Word: trudeau
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With Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau at her side and 30,000 rain-soaked Canadians looking on, Queen Elizabeth II stood on a huge wooden platform outside the massive limestone buildings atop Ottawa's Parliament Hill. Though the Queen had visited Canada ten times before, this trip was unlike any other. She had left her country as it stood on the-brink of war in the South Atlantic. And her purpose was to preside over a ceremony in which Britain relinquished an arcane but important vestige of its control over the onetime colony. As the Queen signed the proclamation...
...ceremony ended decades of political wrangling that had left the country drained and weary. It was a victory for Trudeau, who since 1971 had sought to gain authority over the basic document governing Canada's federal system, the British North America (B.N.A.) Act of 1867. Although Canadians have enjoyed self-rule since then, the Act was retained by the British Parliament because Canadians could not agree on a formula for amending it. The British have routinely passed amendments adopted in Ottawa, but the necessity of going to Westminster has long rankled Canadians...
Appended to the document is another Trudeau project, a charter of rights, which guarantees Canada's citizens freedom of speech, religion and assembly. It also prohibits discrimination according to race or sex, and grants English-and French-speaking parents the right to educate their children, where numbers warrant, in their own language...
...Trudeau's chief goals in seeking a home-grown constitution was to strengthen Canada's relatively weak central government. That was precisely why he faced stubborn opposition from the country's ten provincial premiers, who retain primary control over natural resources, education and health. To secure the premiers' agreement, Trudeau was forced to compromise on several important points, including an amendment formula requiring approval by seven provinces comprising 50% of Canada's population...
...Change, too, has its limits," charged Bundestag Member Freimut Duve, a member of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic Party. "Lech Walesa should have recognized them long ago." Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stated that martial law "isn't bad" if it prevents civil war. George Kennan, a former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, suggested that Poland's latest tragedy might have been avoided if only Solidarity had been content "to rest for a while on its laurels" instead of pushing the "semiparalyzed Communist government" to the wall...