i'm sorting through old posts, trying to shut down my facebook politics page from 2012. it's interesting to read certain things.

16 october 2012

so, it's mcguinty v. trudeau.

there's the challenger that people were expecting. i had john manley at the top of the list, but mcguinty was never far down; despite what he's said about completing his third term, that he would run for the liberal leadership when the opportunity is right has been obvious for a while now. it's also obvious that he's doing this now precisely because he's concerned that if trudeau gets in then he'll be there for the next thirty years.

this is actually an interesting race, because it's likely going to determine if the liberals are going to present a third centre-right option or swing out to the left of the ndp. mcguinty will not be substantially different from harper or mulcair, but trudeau just might be.

28 september 2012

several years ago, before he even ran for mp, i remember seeing some old videos of justin trudeau floating around on youtube. he was doing some kind of campus speaking tour, i think some time in the late 90s. the topic was the decline of western civilization, and how young people growing up in canada need to prepare themselves for a future where the nexus of global power, wealth and influence resides in asia, rather than in america – and
the consequences of such a shift. these videos no longer appear to be available on youtube, but i'm sure they'll surface over the course of the next few months as conservative attack ad fodder.

of course, it wasn't the first time i'd heard somebody say something like that, but coming from such a source (while he was not in the public eye at the time, he was still the oldest and most visible son of what amounts to canada's version of thomas jefferson), it was rather shocking. such statements would threaten to shatter the delusions that continue to be held by much of canada's middle class.

"civilizations rise and fall.".

he was elected as an mp not long after i saw those videos. over the last few years, he's played the media fairly well. his supposedly controversial statements have in fact been widely popular, and when pushed his responses have been both surprisingly phrased to appeal to an extremely socially liberal audience as well as surprisingly nuanced.

the point i'm getting to is that i think that baby trudeau is a bigger wild card than many observers will recognize on first glance because he has the potential to eat back into the ndp; when contrasted against mulcair's cold, business-person exterior the flippant trudeau is going to come off very, very well with younger voters. the newspapers are going to write him off as a liberal aristocrat, being floated by the party leadership. it remains to see if this is going to be the case or not. however, he really hasn't seriously defined his political stances yet, so it's going to be hard to determine if the commentary is accurate or sensational on a wide variety of topics. however, this is where the next few months of campaigning for the liberal leadership are going to be very interesting - he's going to have to finally do precisely that. judging from those clips i saw on that campus tour, as well as the select commentary he's provided, i think there may be more of interest in his views than one might expect.....

there have been multiple polls suggesting that if an election were to be held tomorrow and baby trudeau were to be the liberal party candidate then we'd be back at a liberal majority. the liberal party may be currently broken, but it's still the most successful democratic political apparatus (measured in terms of political wins) that's ever existed, anywhere. as i've said repeatedly: it's the fucking british liberal party. it's not going to pass up on that kind of opportunity.

the question is whether or not it realizes that trudeau's popularity is due partly to his name and partly to his attitude, the precise attitude that the press is going to deride him for. given that we're talking about the liberal party, and it's long history of charismatic leaders, i'm sure it does.

a couple of key policy differences, accompanied with the ndp's move to the right, could position the liberals to their left. judging from what i've heard so far from baby trudeau, i think that's where his mind just might be.

so, this is going to get interesting.