When has a leader really impressed you?
| 05:16 UK time, Thursday, 19 August 2010
The WHYS team has landed in Montreal ahead of the  conference, which Nuala will be presenting live on Friday and Monday. But as we were waiting to collect our bags at Pierre Trudeau International, I began to tell the rest of the team about the man the airport is named for - and why he is a bit of a hero of mine - and I thought I'd share a little of it here.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the province of Quebec was a volatile place. What was once New France was striving to assert its uniqueness, and for some that meant independence from Canada and the British crown.
French-Canadians saw themselves as not part of the rest of the country - as districtively different. The state's official motto - seen on every car numberplate here - is Je Me Souviens.
It literally means "I remember", but is loaded with far more meaning, as the historian Mason Wade once explained:
"When the French Canadian says "Je me souviens", he not only remembers the days of New France but also the fact that he belongs to a conquered people
By the late 1960s, the wave of national sentiment in Quebec had turned violent, in the form of the (FLQ)and two high-ranking officials were kidnapped,
Enter the new Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In the words of John Lennon:
If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.
Trudeau dealt with the imminent problem of the FLQ by authorising the controversial War Measures Act - but that is not the real argument here. It was his long-term strategy that, when I first read about it, completely astonished me.
The people of Quebec absolutely tied their drive for independence with their language. Their argument was that Canada was not protecting their uniqueness, a uniqueness that was completely bound up in their language.
Therefore, what Trudeau did was make French an official first language throughout the whole country.
If you are in the UK, imagine if Wales began demanding to leave the Union because Welsh as a language was dying out. And that the government's response was to insist - by law - that all signs in London, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and everywhere else, were in Welsh.
That's the impact of Trudeau's act. And arguably its legacy survives intact - Quebec remains a part of Canada despite numerous referedums since.
Now, I should point out that until 2006, when I covered the , I had never even been to Canada. I know that many Canadians disliked Trudeau intensely. Nevertheless, he still came third in a poll to find the greatest Canadian ever.
There is even, now, - which would have been handy back in 1999, when I was studying it.
There is no big punchline to this little slice of history. But in a week when we've been discussing the true motivations of a political leader giving away book profits to charity, I thought it would be interesting to ask when you have actually been impressed by something a leader has done.
