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Like, OMG.

Like, Swifties check this out: the president of Canada, Justin Whatsisface – who is kind of super hot for a Dad, right? – has sort of slid into Taylor’s DMs on Twitter! Like, is that dope, or what?

Here’s what President Hottie wrote:

“It’s me, hi. I know places in Canada would love to have you. So, don’t make it another cruel summer. We hope to see you soon.”

LOL! Isn’t that lit? It was so flex! It broke the Internet! Like, Justin quoted lines from Taylor’s own songs to get her attention, and to get her to tour in Canada! He’s cute AND he’s super smart!

Now, not all of my BFFs agree. We were doing Netflix and chilling, like, and we were all spilling the tea and stuff. And I showed President Trudeau’s tweet to one friend, and she was like all: “Swerve, girl. Not cool. Shouldn’t he be running the state of Canada, or whatevs?”

OMG! That was salty, but I get it. I mean, he probably shouldn’t be stalking Taylor on social media using taxpayer money and all that, but it still was sort of kind of sick. I mean, Taylor is the GOAT!

I showed it to another friend in my squad, and she wrinkled her nose, and I love it when she does that! She’s so extra! Anyway, she said: “Okay, Boomer. Such a noob, he is. Such a tool. An older married guy shouldn’t flex at Taylor like that. WTF! She should ghost him, totes.”

She called President Justy a stan, too, which is like a fan who is like over the top. It’s cheugy, y’know? Like, he’s trying too hard. I get it, LOL.

Anyhoo, I still wasn’t sure, so I showed my Mom, because she’s cool even though she’s super ancient, like Justin. She said he was being a bit of a troll, which is pretty on fleek. (That means “on point,” oldsters.)

My Mom: “This reminds me of the time that the Mayor of Toronto wrote a letter to the Spice Girls asking them to reunite. Except this is a lot worse. Doesn’t Prime Minister Trudeau have anything better to do with his time?

“I mean, most of his provinces are on fire, he’s got a recession coming, and people are wondering if China is secretly in charge of his government, and his big priority is getting Taylor Swift to come to Canada?”

YAAAAS! Nice clap back, Mom! That was fire! But Justin is, like, quiche – he’s hotter than hot, and he loves Taylor! Justin loves Taylor, because duh! Like, who doesn’t?

Mom shook her head again.

“Honey, do you remember that time your gym teacher started commenting on the pictures you and your friends post on Instagram?”

“Totes, Mom. That was weird.”

“So is this, honey. He’s an older, professional man, and he’s tweeting at Taylor Swift to get her attention? Seriously? It’s not sliding into her DMs, or sending a pic of, well, you know, but it’s still inappropriate. There’s a word for it, in fact.”

“Whats the word, Mom?”

“Creepy, dear.”

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Iggy Pop. Not the other Iggy.

Ian Davey and I didn’t become friends, you see, because of politics. We became friends because of music.

His sister, Catherine, had told me about her brother, and how I needed to meet him. We’d get along like a house on fire, she’d said.

I was unconvinced. Ian, I knew, was one of a small group of guys trying to persuade Michael Ignatieff to come back to Canada and save the Liberal Party. I wasn’t so sure about Ignatieff, or that the Liberal Party needed saving. I’d had my fill of the federal Liberal Party, by then.

But I adored Catherine, and I had been close to his dad, the truly legendary Liberal political guru Sen. Keith Davey. So I agreed to meet with Ian Davey.

He came to see me. It was 2008 or so. He was a tall guy, good-looking, and he had an engaging, affable manner. Easy to like.

And we talked about music.

Sure, we talked about politics, too. He made his pitch, saying I needed to come back to the Liberal Party, which I had left in disgust during the Paul Martin era. He said Ignatieff would become Liberal leader, and they needed me to run his war room, as I had done for Jean Chretien’s campaigns. I demurred.

But, mostly, we talked about music.

Ian knew all about the punk scene I had grown up in because he had grown up in it, too. At clubs along Queen Street West, he had seen many of the bands I’d loved, back in the day. I told him Iggy Pop was God, not the Iggy he was recruiting, and he had laughed and agreed.

And so, over many talks and many days, Ian Davey slowly but surely brought me back to the Liberal Party. It wasn’t Michael Ignatieff who did that: When Ian finally convinced me to meet with Ignatieff, the once and future Harvard professor struck me as an academic who thought politics would be easy, like a sabbatical in France.

Politics wasn’t easy, but Ian Davey was. He led the effort to bring the Liberals back to the political centre, and to install Michael Ignatieff as the party’s leader. He attracted dozens of amazing people along the way — Mark Sakamoto, Sachin Aggarwal, Alexis Levine, Jill Fairbrother (who would later marry Ian).

