, he had more women than he STATI Matters David Suzuki, David Suzuki Foundation me a naive optimist, but I really hoped the federal gov- hment’s vaunted Clean Air Act might actually do what the e implies—clean the air. Boy, was I wrong. Although bits of the legislation that had been leaked over past few months didn’t look promising, I still clung to pes that the Act wouldn’t be all spin, that there would be e substance to it to help restore Canada’s flagging envi- ental reputation and give Canadians optimism. After all, e Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister na Ambrose have been boasting for months that they’d e up with a “made in Canada” solution that would make Inada a world leader in clean air. Instead, what we got was George W. Bush style rhetoric; g language designed to confuse. Much as George W’s’ lear Skies” initiative allows pollution to continue increasing, does Canada’s new Clean Air Act. Certainly, there are some nor initiatives in the Act that are truly helpful, but they are pletely buried under an avalanche of nothingness. Let’s look at the two big issues Canadians might expect a an Air Act to tackle: global warming and smog. vironmental groups and scientists have, for years, been say- b that to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse emissions and air utants you have to do two key things. First, commit to tar- pinionsubmit@hotmail.com could handle, but was too sophisticated for average fare and only seriously pursued the top starlets. Yet behind all this glamour, Trudeau was first and fore- most a powerful intellect, if not a supreme political genius, whose bold, outside-the-box policies shook up the staid busi- ness of “politics as usual,” bringing the radical ideas of coun- terculture into government. Or at least that was the image we were given. Even today, when young people talk about how much they love Trudeau, or admire his legacy, such praise is rarely based on much more than the collection of marketing gimmicks the Canadian media, popular culture, and the Liberal Party have historically used to package and sell the former prime minister. With each new biography of the great man that is pub- lished, a new piece of the Trudeau mythos begins to crumble. Last week Toronto historian, John English released Citizen of the World: The Life and Times of Pierre Eliot Trudeau, one of the latest books to closely re-examine the Trudeau legend. Among the most jarring of English’s revelations is the claim, based on the accounts of Trudeau’s former therapist, that Pierre the swinging bachelor actually remained a virgin until the age of 27. A strong Catholic, Trudeau held deeply conservative val- ues regarding marriage and sex that greatly complicated his love life. To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with virginity, and the fact is not a mark against the man in and of itself. What is gets and timelines for each sector of the economy, and then let industry do what it does best—use its vast brainpower of engineers and technicians to meet those targets. It has worked before. In the 1970s, when smog was plagu- ing our cities and gasoline supplies were uncertain, govern- ment regulations spurred industry to meet tough clean-air requirements. Industry complained and moaned that it could- n’t be done. Then, after the regulations came into effect, they just went ahead and did it. That was over 30 years ago. It’s high time we updated those regulations—especially now when all the science tells us that global warming has become an urgent problem. But the new Clean Air Act provides no such timely incen- tives. Instead of clear, firm targets and timelines to reduce air pollutants, it promises years more consultation with industry. Minister Ambrose has consistently poked fun of the past fed- eral Liberal government for doing nothing but talk for years. Now Canada’s “new” government is going to do the same thing. The Act also ignores our Kyoto commitments, even though Kyoto was a parliamentary decision, not a partisan one, and has the support of the vast majority of Canadians. It is also international law and Canada is the only country to relevant, however, is that the intimate image of Trudeau painted in English’s book—a man deeply sexually frustrated because of his intense Christianity and intimacy problems, is so dramatically (and deliberately) at odds with the playboy image that would later be used to market him. Indeed, it makes many of his later romantic rendezvous, such as his overly-publicized dates with Hollywood stars and eventual marriage to 19-year-old, Margaret Sinclair, seem less like charming eccentricities and more like unsettling symptoms of other deeper problems. If nothing else, this latest revelation just further proves that there is almost nothing in Trudeau legend that is not con- testable. A wealthy, born-and-bred member of the Quebec elite, there was never anything remotely anti-establishment about the man. He flirted with fascism during the war when it became fashionable for French-speakers to do so, then turned to Marxism when that became the cause nouveau. As Prime Minister, his proudest policies, such as bilingualism and the Charter of Rights, helped consolidate the rule of Quebec lawyers and judges, while simultaneously fostering all sorts of deep regional divides which persist to this day. It would be nice if we started seeing some of this Trudeau reflected in CBC docu-dramas and keynote speeches. But images are powerful things, and the fake Trudeau has proven far more useful. have ratified the agreement that is not even trying to meet our targets. Instead, the new Act’s timelines for greenhouse gases are set ludicrously far in the future. In fact, the only real greenhouse gas reduction target is for 2050. Interim targets for emissions are “intensity based” which means pollution can continue to increase, so long as the amount of pollution per unit of energy goes down. Industries love intensity-based targets, because they amount to little more than standard efficiency upgrades that industries would probably do anyway. The problem is that unless actual emissions go down significantly, it won’t slow global warming. So the Act doesn’t solve the problem it was supposedly designed to meet. What’s the point of that? For the less charitable among us, the point may have been entirely to distract Canadians’ from their growing concerns about our climate and the air we breathe. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a core Canadian value is that we try to be good environmental stewards and responsible players on the international stage. With this piece of legislation, our new government seems to be indicating that those may be values it does not share. Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org. 7