Boy, am I ever glad I shelled out for Raptors season’s tickets.

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As uprisings go, it sure ain’t The Mutiny On The Bounty.

Not yet, anyway.

As you may have heard, last week Official Ottawa was agog over the fact a couple of Conservative backbench sheep finally got up on their hind legs and bleated “no” to the boss. An avalanche of columns and news stories immediately ensued, including some that actually went as far as suggesting Stephen Harper’s corpse might soon be swinging from the yardarm.

The Toronto Star: It’s a Conservative “revolt!”

It’s “a rare show of courage!” enthused The Globe and Mail. It could be the beginnings of a “leadership challenge!” wrote one respected columnist.

Um, not quite.

The beginnings of the mini-mutiny can be traced, mostly, to the abortion file. Some of the nobodies and lunkheads in the Conservative caucus still want to try to make abortion illegal. They have devised all manner of clever motions and resolutions to achieve that.

Ship captain Stephen Harper, however — to his credit, and to the surprise of people like me, who wrongly said he had a hidden agenda on abortion — has said no way. He has ruthlessly crushed any and all attempts to kickstart the abortion debate.

Harper has been more resolute on the abortion issue, in fact, than any prime minister in a generation.

He deserves credit for that. He said he wasn’t going to reopen abortion, and he meant it. Harper’s party pledged to leave abortion alone in successive election campaigns, and they did just that.

The motley crew below decks, however, aren’t satisfied.

So they’ve devised dishonest tactics and tricks to move the country back to the bad old days, when the only choice women had were coat hangers in back alleys.

Some of the MPs say they are focused on “gender discrimination,” or what constitutes “complete birth.” They’re lying. They want to make abortion illegal and they lack the guts to say so out loud.

Some of them, meanwhile, aren’t upset about abortion at all. Instead, they’re upset about something else — two tiny letters, which they would like to see appended to their names on fancy letterhead: “P.C.”

As in, privy councillor. They figured they’d be in cabinet by now and, seven years in, the mutinous MPs have finally figured out they won’t be. So they’re popping off at Captain Harper.

Should the conservative captain be concerned? Yes and no. Yes, because when your government is slipping in the polls, as his is, you need all the shipmates rowing in the same direction.

But, also, no. This pipsqueak revolution, led by pipsqueaks, is nothing like what Jean Chretien loyalists (like me) had to contend with a decade ago. Back then, ambitious Paul Martin supporters used every dirty trick in the book to hurt Chretien and drive him out.

Chretien, however, fought back and ended up staying far longer than he’d planned. All the Grit mutineers ended up doing was sinking the S.S. Liberal. And themselves.

Captain Harper quickly put down last week’s rebellion, and the anti-abortionists and the overambitious sailors have — for the moment — gone quiet. If I were advising Harper, however, I’d advise this: Throw a few of the nobodies overboard and make everyone watch as the sharks tear them to pieces.

Things will be shipshape again, and in no time at all, too.

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The loss of this extraordinary bookstore is an unmitigated disaster for anyone who loves (and needs) books. With the exception of Ben McNally’s spot on Bay, there just aren’t many book sellers like Nicholas Hoare anymore.

I had two book launches at Nicholas Hoare, and both were special. I am very sad to see them go.

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Adrian Dix’s B.C. NDP release an attack ad on themselves. Absolute genius.

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Here:

“Liberal front-runner Justin Trudeau has raised more than $1-million as a candidate for leadership of the third party in the House of Commons which “says a lot,” say a number of political observers and insiders.

“Money isn’t everything, but the fact that Trudeau has raised such an extraordinary amount—when his party is in a distant third place—says a lot. I don’t think anyone has ever done that before. It’s a huge amount of dough, raised by a guy who is just an MP with the third-place party,” said Warren Kinsella, president of the Daisy Consulting Group and a former adviser to prime minister Jean Chrétien. “That’s amazing, frankly.”

Mr. Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) has raised $1,001,060.37 from 7,009 contributors, according to the first of four weekly financial reports filed with Elections Canada. Political observers told The Hill Times last week that this is a feat because of the restrictions on political fundraising the Conservative government introduced when it came to power in 2006.

While former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff raised $1,037,186.24 in 2006 in his first weekly filing with Elections Canada, he did so from 1,959 people when the individual fundraising limit was still $5,000 and when the Liberals were still the official opposition. In 2009 when he ran again, Mr. Ignatieff raised $547,628.85 from 2,113, as shown in his first weekly filing, under new rules limiting individual donations to $1,000, adjusted to inflation. Today’s limit is $1,200.

