Never make predictions, especially about the future.

So said baseball great (and quipster) Casey Stengel, and he was of course right. The prediction business is high-risk and low-reward.

The punditocracy loves making predictions, however, especially at year’s end. So who am I to buck a trend?

Here’s five of mine for 2025.

Justin Trudeau is going to leave.I’ve got several lunches riding on this one, so I’d better be right. My reasons? For starters, he’s been behind Pierre Poilievre’s Tories by double digits for more than a year. Nothing he’s tried has reversed his downward spiral.

Another reason: along with public opinion, he’s lost the support of most of the Liberal caucus, a sizeable chunk of cabinet, and every party in the House of Commons. Theirs is simply no viable path back to victory. So, sometime soon, he will say he’s written to the president of the Liberal Party to say that he plans to step down when a new leader is picked, give us all a Trudeau-esque wave, and then jet off to do some international sight-seeing. All at taxpayer expense, naturally.

Like Stephen Harper did in similar circumstances in 2008, the Grits will prorogue to avoid getting defeated in a confidence vote. That’ll give them some breathing room. Trudeau’s announced departure will boost their numbers, as will a leadership race. And then, with a shiny new leader at the fore, the Libs will get even more popular – because every new leader gets a bit of a honeymoon. But who will that leader be?

The new Liberal leader will be an outsider. That is, someone who isn’t in Trudeau’s cabinet, all of whom are too close to the blast radius. Outsiders always tend to do better in leadership races, particularly if a party has been in power for too long. Voters are looking for fresh faces, and so are party members. The Grit tradition of alternation between French and English leaders narrows the field even more.

That all leaves just three options. One is Christina Freeland, who executed a brilliant pirouette out of Trudeau’s circle, and has effectively become the leader of the opposition from within Trudeau’s caucus. Another is Mark Carney, who has been a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England – and therefore a good guy to have around when facing the economic existential threat of Trump tariffs. The third choice is Christy Clark.

The Liberals want a female leader to offset Poilievre’s angry guy: Clark, a happy warrior, offers that. They’ll want someone who knows how to govern: Clark, a former Premier, offers that. They’ll want someone who has never been part of the Trudeau oxymoronic brain trust: only Clark offers that.

Christy Clark is the only viable alternative to Pierre Poilievre. Big question: does she speak French well enough?

Pierre Poilievre will win. Doug Ford will win. Notwithstanding everything above, the federal Conservatives are still going to win a majority. It won’t be nearly as big as it would be, were an election to be held today. But Poilievre is still going to win. He may not be the cuddliest guy to ever offer himself to the people, but the people aren’t looking for cuddly, these days. They’re mad as Hell at all incumbents, and they’ve had time to get used to the idea of Poilievre as prime minister. He’ll win.

So will Doug Ford. As my colleague Brian Lilley has reported, a debate is raging within Ford’s team about when to seek re-election – this Spring, or later. Either way, Ford will still win. Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie remains an unknown quantity, and the Ontario NDP (like their federal cousins) seem to be more preoccupied with Gaza than Guelph. Ford is routinely underestimated by his opponents, he’s coated in several layers of Teflon, and he’s morphed into the anti-Trump Captain Canada. He’ll win, too. Big.

The world will continue to orbit to the Right. A variety of factors are at play: an increasingly-dangerous world, which progressives seem unable to understand or fix. Anger towards political elites, who always tend to be pointy-headed political progressives. Frustration about the cost of living and porous borders, which have always been winning themes for conservatives.

For the next year, the Right will continue to dominate – and then, by 2026, the Left will come roaring back. Politics is pendulum, always swinging between Left and Right.

Which is always predictable, too!

Comments (16)

Said the famous socicultural expert, with typical insight and perspicacity : “I don’t like parties past 2 a.m. Then it’s all losers and weirdos.”

The expert, of course, is socialite Paris Hilton, who knows whereof she speaks. Her wisdom about losers applies, with particularity, to one Justin Pierre James Trudeau, Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister and – the way things are looking – the guy who is going to reduce the once-great Liberal Party of Canada to extinction. Paris knows losers when she sees them, and Justin is a big one: he’s stayed way, way too long at the party.

And that’s why, when crafting a year-end column about political losers, it’s pretty hard to come up with one in which Justin Trudeau doesn’t fill every single spot. That’s because the Canadian Liberal Party leader is concluding 2024 in worse shape than just about any politico in Western democracy.

