WHAT JUSTIN TRUDEAU AND THE LIBERAL PARTY OF CANADA MUST DO TO MAKE THEMSELVES SUFFICIENTLY RELEVANT ACROSS THE COUNTRY, IN BOTH OFFICIAL LANGUAGES, TO RECONQUER THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF CANADIANS AND RE-ESTABLISH ITSELF AS THE PARTY OF CHOICE TO GOVERN OUR MUCH-BELOVED COUNTRY.
I was lying on the couch this gray and dismal Sunday evening on the last day in May of 2015 and wondering if summer was ever going to be sufficiently inspired to put in its annual appearance once again this year. I’m always aghast as to how tardive is the summer heat to make itself known to the residents of the Great White North, and, every year without fail, after first availing ourselves of our constitutional right and prerogative to complain about that very fact and the recurrent bouts of cold, promptly proceed to bellyache about how unbearably hot it is and just how very much we prefer the spring and fall and simply ‘cannot do without our air conditioning.’
It always boggles my mind just how pampered and spoiled we are in Canada, never satisfied with the way things are, always wishing it were warmer, cooler, less humid, less windy, yet always swearing up and down that we live in the ‘greatest country in the world’ and that we ‘wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,’ as we merrily gripe about how much tax we pay on everything, how lousy our politicians are, how badly we are being gouged at the pumps for our fuel, how many people are living on the avails of government largesse, yet swearing up and down when it comes to our turn, that ‘we’re entitled to it,’ and that ‘we paid our taxes so why not?’
I just have to shake my head and think about the poor Somalians, who don’t even have a functioning government that they can self-indulgently have the pleasure of bitching and complaining about, much less getting their technocratically construed and managed check for whatever universal program of state-centric universal welfare state largesse duly deposited into their bank account promptly every 2nd week or end of the month via direct deposit for their greater comfort and convenience.
I once spoke with a bus driver from Toronto who drove coaches of tourists to Québec City in the days when I gave tours of Old Québec, and he told me that he was of Croatian origin, married to a Portuguese woman, and who also spoke English, seeing that he now lived in Canada. So this fluently trilingual immigrant, who, according to some, is ‘stealing our jobs,’ told me that we are totally out to lunch complaining about high gasoline prices at $1.20/litre in Canada. He said that when he goes back to visit Croatia, he is astounded that they are paying $2.50/litre and nobody complains!
Another gentleman, who is French-Canadian, married to a New Zealander, who was living in London England, bought my parents’ house, sight unseen, from London, England for $399 000.00 in 2008 because they were so desperate to move back to Canada from the UK despite the gentleman in question having a fairly well-paid position with a major international bank. He said that a similar 2 storey brick structure with a full basement, 4 bedrooms, attic, a yard, garage, and all the modern conveniences would have cost them the equivalent of 2 million dollars in UK sterling if they had stayed over there. The quality of life here in Canada is simply beyond compare. People in the UK pass down mortgages from Father to son. Debt peonage is intergenerational. At least here in Canada one still has the opportunity to pay off one’s debts before one dies and to live out one’s remaining days in this mortal coil in relative ease and comfort, unoppressed from the tyranny of the vestiges of the old feudal order from the Old Country.
Which brings me to the subject of this piece. The Liberal Party of Canada with Justin Trudeau as its leader still have a long way to go in convincing Canadians of the putative value of re-electing the Party to office with the Son of the Northern Magus as its next best pre-anointed proto-Messianic Mogul as our new Pied Piper of Hamlin who will magically pipe all the rats of mean-spirited neo-conservative demagogic think tank policy wonk land into the drink and make us all live happily ever after in a re-nascent Postmodern, Post-industrial permutation of the Just Society; albeit on a Weight Watchers fiscal regimen but still accustomed to the junk food spending habits of a Mc Garbage wasteland.
I just don’t see Mr. Trudeau pulling it off as it stands now. First of all, he’s not even ‘Mr. Trudeau’ or ‘Justin Trudeau’ but simply ‘Justin’ as if he’s some sort of Post-Cold war, Post-industrial, Postmodern political ‘Boy Band’ sort of ‘one man show’ kind of travelling circus act in a suit. At least his handlers got rid of that awful tussled ‘boy band’ kind of ‘teen heart throb’ hairdo he had for so long. At least now he has a real life adult-like haircut and a dark suit that actually makes him look electable, as opposed to some sort of fresh-faced looking post-pubescent twerp who looks like he’s looking to recruit teenage girl groupies to join his fan club or something.
