Nice hair

Pierre Trudeau fathered three sons.

Justin was born on Christmas Day 1971. Alexandre (Sacha) was born on Christmas Day two years later. (What was that about?) With less precise timing, Michel was born in October 1975.

Just after Justin Trudeau won an election to become an MP in 2008, I met a woman who was a friend of the Trudeau family. This, she told me, wasn’t the way Pierre had expected things to turn out. Justin, she said, had inherited his mother’s looks, but it was Sacha who’d inherited his father’s brains and it was Sacha everyone had expected to be the next Trudeau prime minister. Sacha had other ideas and thus Alexandre Trudeau is now a documentary film maker and Justin Trudeau is prime minister. I wonder what Dad would have made of this?

In the 2011 general election then Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper achieved two of his major goals: first, after leading two minority governments, he finally won a majority and, second, he saw the Liberal party, which he hated with all his being, reduced to third party status. The Liberal party’s then leader Michael Ignatieff promptly upped sticks and returned to life in academe. A leadership contest began and was eventually won in 2013 by pretty boy Justin, who went on to have what may have been the worst attendance record in Parliament of any party leader ever.

Nevertheless, by 2015 Stephen Harper had worn out his welcome and it the time-honoured strategy of Canadian voters was implemented.

When a friend in the UK asked me what I thought of Canada’s shiny new prime minister my comment was: “Nice hair.” Shame there wasn’t much underneath it. In the aftermath of Blackfacegate she wrote to say yep, I’d pretty much nailed it from the get go.

Usually in Canada the ruling party gets at least two terms before they’re chucked out. I don’t know if the combination of the SNC Lavalin scandal (subject for another day perhaps) and the blackface travesty is enough to make soft Liberal voters turn Conservative, but I sincerely hope not.

If there’s one thing you can say for the Liberals: they aren’t as bad as the Conservatives. Unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals have actually been known to steal popular progressive ideas from the New Democratic Party and implement them.

I’d rather have a prime minister who is all mouth and no trousers than a social conservative who scares the CRAP out of me.

This hold-your-nose strategy isn’t a problem for me. I live in a riding where neither the Liberal or Conservative candidate has a hope in hell. The battle here is between the NDP and the Greens.

Oh, well, if I get too agitated by the prospect of the looming Canadian election (or the looming Brexit deadline) I can take the edge off, – thanks to the only 2015 election promise Justin Trudeau kept – by getting legally stoned.