MY CONSERVATIVE PAST:

During the Trudeau years in Canada, I was not very pleased with the direction that the Liberals were leading us. I do believe deeply in preserving the customs and history of our past. This includes retention, no, celebration of our Canadian monarchy. I adamantly believe we lost something very precious when Trudeau began shedding the word "Royal" from many of our institutions. "Royal Canadian Navy", "Royal Canadian Air Force", and "Royal Canadian Post" come to mind. Thank God we still have the "Royal Canadian Mounted Police" and the "Royal Canadian Legion" It wasn't ALL bad, of course. Some of our official Canadian social morality needed loosening up and Pierre did do that. His famous phrase of "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." is still often heard to this day.

METRIFICATION: This was another great initiative started by the Trudeau Liberals. What a disaster we have today because the project was stopped half way through. It is scientificaly sound. The different types of measure, I.E. liquid, dry, volume, weight et all, relate to one another and the various units are all decimal or divisible by ten. It is simple and logical and Canada was leading North America by its implimentation. Now we are stuck with an odd and confusing mixture of the two systems.

CONSTITUTION: By the end of the Trudeau years, it was becoming obvious to me that the Liberals were becoming far too much to the Left for my liking. We had lost out tradition of Common law and replaced it with our Canadian Constitution and Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On the one hand, it seemed a fine and noble thing, our very own Constitution. No more were we under the rule of Britain ...WOW! Many Canadians, I among them, felt a little uneasy about this and time has proven us right. Prior to that time, laws were passed in Parliament and provincial legislatures. If there were any questions about the appropriateness of the law, the courts tested it against the common law, past precedent and the intent of Parliament. Justice was for the common good and things went pretty smoothly. That is not to say that there were no individual rights or Civil rights. There were, but not to the extreme that they are today. We are becoming more like our American cousins every day. If you are not happy about something, find someone to sue.

Armed Forces:I have had a proud career in the Armed Forces of this country. I started out in the ROYAL CANADIAN NAVY then the ROYAL CANADIAN AIR FORCE and finally the Canadian Armed Forces. (The difference in upper and lower case is intentional.) In the RCN and the RCAF the feeling of pride and the espris de corps was something we could taste, feel and breathe. Trudeau, we called him "King Lucky Pierre the First" took that away from us with his integration and unification. As members of the origional three services, we inherited our uniforms, traditions and rank structure from the British forces and with these we inherited a tremendous pride. With unification and severe downsizing, we lost all that. We lost our separate and distinctive services,and our high morale and gained common American style uniforms. Eventually the government gave the three "elements" of the service different colours of uniform but we did not get our distinctive British style back. Some of the old morale has returned but nothing like before.