Sonny or Michael?

The battle is on to see who of the Trudeau sons will become the padrino-in-waiting or the self-destructive short-fuse.

While Justin has been tapped by the Grits to lead a youth task force, brother Alexandre has embraced the cause of suspected al Qaeda sleeper agent Adil Charkaoui, condemning national security measures:

"The non-presumption of innocence. A burden of proof that's left on Mr. Charkaoui without showing him the evidence against him. It's very problematic," he said. "It could be bin Laden, for me, being treated that way does no service to the judicial system."

One reporter noted that Mr. Trudeau's father used the War Measures Act to lock up hundreds of Quebeckers without charges during the 1970 October crisis. Mr. Trudeau replied, "I wasn't alive then" and declined to comment further.

Indeed, Trudeau the Much Younger wasn't around when his father was merely following orders... oh wait, he was giving them. But it's not like that sort of excuse and its originators were entirely foreign to Trudeau the Elder:

In the 1930s, Mr. Trudeau appeared to embrace the kind of narrow ethnic nationalism that he later scorned, favouring the creation of an independent Quebec that was French and Catholic.

Mr. Trudeau was still promoting the idea in 1942, when he joined a "secret" revolutionary group plotting to form an ethnic-based country, the book reveals.
[...]

In a school text in 1936, he wrote that he would deploy terrorist-style tactics by detonating enemy munitions plants; in a prescient bit of timing, he said he would return to Montreal in 1976 and lead an army "to declare the independence of Quebec."

In fact, the separatist Parti Québécois would win victory that year.

The book says that a time when nationalist Quebec priest Lionel Groulx was pushing for French Canadians to buy from their own in the 1930s, Mr. Trudeau penned a play while at the Jesuit-run Collège Brébeuf that cast Jewish merchants in a negative light

Posted by Abu Buddy at April 7, 2006 10:56 PM