Pipsqueaks on the shoulders of giants?

Brian Mulroney (1939-2024) was the Prime Minister of my earliest political memories. Through the hazy lens of childhood recollection, I remember the acrimonious election of 1988 as I struggled to understand what on earth “free trade” might be and what it might mean, if only for the price of cheese. I can still feel the frisson of tension around the Meech Lake Accord ratification negotiations, upon which I was sure the fate of the country hung (I was an anxious kid on public matters). The furor over the GST taught me how to multiply by 1.07 to know the real price of the bike I was saving up for.

I don’t recall whether I (or, more aptly, my parents) were pro-Mulroney or not. But these memories left me with the impression that politics was a domain where big and consequential issues were decided by big and consequential men (they were, in my memory, almost exclusively men). Men like Brian Mulroney, but also like Ed Broadbent (also recently passed on) who led the NDP to then-unprecedented success and was both a great adversary and a genuine friend of Mulroney’s. The great debates of the day were serious and the people who engaged in them were serious, expert and charismatic.

Now, though the issues we face – climate change, reconciliation, housing – are no less grave, it seems to so many of us that the people we have to lead us through them are so utterly inadequate to the seriousness of the moment. If they aren’t petty partisans, they seem to be dreamy lightweights. If they aren’t petulant and rancorous overgrown young Turks, they are out-of-touch time-servers who haven’t had new idea in a decade, if they ever aroused sufficient intellectual energy to have ever had an idea. Rather than helping us wisely navigate the challenges of our shared lives, they speak to us in ways that leave us less able to think clearly about those than we were before they opened their continuously flapping mouths. We look at our political leaders on both sides of border and ask ourselves: “is this really the best we can do?”

But perhaps this is all the distortions of memory and the inevitable disenchantment of growing up in a fallen world: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” (1 Cor 13:11). Perhaps my childish political nostalgia is just the reverse-image of my present cynicism; perhaps “’twas ever thus.”

After all, the political battles of the Mulroney era were not exactly the stuff of Cato and Cicero either. But perhaps a bit more childishness is what we need: the childish expectation that our leaders be and behave like grown-ups; the childish demand that they explain themselves to us in ways that make us smarter and better-informed. After all, someone once commended children to us as examples of the coming Kingdom; maybe he was right.