scaramouche

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Member of the lucky sperm club takes his place on the political stage: Trading on his good looks, his daddy’s name and not a whole heck of a lot else, Justin “Son of Pierre” Trudeau has announced he’ll be running as the Liberal candidate in a fractious Quebec riding. From the Toronto Star:

…"I've been on the ground for 18 months, doing at least 10 events a week," Trudeau says. These days, the 36-year-old father of one – with another on the way – looks as if he's studied Details magazine, dressed in a dark-blue suit and an open collar white shirt. "Building personal connections is extremely important in this riding."

Liberals, whose political fortunes continue to fall in Quebec, see Trudeau's candidacy in Papineau as the lone bright spot.

"I think Trudeau is a good name and I think it will probably help the Liberals here," says Jean Lapierre, former Liberal cabinet minister and now a political commentator. "This is probably the only riding where I see some movement to the Liberals. Otherwise, I don't see the other ridings where the Liberals could pick up support."

Papineau is a two-party race. The Conservative candidate can barely speak French.

It's a very diverse riding and one of the poorest in Canada. It has a large number of new immigrants, many of whom live in the area of Parc Extension, part of which was included in Pierre Trudeau's old riding. So memories could count.

But francophone Quebecers are the largest voting bloc in the riding, and it is they who Trudeau will have the hardest time convincing.

As if to underscore the point, a sovereignist group called the Young Patriots of Quebec held a "No Trudeau in Papineau" demonstration in front of Trudeau's riding office yesterday evening.

They believe Trudeau is the same as his father, a federalist warrior who patriated the Constitution minus Quebec's support, and opposed any special distinction for Quebec.

"We want to underline the contempt of Justin Trudeau toward the French language and the Quebec people," says group spokesperson Marilyne Lacombe.

Justin Trudeau, like his father, has not been kind to sovereignists. He disparaged the resolution adopted by Parliament in 2006 that recognized the Québécois as a "nation." He maintains he just doesn't know which Quebecers are being recognized as such.

In an interview, Trudeau called "federalist" a "word that increasingly means less and less."

Asked to clarify, he said there's been an evolution in the way Quebecers see themselves, a move away from being simply federalists, who believe in federalism, or sovereignists, who believe in Quebec. "Between them there are so many who are proud to be both," he says.

His critics like to say he's fairly vacuous; a lesser facsimile of his father. Yet he states his convictions at every turn. Most prominently, he has taken up defending multiculturalism and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of his father's most enduring legacies…

Fairly vacuous? The man makes lightweight Barack Fauxbama look like a statesman of Mount Rushmore calibre.

posted by: scaramouche at 08:40 | link | comments (3) |

Comments:

#1 25 September 2008 - 14:00

Trading on his good looks, his daddy’s name and not a whole heck of a lot else,

And his grandfather's money. None of this Trudeau farce (the WW2 conscription evasion; the Nazi highjinks; the $300K German sportscar; the Art Moderne mansion in Westmount; the pampered "jobs" held)- PET lived a charmed life built on petrol stations sold to the Yanks by his old man.

And now this vacuous little twerp Justin (half-suffused with flaky flower child genes) is continuing the family tradition, sans any identifiable intelligence.

Mo'nonymous

#2 25 September 2008 - 20:25

Justin got his mother's looks AND his mother's brains.