The Trudeau Salute

​On day 8 of our trip, July 22, 2024, we were ominously issued helmets before we boarded the rafts. It looked like it might be an exciting day! During a stop before reaching the major rapids, some of us walked up to a good place to take pictures on a narrow promontory high above the river.
Then we continued through the Canyon Reach, and the canyon walls became ever more spectacular with contorted rock strata and in some places, bright colours. The rapids came one after another. We made it through the Surprise Rapid (Class III+) and Big Bend Roller Coaster Rapids (Class IV), and then a little further downstream, I saw what I had been watching for: Trudeau’s finger. This vertical column of rock on the rocky shore sits on top of a wider rock formation that might represent the rest of his hand.  
The name given this rock on the shore of a remote Arctic River proves that you can run but you can’t hide. It commemorates a famous incident that happened to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Salmon Arm, B.C. on Aug. 8, 1982. It was a time when rampant inflation was reducing the value of the Canadian dollar by about one percent per month, and things were tough with high unemployment levels in western resource-based towns. He had also infuriated Albertans by bringing in the National Energy Program. Pierre Trudeau had been calling for restraint on public sector wages to combat inflation, so the optics were not great when he decided to take a trip to the Canadian Rockies with his family including 10-year-old Justin in a luxury railway car borrowed from the governor general.
At the Salmon Arm station, he was met by three protestors, apparently Liberal voters on strike from their government jobs, who had rushed to the train station to protest what they saw as an act of indulgent hypocrisy. They carried signs stating things like, ““Restraint, Practice What You Preach.”
As a protestor later told it, “He looked at my wife, he smiled and gave her the finger. He pushed up the other blind, looked at me and gave me the finger. He pushed the other blind up, looked at David and gave him the finger.”
The thrown vegetables followed soon after, and after that, other small towns followed suit, so much so that railroaders dubbed the produce-splattered train “The Caesar Salad Special.”
Tomatoes thudded into the windows as the car emerged from the Connaught tunnel. Eggs rained down on the prime minister’s car outside Calgary. Whitewater rafters in the Kicking Horse River mooned the official train.
In my view, Pierre Trudeau's now famous “Trudeau Salute” is not a chapter in Canadian History to be proud of. 
Reference: Tristin Hopper, National Post, Aug 22, 2016  •