As Ian had predicted, I did become Ignatieff’s war room chief, for a while. But when Ignatieff fired Ian and scores of others in 2009 — stupidly, callously — I had no interest in remaining.

“That’s not how you treat the people who got you the job,” one former prime minister said to me, when I called for advice. So I quit, telling Ian that if he wasn’t there, I didn’t want to be, either.

So, Ian and I remained friends, and we both watched — with a mixture of schadenfreude and bemusement — as Ignatieff and his new gang of super-smart advisors led the Liberal Party of Canada to its worst showing in history. Third place, behind Jack Layton’s NDP.

The last time I saw Ian was at my birthday party. I can’t believe I’m so old, I told him.

“Iggy Pop is a lot older, and he’s still kicking ass,” Ian said, and we laughed.

He got the cancer diagnosis not long after that, and we couldn’t see each other during the pandemic. I told him he and Jill needed to come see me at my new home in Prince Edward County, and we’d go hunting for old vinyl. He said he’d come.

He never got the chance. My great friend Ian Davey died just before Canada Day, too soon, still a young man. A dad, a husband, a friend. I cannot believe he is gone.

I will play some Iggy Pop stuff today, and remember Ian Davey.

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Want a friend in politics? Get a dog.

Well, that’s not exactly the quote. President Harry S. Truman said that, except he substituted the word “Washington” for “politics.”

And, with the greatest of respect to the 33rd U.S. president, he’s not entirely right, either. Because it is indeed possible to have friends in politics – and in a way that helps constituents, too.

Partisans – younger ones and TruAnon, in particular – don’t get that. They see the universe in black and white, and regard any political opponent as a mortal enemy. They believe disagreement is treason and a capital offence.

The successful political folks aren’t like that. Jean Chretien, Doug Ford, for example. Olivia Chow, too.

Chretien, for whom I once worked as Special Assistant, was friends with folks across the political spectrum. Ralph Klein, Roy Romanow, Roy McMurtry, you name it: the most-successful Liberal Prime Minister of our generation had friends of many different stripes. Some Grit partisans may not have approved, but Chretien didn’t care.

In the case of NDP Premier Romanov and Conservative cabinet minister McMurtry, too, Chretien’s friendship paid big dividends. In November 1981, when a deal to repatriate the Constitution looked to be falling apart, Chretien met quietly with his NDP and Tory friends – in a kitchen pantry at the Ottawa conference centre, no less – to hammer together a deal.

The “Kitchen Accord,” as it became known, was what led to the creation of a truly Canadian Constitution, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And it wouldn’t have happened if those three – a Liberal, a Conservative and a New Democrat – hadn’t been friends.

Doug Ford – for whose caucus, full disclosure, my firm does consulting work – comes from the same school. The Ontario Premier famously has friends in every political party, and it has clearly benefited the province he has led since 2018.

This writer saw the proof of that, close up. When I was helping to run Olivia Chow’s 2014 mayoral campaign, Ford and I met. He was also a candidate for mayor, and we started talking regularly.

Not only was Chow okay with that – she encouraged it. Doug’s brother, Rob, had been a Toronto city council seatmate with Chow’s husband, Jack Layton. They became good friends.

When Layton tragically died of cancer in 2011, Rob Ford was bereft. “Today’s definitely one of the saddest days in Toronto, but not only in Toronto, but Canada,” Ford said at the time, adding that, when he arrived at Toronto City Hall, Layton “taught me a lot…He taught me never to take things personal. He taught me, you’re going to be surprised on who votes with you sometimes and who votes against you.”

When Layton’s casket was brought into City Hall, Rob Ford was one of the few who escorted it. On that day, he put friendship before politics.

His brother, Doug, is cut from the same cloth. Much has been made of Doug’s support of his friend Mark Saunders in the just-concluded Toronto mayoral by-election. But much of the partisan speculation about his future relationship with Toronto’s mayor-elect is misguided.

“[Chow] is someone I have had a good relationship with” said Ford on Tuesday – and it’s the truth, going back to the years Rob and Jack were both alive. “We’ll work together and we’re going to find common ground when we sit down because she’s actually quite a nice person.”

And they will work well together – not just because they have to, but because they know how to. When the political stakes are high, as they too often are these days, letting rabid partisanship get in the way is just plain dumb.

So, yes, when in politics, get a dog. Sure.

But get some friends across the aisle, too. It helps – everyone.

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Yes, the government is still the government.

Yes, the Official Opposition is still the Official Opposition.

Yes, the turnout was low.

Yes, nothing really changed.

Yes, the punditocracy reads too much into by-elections.

But, but, but: four by-elections happening on one day is nothing to shrug about. And, if you poke through the entrails, there is a warning to be seen.

For the Conservatives.