On another note, the Party really has to get him to start addressing Canadians in a more dignified and professional manner. I received an e-mail from the Party with a web video from ‘Justin’ in it wherein he prefaces his remarks to the country by saying ‘Hey there!’ (Oh my God, really?) When I was growing up and I said ‘Hey!’ or ‘Hey there!’ or ‘Hey Ma!’ My Mother always responded by saying ‘Hay is for horses!’ meaning, ‘Please preface your remarks, especially to your elders, in a more dignified and respectful and formal manner, commensurate with their status, authority and your own self-respect as a child of God.’
I mean I ‘get it.’ Mr. Trudeau or ‘Justin’ is trying to be ‘cool’ and ‘informal’ and to appeal to all those youth voters who have been turned off by the Liberal Party for the last several decades as the party has grown to be associated with being a haven for old-school geezers who are over the age of 75 as well as Multiculturalism-era immigrants from the late 1960s and early 70s who are now about the same age. The Party handlers are trying to ‘reach out’ to all those cyber kids and Facebook and twitter twits with their ethereal and ephemeral sense of informality and ‘flat sense of organizational structure and authority,’ meaning ‘nobody is better than anybody else,’ and we all call each other ‘dude’, and we all take a sort of Southern California ‘skater boy’ attitude towards life.
Well, it doesn’t win anybody, least of all Mr. Trudeau, any friends or favours, to be essentially lowering his standards of public propriety in a vain attempt at being more ‘popular’ with a disenfranchised segment of the population, which, by any stretch of the imagination, should be being shown how to raise themselves out of the quagmire of secular moral relativism and the inevitable culture of contempt and disrespect which is engendered by the predisposition of our public officials towards lowering themselves to the same level of informality and profane sorts of modes of popular public tone of discourse which are to be found within the realm of day to day informal verbal exchanges between youth and their peers.
I would much rather hear Mr. Trudeau address his fellow citizens by saying ‘my dear brothers and sisters’ or ‘my dear friends,’ as opposed to ‘my fellow Canadians,’ which is far too much of a cop of the ‘my fellow Americans’ and which sounds far too much as if he were trying to affect some sort of pseudo ‘August Christian Republican (as opposed to Constitutional Monarchy) tone in his manner of discourse.
What I find unfortunate is that the party has eminently failed to capitalize on Mr. Trudeau’s burgeoning abilities as an accomplished public orator in both Official Languages so as to re-establish a sense of Liberal resanctification and resacralization of Canada as a progressive, faith-based society which respects its newfound secular paradigm, and seeks to re-consolidate its strengths as a nation of English and French speakers, of multicultural heritage and social fabric, of First Nations foundational origins, of progressive economic and social initiatives both of an individual and collectivist nature and to propagate these ideas throughout the land with bold new policy initiatives.
I would love to see and hear Mr. Trudeau talk about public transit for our cities and towns, for making Via Rail into a real National passenger rail service, un-beholden to freight rail traffic, recycling, agricultural stewardship and conservation of agricultural lands for future generations, resanctifying the vocation of agriculture not only as a business profession using scientific methods of production and management, but also as a sacred vocation to be in communion with the land and to preserve it for our posterity. I would love to hear him speak about curbing urban sprawl, resanctifyIng the family through the institution of marriage and procreation, protecting working people’s rights to collective bargaining and a fair wage, attracting new factories to our country by lobbying the WTO and NAFTA for fairer trade arrangements which allows companies to be able to compete in the Canadian market in western-style labour conditions without feeling compelled to offshore or nearshore production elsewhere to be profitable.
