Mulroney Slams Trudeau

[Update 07/09/07]:
A lovely tongue-in-cheek synopsis of why Mulroney slammed Trudeau the way he did is here.
[/Update]
Why anyone would speak ill of the dead is beyond me ... at first.

Then it dawned on me - Mulroney never really left party politics. In fact, he's been a key advisor and strategy player behind the scenes in Stephen Harper's government.

Which leads to the delightfully fishy timing of "The Chin" making this latest pronouncement about his former adversary. What does he gain by slamming a now-deceased Prime Minister? Well, Mulroney doesn't gain anything, but the HarperCon$ do.

By accusing Trudeau of a lack of "moral fibre":

The late Pierre Trudeau wasn't morally fit as a leader because of his failure to support the war against Nazi Germany, says former prime minister Brian Mulroney.

In an interview to promote his soon-to-be-published memoirs, Mr. Mulroney takes direct aim at his long-time foe, whose intervention is widely considered to have derailed Mr. Mulroney's Meech Lake constitutional accord.

"[Mr. Trudeau] is far from a perfect man," Mr. Mulroney said in an interview with CTV News.

"This is a man who questioned the Allies when the Jews were being sacrificed, and when the great extermination program was on, he was marching around Outremont [Montreal] on the other side of the issue."

Mulroney has simply replayed the "Dion is not a leader" meme that the HarperCon$ have been playing for some time. This is simply part of a broader play to try and plant the idea that the Liberal party as a whole simply is filled by bad leaders - especially if they can make such an allegation stick to Trudeau's memory. (Good luck with that, boys - outside of Alberta, you'll need it)

With Harper playing games around when Parliament will sit again (and putting a new throne speech forward in October), the timing of this plays quite strongly into a fall election call. Mulroney's book will make a bit of a splash for a few weeks, just long enough to be a useful tool in the upcoming election - from Harper's perspective.

That said, I personally think Mulroney's comments are small-minded, petty and quite irrelevant today. The young Pierre Trudeau that existed in WW II grew and changed dramatically over the decades before he sat as an MP in Ottawa. Mulroney is merely falling in line with the generally nasty spirit that pervades the current Conservative party - where the ethos is no longer about a better Canada, but rather it's about power at all costs - and if you blacken someone else's name in the process, that's just a bonus.