Trudeau is the government; he is no longer the head of an
administration, but its head, body and soul. When you mark an
X beside the name of a Liberal MP, you are not voting for him at
all, but for Trudeau. You must give him blanket authority or
blanket condemnation. If you admire his foreign policy ap-
proach, but detest his economics, you cannot say so; he has re-
moved all the channels of communication but one: the ballot.

It is all very neat, and neater still is the way in which the
Prime Minister has turned the process into an exercise in "par-
ticipatory democracy". If he will not answer the questions of
the opposition, he will answer those of the television camera;
he has gone over the head of Parliament, an institution for
which he shows open contempt, to appeal directly to the
people, snug in their living rooms. And they cannot talk back.
He can tell them that the opposition is obstructionist, the bu-
reaucracy backward, the cabinet united and the country march-
ing ever onward and upward, and they can only shake their
heads or nod. The cabinet has been muted by executive fiat --
Trudeau has said in so many words that he would fire any min-
ister who spoke out of turn; the opposition is invisible, by
virtue of the fact that television, the crucial observer, is absent
from Parliament (this is not Trudeau's fault, of course; he ap-
pears to lean towards television coverage of the House of Com-
mons; but it is a key factor in the way we have been ruled by
him); and the bureaucracy has been shattered, demoralized and
superseded in the decision-making area by that counter-bu-
reaucracy, the Supergroup.

What is more and what is worse, the new system of govern-
ment is not even efficient. This administration's major moves
have simply been implementations of decisions taken in the
Pearson years, from the much-delayed Canada Development
Corporation to the Regional Development Incentives Act. A re-
view of foreign policy, which came to no discernible con-
clusions, took eighteen months to complete; so did a study of
the Willard Report on Social Programmes, the main effect of
which was to exorcise Deputy Health Minister Joseph Wil-
lard's key recommendation, for a guaranteed income. The tax
reform bill that limped into Parliament this June was the badly
mauled result of a proposal made by a royal commission ap-
pointed nearly a decade ago. The Indian Act, an urgent priority
in Pearson's time, has yet to see the light of day, and Revenue
Minister Herb Gray's review of foreign ownership of the econ-
omy was bogged down somewhere in the cabinet for more than

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