Mr. Trudeau is currently lagging behind ‘Tom’ Mulcair in Quebec by a margin of 30% to 25% of the decided popular vote. Mr. Mulcair has tried to make himself more ‘friendly’ to voters by branding himself as ‘Tom’ Mulcair as opposed to the more formal and stiff ‘Thomas,’ which I initially thought was pretty lame, strategy-wise, but it seems to be working. He seems to be being able to keep the beard and not scare off too many voters who might otherwise be put off by some dude with a hairy face, which might otherwise evoke thoughts and feelings of antipathetic mean-spirited Neanderthal-like or Cro-Magnon male humanoid bipeds in a dark suit, which might otherwise be bad if you’re trying to get elected Prime minister of Canada, if it weren’t for the fact that one of your other two leading opponents should be going in the opposite direction and NOT going by his first name, but should rather be invoking his full name of ‘Justin Trudeau’ to put more flesh on the bone, while the second of your leading opponents has 9 years of incumbency against him, walks stiffly like a droid replicant clone, has steely blue eyes like a droid replicant clone, and has hair which does not budge a single inch on his head, despite the flags waving in the breeze in the background, leading one to believe that he’s a droid replicant clone!
But I digress. Which leads me to believe that we may be headed for our first ever NDP government in Canada in the history of our country, albeit perhaps a minority. We may have to get used to the idea of hearing and using the term ‘Prime Minister Mulcair.’ For those who thought the so-called ‘Orange Crush’ in Quebec was just an ethereal flash in the pan based on Jack Layton’s popularity, they may have to re-evaluate their assessment of the situation in light of Mr. Trudeau’s current inability to captivate the hearts and minds of a plurality of his home province’s voters.
I think one of the problems is not just Justin Trudeau but also the nature of western civilization in the post-Cold War era itself: The whole middle of everything has dropped out or withered away. The middle class has evaporated with the loss of most of middle-aged citizens’ manufacturing jobs, so with it too has gone the middle ground of the political spectrum as well. The middle course in intellectual and economic debate as well as religious discourse has given way to extremism on both sides. So the Liberal Party of Canada, the traditional party of the middle, has had difficulty gaining traction with voters of late as it struggles to redefine itself within a society wherein its traditional voter base is increasingly more and more absent from the socio-economic and therefore political landscape.
So wither ‘Justin?’ Or ‘Mr. Trudeau?’, or ‘Justin Trudeau?’ or does it really matter at this stage? With a solid block of 50+ seats in Quebec to start out with straight out of the gate ‘Tom’ Mulcair just might have a shot at making history if he’s able to cobble together enough seats in Ontario, the west and the Maritimes to form a minority or eve a majority government. I’ve always said that Canada was a ‘two and half party state’, but traditionally the CCF/NDP was the ‘half’, making it the odd man out on Election Day. Now the tables have turned and the tide of history has created a new political bipolarity with the two extremes represented on the far right and left, with the centre being reduced to a meagre ‘half’ of an ideological slice, a shadow of its former self, despite the high hopes which the once ‘natural governing party’, has put into anointing yet another putatively proto-Messianic Magus, this time hoping to capitalize on the ‘brand name recognisability’ of a family name which was the foundational myth maker of the proto-Messianic Magus matrix to begin with. Oh well. The best laid plans of mice and men. Sometimes they get hoisted by their own PR. As for Justin Trudeau, I think he might make a pretty good Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, assuming the Liberals come in second this fall. Otherwise, ‘Justin’ might have to make do with shadow boxing with ‘Tom’s’ people in the House in a ‘ménage à trois’ (with the Bloc and the Greens along for the ride), which is increasingly looking like a proportional representation scenario which is just crying out to be validated in law.
If only David Suzuki could explain it to us more common of mortals and not have us both scratching our heads then we’d be all set! Well, I guess we’re still not living in Mogadishu Somalia where the President of the country doth not dare venture out of the Presidential Palace for fear of summary execution by wild-eyed Islamic Jihadists. And we’re not yet paying $2.50/litre to fill up like in Zagreb, but we’ve still got our share of boo boos here in good ol’ Canada, the land of the True, North Strong and Divided. Wonder who does ‘Justin’s’ hair? Can’t be the same guy who does the droid replicant clone dude’s follicles. That would be like too weird man! Maybe if ‘Tom’ divulges to the nation who grooms that gorgeous ‘GI Joe Lifelike Hair’ beard of his then he’d put himself over the top in the popular vote and prove once and for all that he’s ‘friendly’!
And who said Canadian politics was boring? Phooey!!!
P E T E R S T U A R T . CA 
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