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One more reason to love Margaret Thatcher

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Margaret Wente in today’s Globe:

There was only one woman Mr. Trudeau failed to charm: Margaret Thatcher. She loathed him, especially when he launched his personal peace initiative under the influence of Ms. Kidder. By then, it was the early eighties and a vast number of Canadians, including me, had grown to loathe him, too. 

But then one night he kissed me on the hand, and all was forgiven.

I knew Pierre Trudeau cavorted with dictators, dabbled in fascism, embraced communism, tanked Alberta. I did not know he abused women too. And for this, so many revere him? When those are your sins, I don’t forgive for a kiss on the hand, I’ll tell you that much. Say it ain’t so, Margaret Wente. Why can’t more women have the sense of Margaret Thatcher?

A difficult “hero,” indeed

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Abortion is a personal and private matter, unless you’re on a crusade to change the law, in which case writing the prime minister to highlight just who you’ve conducted abortions on is entirely appropriate. So desperate was Dr. Henry Morgentaler to legalize the practice that he wrote a personal letter to Dear Pierre detailing how he had done abortions on members of Trudeau’s family and other politicians…

 

The letter, reported on in Maclean’s and by Terry O’Neill, was written in August 1973.

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Brigitte is flabbergasted: How come everybody is so shy about using the term blackmail to describe, well, blackmail? He writes:

Do you know that in my clinic, I have helped wives, daughters, mistresses and relatives of members of the Federal and Provincial Cabinet, including some relatives of yours?

And then he says:

I also want to assure you that if I refer to prominent people having had safe abortions in my clinic it is not with the intention of embarrassing anyone but only to bring into stronger focus the hypocrisy and absurdity of the law.

I’m not buying it. Had I been in Trudeau’s shoes I certainly would have felt threatened by that letter. Which, as Terry O’Neil notes in his piece, “is perhaps a testament to the strength of Trudeau’s character that he refused to budge from his position, even though Morgentaler’s letter could be viewed as a none-too-thinly-veiled threat that, failing to amend the law, names would be named and alleged hypocrites exposed.” Indeed. You can say a lot of unflattering things about Trudeau (I have done so myself, more than once), but he was no pushover.

 

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