I chuckled with the nonsense about harpermania, given the old boy is still struggling to get his party into power. The last great cult of personality produced an astonishing public reaction.
But that was Trudeau in 1968.
And Harper is not even close to being Pierre Trudeau on any level.
In fact, even Harper wouldn't want to be compared to Pierre.
There I came face to face with a living legend, someone who had provoked in me both the loves and hatreds of my political passion, all in the form of a tired out, little, old man," Harper wrote in a newspaper column that stood out from the flood of Trudeau tributes. "It was an experience at once unforgettable, nostalgic and haunting." He went on to denounce that old man's legacy in the bitterest terms. Not only did he rebuke Trudeau's policy mix of "centralism, socialism and bilingualism," he even indicted him for failing to serve in the Second World War or oppose the Soviet Union. "In those battles," Harper wrote, "the ones that truly defined his century, Mr. Trudeau took a pass."