Mr. Trudeau’s average donation is $143, which some people said last week is a reflection of the overall support he has across the country…

Mr. Kinsella said if the candidates have the money to spend the maximum, they should. “If you’ve got it, spend it. Otherwise, the party will just claw it all back, anyway,” he said.

Mr. Powers agreed: “Most good campaigns will get there. If they have the money there’s no real benefit in saving it. If you have the resources, and people have given you resources to run a campaign, then you should maximize every opportunity you have to do that because you only get one shot at it, and that’s the campaign, so you try and use the resources effectively to get that win.”

One insider said, however, that Mr. Trudeau will likely try not to spend all the money on his campaign, but rather save to it be in a good position to defend the party against Conservative and NDP attacks.

“I think the thinking is based on Dion’s and Ignatieff’s experience, he’s going to get hit with everything but the kitchen sink from the Tories, so he needs to frame and define himself and defend himself against that. That’s where that money will come in handy over the next year,” the insider said.

Mr. Kinsella said the “Just Visiting” ad campaign against Mr. Ignatieff in 2009 cost the Conservative Party approximately $4-million. The Liberals don’t have that kind of money yet to mount their own campaign, Mr. Kinsella said, but “I am confident they will get it—paradoxically, the attacks are often useful in generating funds. We’ve learned that from the Conservatives, in fact.”

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I can live with that.

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Suckered, apparently, were Lono, Calda (briefly), Bruce A., Friesen, and Patrick. Gotcha!

(And, yes, the timestamp is off. And, no, I don’t know how to fix it.)

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…and appeared for the last time on the network.

It’s a long (and perhaps interesting) story. Details to come.

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And, as I remind my children all the time, the lead singer has a Ph.D and teaches at Cornell.

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“I will not go negative.”

Justin Trudeau had been warming up to saying those words for a few minutes, as he sat before a sold-out crowd of hundreds at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel.

And then he finally uttered those words.

He will not go negative.

At a table near where I was sitting, a former Liberal cabinet minister, a former senior adviser to a former leader and assorted party luminaries exhaled as one. “Jesus Christ,” one hissed. “Did he actually just say that?”

He did, he did. Justin Trudeau — the guy who everyone expects to become the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada next month — just told everyone that he won’t use negative ads against his political opponents.

At the back of the room, the media furiously scribbled away in their notebooks. This was news.

And so, later on that day, they reported Trudeau’s statement that way.

Trudeau takes aim at negative politics, read the Toronto Star’s headline.

“Yes, there are a lot of fault lines we can play up to divide this country,” the Star quoted the Montreal MP as saying. “But for me, it’s much more interesting to look for those common values that define Canadian identity.”

Global News reported likewise: “Trudeau declared he would ‘not go negative’ in any election campaign if he becomes party leader.” They went on: “Trudeau said he fully expected the Tories to come up with vicious attack ads after the Liberals choose their leader, because ‘that is what they do.’”

Now, as you may have surmised, a few of us think Justin Trudeau has made a really big mistake here.

If anyone has any doubts about that, they can ask Stephane Dion or Michael Ignatieff, who learned the lessons of modern politics the hard way.

Both men said they wouldn’t “go negative,” too. And both paid for it with their political lives.

At a speech he gave at York University a year ago, a defeated Ignatieff admitted as much. He tried to be a nice guy, he said. But, likening politics to boxing, he said he had learned to “get your (fist) in first.”

Dion, meanwhile, was blunter in a statement he made after the 2008 election campaign.

“I failed,” he said, simply. He needed to counter the Conservatives’ negative ad barrage, and he didn’t. The anti-Dion attack ads were, he said, highly “effective.”

And those ads defeated him.

So, a few of us who like and admire Justin Trudeau would like to ask him, what the hell were you thinking?

If there is anything the Liberal Party should have learned in the past decade or so — anything at all — it is that you don’t show up to a gunfight with a knife. You don’t turn the other cheek, over and over.

And you don’t ever, ever say you won’t “go negative.”

It’s not “negative” to tell the truth about your opponent, as he or she is seeking high public office. Telling the truth about their public record — their votes, their quotes, their expenditures and missteps — isn’t “negative.” In a democracy, it’s the right and proper thing to do.

It’s your job, in fact.

After his talk — in which Justin Trudeau placed his head on the metaphorical chopping block and dared Stephen Harper to swing the same bloody axe he used on Dion and Ignatieff — I spoke with one of Trudeau’s confidantes. This person is one of the smartest players in Canadian politics.

“What the hell did you guys just do?” I asked this person. “You should’ve talked to Dion and Ignatieff before making that kind of a promise.”

“Don’t worry,” said the player, smiling. “This guy’s a fighter. He will fight.”

Liberals hope so.

Otherwise, Justin Trudeau’s been knocked out before he even gets in the ring.

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