He’s the Number One Loser, but there are other contenders for the list. Herewith and hereupon, here they are:

1. Justin Trudeau: He survived the Aga Khan, Grope-gate, blackface, WE, SNC Lavalin and innumerable scandals. He survived myriad broken promises, too, from Indigenous reconciliation to balanced budgets to electoral reform. He got elected or re-elected every single time (way to go, Canadians). But now, finally and praise the Lord, it feels like the Boy Blunder’s goose finally cooked: he is ending 2024 as the year’s top loser because his cult’s second-in-command, Chrystia Freeland, decided she would drink no more of the Liberal-red Kool Aid. Trudeau now faces a full-on caucus revolt, and a country that finds him revolting. He’s done like dinner and will leave – which means that Brian Lilley and several others will have to buy me dinner!

[To read more subscribe here]

Comments (1)

For many politicians and political parties, 2024 was a horrible, awful, nasty, no-good year.

Incumbent politicians and political parties, that is. The year 2024 was the worst year ever – ever – for incumbents, the political scientists tell us. Either they all lost ground, or they plain old lost. It was nasty, brutish and (sometimes) short-sighted.

The reasons are myriad and multiple, as they always are. But topping the list are the surging cost of living, and the surging numbers of migrants. Both issues made voters cranky, everywhere. (Elites, too. Voters got really mad at the elites.)

All of this was very good news for politicians or a political parties challenging incumbents. All they needed to do is maintain a pulse, most of the time, and they’d win.

That’s the big caveat attached to this year’s “winners” list. They may be political winners, but – in many cases – they didn’t actually earn it. They just had to show up and be the anti-incumbent.

1. Pierre Poilievre: Poll after poll show the Conservative Party dramatically ahead of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Interestingly, poll after poll also showed more voter enthusiasm for the Conservative Party than for the Conservative Party’s leader. That may be because voters don’t really know Poilievre, yet. Or, it maybe they do, and they find the Mr. Angry stuff wearying. It doesn’t really matter, however: at this point, Poilievre is going to win the biggest majority in event Canadian history. Which makes him a big winner.

[To read more, subscribe here]

Comments (3)

Here’s a Christmas tale.

O. Henry is one of my favorite writers (anyone who reads my stuff will know how much he influenced me). And one of his best-known stories is The Gift of the Magi.

If you haven’t read it, I’m not going to give the story away. Suffice to say it’s about a couple at Christmas, and the gifts they gave each other. The gifts were connected.

This year, I told E. I didn’t want anything, other than something artistic by her. Something creative. I was going to do likewise, but I didn’t tell her that.

Tonight, after Mass, we exchanged presents. What you see on top is the big one she gave me. What you see below is the big one I gave her. We were both very surprised.

It’s a Gift of the Magi thing, with Roxy at the center. Which is kind of perfect, and a perfect Christmas story, too.

So, a merry Christmas to all – and to all a good night!

 

Comments (2)

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all of you from us.

Comments (4)

Comments (5)

The sticker affixed to the London Calling album shrink-wrap, so many years ago, boldly declared that the Clash were “the only band that matters.” If that is true – if it was more than record company hyperbole – then Joe Strummer’s death 22 years ago today, of a heart attack at age 50, was a very big deal indeed.

It wasn’t as big as John Lennon’s murder, of course, which came one year after London Calling was released, and shook an entire generation. Nor as newsworthy, likely, as the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994. No, the impact of the sudden death of Joe Strummer – the front man for the Clash, the spokesman for what the Voidoid’s Richard Hell called, at the time, “the blank generation” – will be seen in more subtle ways.

For starters, you weren’t going to see any maudlin Joe Strummer retrospectives on CNN, or hordes of hysterical fans wailing in a park somewhere, clutching candles whilst someone plays ‘White Riot’ on acoustic guitar. Nor would there be a rush by his estate to cash in with grubby compilation and tribute discs. Punk rock, you see, wasn’t merely apart from all that – it was against of all that.

Punk rock was a specific rejection of everything rock’n’roll had become in the 1970s – namely, a business: an arena-sized, coke-addicted, utterly-disconnected-from-reality corporate game played by millionaires at Studio 54. Punk rock, and Joe Strummer, changed all of that. They were loud, loutish, pissed off. They were of the streets, and for the streets. They wanted rock’n’roll to matter again.

I met Joe Strummer for the first time on the night of October 16, 1979, in East Vancouver. Two of my Calgary punk rock buddies, plus my girlfriend and I, were loitering on the main floor at the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE). We were exhilarated and exhausted. We had pooled our meager resources to buy four train tickets to Vancouver, to see Joe Strummer and the Clash in concert. Their performance had been extraordinary (and even featured a mini-riot, midway through). But after the show, we had no money left, and nowhere to stay.

