With increasing frequency I deplore all the negative talk about the leaders of our countries today...Rarely hearing anything positive, if ever. Some would argue that criticism holds the government accountable but quite frankly, at the current level, I find it exhausting -- unhealthy even.
Surely to heaven our governments do something right occasionally but you wouldn't know it because it is never acknowledged publicly. Recognition, ideally, comes only at the polls during elections.
History, interesting enough, is replete with examples of good and bad leaders. Queen Elizabeth 1 was an exemplary monarch who said: "It is not given to man to tax and be loved." One would presume what she meant was that a ruler cannot tax excessively and be respected by his or her subjects. She practiced what she preached, taxed modestly and was adored by her nation.
Peter the Great was a Russian Czar who followed a long line of incompetent leaders. He abolished the plow tax and the household tax which together had been crippling the economy and replaced them with a simple and single poll tax on all males. Peasants who worked hard and purchased new equipment and lands could keep the extra revenues generated. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a notorious boor, he reversed the declining Russian economy (albeit temporarily) by remaking the tax system, stimulating economic growth and decentralizing the state.
William Tell is famed in Switzerland not for shooting an apple off his son's head, but for inciting a successful tax revolt against Austria's King Rudolph. In 1315 (if you can remember that far back) Rudolph's troops descended on the Swiss infantry outnumbering them almost 10-1 and were still defeated...Apparently the Swiss were stronger mad than the Austrian were greedy.
There is no denying that modern Canadiana has had more than its share of the bad and the ugly. In the 1970s the Liberal government gave us such an enormous per capita bureaucracy it was laughable on the world stage, and Pierre Trudeau himself will forever be remembered as the godfather of deficit financing.
Despite PC Brian Mulroney's '84 campaign promise to give civil servants "pink slips and running shoes," like a good Liberal he hired a whack more and gave us the GST. With more truth than fiction, Britain's Margaret Thatcher noted in her memoirs that Mulroney was a Progressive Conservative who placed far too much emphasis on the adjective.
Of course we had Joe Clark and Kim Campbell sandwiching Mulroney in the Prime Minister's office for no more than a cup of coffee but almost humanely they did not stay long enough (less than a year each) to do much good or bad. Suffice to say, I met and liked both of them, stop gaps that they were.
As to the last three decades of Canadian politics...I'm not even going to go there.
Like I said, I'm kind of turned off by all of it.
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