so, what was pierre trudeau actually like?

castro is maybe not so good....

a better comparison is to hugo chavez. the elder trudeau was a fiery, charismatic, populist orator with a strong authoritarian streak, as demonstrated most famously in what canadians know as the october crisis. he nationalized the oil industry in the 70s (with support from the ndp...), with the intent to use oil revenue to fund social services, like universal health care. he was a very strong advocate of multilateral institutions, and tended to piss off the americans a lot due to this; canada was actually on the brink of joining the non-aligned movement in the 70s. we were trying to kind of sidestep nato by building closer ties with india. if trudeau called this a "third way", it had nothing to do with blairism.

reagan fucking hated him.

like chavez, he's also responsible for rewriting the country's constitution to place his own ideological biases of social liberalism at the constitutional centre of the country.

there's a stronger comparison between tony blair and jean chretien, but even that is a ridiculous stretch of the imagination. chretien opposed iraq, for example.

we never really got to our blairite moment until recently.