The four of us were discussing this state of affairs when a little boy appeared out of nowhere. It was near midnight, and the Clash, DOA and Ray Campi’s Rockabilly Rebels had long since finished their respective performances. Roadies were up on stage, packing up the Clash’s gear. The little boy looked to be about seven or eight. He was picking up flashcubes left behind by the departed fans.

We started talking to the boy. It turned out he was the son of Mickey Gallagher, the keyboardist the Clash had signed on for the band’s London Calling tour of North America. His father appeared, looking for him. And then, within a matter of minutes, Topper Headon appeared, looking for the Gallaghers.

Topper Headon was admittedly not much to look at: he was stooped, slight and pale, with spiky hair and a quiet manner. But he was The Drummer For The Clash, and had supplied beats for them going back almost to their raw eponymous first album, the one that had changed our lives forever. We were in awe.

Topper asked us where we were from and what we thought of the show. When he heard that we had no place to stay, he said: “Well, you’d better come backstage with me, then.”

Sprawled out in a spartan PNE locker room, Strummer was chatting with lead guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon, along with some Rastafarians and a few of the Rockabilly Rebels. They were all stoned, and grousing about an unnamed promoter of the Vancouver show, who had refused to let them play until he was paid his costs. The Clash, like us, had no money. That made us love them even more.

Joe Strummer, with his squared jaw and Elvis-style hairdo, didn’t seem to care about the band’s money woes. While Mick Jones flirted with my girlfriend, Strummer started questioning me about my Clash T-shirt. It was homemade, and Strummer was seemingly impressed by it. I could barely speak. There I was, speaking with one of the most important rock’n’rollers ever to walk the Earth – and he was acting just like a regular guy. Like he wasn’t anything special.

But he was, he was. From their first incendiary album in 1977 (wherein they raged against racism, and youth unemployment, and hippies), to their final waxing as the real Clash in 1982 (the cartoonish Combat Rock, which signaled the end was near, and appropriately so), Strummer was the actual personification of everything that was the Clash. They were avowedly political and idealistic; they were unrelentingly angry and loud; most of all, they were smarter and more hopeful than the other punk groups, the cynical, nihilistic ones like the Sex Pistols. They believed that the future was worth fighting for.

The Clash were the ones who actually read books – and encouraged their fans to read them, too. They wrote songs that emphasized that politics were important (and, in my own case, taught me that fighting intolerance, and maintaining a capacity for outrage, was always worthwhile). They were the first punk band to attempt to unify disparate cultures – for example, introducing choppy reggae and Blue Beat rhythms to their music.

They weren’t perfect, naturally. Their dalliances with rebel movements like the Sandinistas, circa 1980, smacked of showy dilettante politics. But they weren’t afraid to take risks, and make mistakes.

Born John Graham Mellor in 1952 in Turkey to the son of a diplomat, Strummer started off as a busker in London, and then formed the 101ers, a pub rock outfit, in 1974. Two years later, he saw the Pistols play one of their first gigs. Strummer, Jones and Simonon immediately formed the Clash, and set about rewriting the rules.

While political, they also knew how to put together good old rock’n’roll. Strummer and Jones effectively became the punk world’s Lennon and McCartney, churning out big hits in Britain, and attracting a lot of favourable critical acclaim in North America. Some of their singles, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ and ‘Complete Control,’ are among the best rock’n’roll 45s – ever. Their double London Calling LP is regularly cited as one of history’s best rock albums.

After the Clash broke up, Strummer played with the Pogues, wrote soundtrack music and formed a new group, the world beat-sounding Mescaleros. He married, and became a father. But he never again achieved the adulation that greeted the Clash wherever they went.

Strummer didn’t seem to care. When I saw him for the last time – at a show in one of HMV’s stores on Yonge Street in July 2001, which (typically) he agreed to give at no cost – Strummer and his Mescaleros stomped around on the tiny stage, having the time of their lives. They didn’t play any Clash songs, but that was okay by us. Joe Strummer’s joy was infectious, that night.

As the gig ended, Strummer squatted at the edge of the stage – sweaty, resplendent, grinning – to speak with the fans gathered there. They looked about as old as I was, when I first met him back in October 1979. As corny as it sounds, it was a magical moment, for me: I just watched him for a while, the voice of my generation, speaking to the next one.

I hope they heard what he had to say.

Comments (0)