We know, we know: the Tories crushed the People’s Party leader, Maxime “Max” Bernier in Portage-Lisgar. Pierre Poilievre’s candidate got three times as many votes as Bernier.

Big deal. Bernier and the PPC have never won a seat in the House of Commons, not once, in hundreds of individual attempts since the PPC was formed half a decade ago.

Besides: Poilievre’s problem was never Bernier, now fading into nothingness in his rear view mirror. His problem is the guy on the road up ahead of him – Justin Trudeau.

It’s dumb to read too much into by-election results. Sure. But, stretching back to December’s Mississauga-Lakeshore result – where the Liberal vote went up, the Tory vote went down, and the dastardly Grits won – a worrying trend is developing for Conservatives.

The trend, which continued in this week’s by-elections, is this: the Liberal vote share went up, and the Conservative vote dropped. On by-election voting day, when it really counts, Trudeau’s Grits have outpaced Poilievre”s Tories.

Yes, yes: media polls continue to show Poilievre’s team ahead. But media polls are generally worth what you pay for them – nothing. Dogs, as former Conservative leader John Diefenbaker famously noted, “are the one animal that knows the proper treatment to give” to poles and polls.

The Tory base, who typically swoon at the mention of Pierre Poilievre’s name, don’t want to hear any of this. They’ll swarm the comments section of this column, wherever it appears, bleating that by-elections don’t matter, their guy held their two seats, blah blah blah. The usual.

But the reality is this: against the worst Liberal leader in generations – against a Liberal Party that has been adrift in a sea of scandal and controversies for months – the Poilievre party (because that is what it is) is not winning on the ground.

Don’t take our word for it. Former Conservative Erin O’Toole quit politics this month, too, and passed along  some truths that every Tory should heed, but few will. Tories, said O’Toole last week, “have to win more votes in suburban and urban Canada.”

This week, following the four by-elections, O’Toole’s former chief was more direct. Longtime Tory stalwart Fred DeLorey was succinct: “What the heck is going on?”

As in, why has the Liberal vote increased, and the Conservative vote decreased, in multiple by-election results? There are a lot of “red flags” in the by-election numbers, said DeLorey to Postmedia, adding: “by-elections are strong indicators of where things are going…How are we going to win this election?”

O’Toole and DeLorey are good soldiers, and hasten to add that they support Pierre Poilievre and want him to beat Justin Trudeau and become Prime Minister. So do millions of Conservative voters.

But right now, based upon the available real-world evidence, Poilievre isn’t doing that. He isn’t winning when it matters.

His problem remains now what it has been since he became leader: Poilievre is beloved by the Tory base.

But the Tory base, increasingly, is out of touch with the country, with the cities and the ‘burbs.

And that’s why the real-world Liberal vote has been going up, and the Conservative vote has gone down.

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Want to protect classified government documents?

Tuck them in old bound volumes of legislative committee proceedings. Nobody will ever find and read them, guaranteed.

Unfortunately, however, people in government have a bizarre fetish for stamping every document SECRET or TOP SECRET in bold red letters at the top. Which presumably makes the person doing the stamping feel important.

And which all but guarantees the TOP SECRET document that isn’t really TOP SECRET will always get read first.

And, sometimes, kept.

That was Donald Trump’s dilemma, Tuesday afternoon, as his entourage piloted their way to Miami’s federal courthouse for his arraignment: he had succumbed to the seductive power of TOP SECRET-stamped documents. He had taken some 13,000 government documents when he was kicked out of the Oval Office, prosecutors allege, and more than 300 of them bore classified markings. Like TOP SECRET.

Trump’s problem isn’t that he was sloppy with allegedly sensitive government information. No less than Hillary Clinton did likewise, a few years back, and she was admonished by the FBI for “extremely careless handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

The former President’s problem is this: he took secret stuff with him when he left town, and he hid them all when politely asked to send back the secret stuff. Hell, Trump even – prosecutors say – hid his stash of classified documents in gilded bathrooms and ballrooms and bedrooms at his Mar-a-Lago compound from his own lawyer. His own lawyer!

Why? Why would he (allegedly) do something so deeply, profoundly dumb as that?

It could be that he actually believed he had already declassified them by “thinking about it,” which he has claimed presidents can do. It could be that he was convinced that the obscure Presidential Records Act – which I guarantee you he has never read, and never will – permitted him to hold onto classified information.

Could be. More likely, methinks, is that holding onto those documents – many spilling out onto the floor of a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, photos of which were helpfully attached to the indictment on 37 counts – made him feel important. It made him feel powerful.

That, certainly, seems to be the legal theory of the taciturn federal prosecutor, Jack Smith, who previously worked at The Hague and squashed war criminals like they were June Bugs. That Trump – according to the indictment he grimly received on Tuesday afternoon – showed the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago guests and said: “See, as president, I could’ve declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

Still a secret.

Ouch. That’s mens rea and actus reus right there in two pithy sentences, folks: Trump allegedly admitted he took secrets, and he knew they were secret. Boom. Gotcha.

The prosecution Donald J. Trump is facing in Miami isn’t like the one he is facing in New York City. The latter is seamy and sordid, involving alleged hush payments to a whackadoodle porn star, and a novel legal theory that seeks to magically transform state misdemeanors into federal felonies. It’ll fail.

The Miami prosecution is very, very different. Most of the time, those caught stealing U.S. government information plead guilty, because the cases are virtually impossible to defend.

If Trump had sent the classified stuff back to Washington, it wouldn’t have mattered that it was more than two years after the fact. He would’ve gotten away with it, as Hillary Clinton did.

But Trump willfully – and, yes, allegedly – took steps to hide the fact that he had TOP SECRET stuff. That’s his big, big problem. Never the break in, always the cover up: it’s the cover up that always gets you. (Take note, Justin Trudeau.)

As he contemplates possibly running for President from a cot in a jail cell, Donald Trump may well finally understand one truth. It’ll make his predicament feel way worse.

Namely, most of the government documents always stamped SECRET?

They just aren’t.

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Reason over passion.

Pierre Trudeau become famous for that one. Some academics claim that Trudeau actually said “reason before passion,” but it doesn’t really matter. The sentiment is clear.

Namely, that we should always be rational. Not emotional.

It was a nice sentiment, and one that people liked at the time. But it described a far-away world that we all aspire to live in. And not, you know, the world in which we actually do.

Because, down here on planet Earth, people continue to make a lot of important political decisions based on passion and their gut. Not reason, and certainly not intellect.

The most successful politicians understand this the best. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is one of them.

Earlier this week, when asked about the certifiably-insane decision to move convicted child murderer in Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison, Ford said this:

“He’s nothing but a scumbag. This SOB needs to be in jail 23 hours a day. As a matter of fact, I’d go one step further – that one hour he’s out, he should be in general population. That’s what should happen to this SOB.”

In effect, Ford was likely calling for Bernardo to be killed. That’s what often happens when “skins” – sex offenders – get placed with other inmates. They get killed.

“Visceral and vituperative,” the Toronto Star’s editorial board sniffed, alliteratively. Ford was “bellowing,” the Star tut-tutted.

Elsewhere in the pages of the Toronto Star, someone with the John Howard Society – an organization that advocates for prisoners – said that “public hatred of a prisoner should not justify harsher confinement.”

Similarly, a bureaucrat who formerly oversaw the federal prison system told the Star that such prison transfers “should not be based on revenge… we, as a country, gave up torture quite a while ago.”

See that? If you are upset about a man who raped and tortured children being sent to an “open campus model” prison – well, you are a vengeful, visceral and vituperative monster who favors torture.

As such, you’re probably opposed to Bernardo getting “stress management training” at his new home. They offer that there. (More family visits and “recreation and leisure time,” too.)

So, the Toronto Star editorial board and some special interest types are okay with Paul Bernardo getting a nicer place to rest his head at night. But I’ll wager most Canadians aren’t. When pressed, most of them probably side with Doug Ford.

That’s because politicians like Ford are better at what political consultants call “the values proposition.” That is, when discussing values – hopes, fears, the ineffable stuff of life and death – conservative-minded politicians do better. Progressive politicians get tongue-tied.

A few years ago, for my book Fight the Right, I predicted that the Tea Party movement would take over the Republican Party. And that the Tea Party’s erstwhile leader, Donald Trump, would become a lot more powerful as a result.

Ironically, some Democratic Party thinkers agreed with me.

Stanley B. Greenberg, a US pollster who was married to a Democratic Party congresswoman, noted that “voters are generally turning to conservative and right-wing political parties, most notably in Europe and in Canada.” Why?

Because, he said, voters believe “government operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes. The people I’ve surveyed believe the government rushes to help the irresponsible, and does little for the responsible.”

Another notable American progressive, Geoffrey Nunberg, agreed. Said he: “The Right is better at values. The Right has a natural advantage, in the modern context, because a lot of the issues they are promoting are emotional issues.” Canadian progressives, like American progressives, Nunberg told me, are basically “clueless” on the values stuff.

Which is why Doug Ford hasn’t really experienced much blowback about his comments on Paul Bernardo’s fate. Because progressives know, deep in their beating (and bleeding) hearts, that anyone who rapes and tortures and murders children on video has forfeited his life. Period.

So, sorry, Mr. Trudeau. Reason over passion is fine.

But Paul Bernardo still deserves an hour in general population.

And most of us would be there to cheer. Passionately.

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