“He would be the front-runner,” Kinsella told Yahoo! Canada News in an email exchange.
“But a lot of us Liberals don’t want or need a coronation. We need a competitive race with lots of great, viable candidates and ideas. Justin needs that, too.”
Kinsella, who was a Jean Chretien staffer, adds that Trudeau has the sizzle but needs the steak.
“He needs to talk about ideas and policies. He has the charisma thing nailed. Now he needs to tell us what he thinks.”
At Ottawa airport. Just got this lapel pin from a union friend. This is my candidate!
As usual, I wasn’t paying attention. Thought my lunch with an old political pal was at noon. It’s at 12:30.
So, I’m seated, and I’ve got half an hour to kill. So here are some linkless, contextless observations about…stuff.
1. Neck tattoos are stupid. Mail room, here you come. There, I said it.
2. Fight The Right leaked out early at a bookstore in Toronto. I won’t tell you where. It happens.
3. If a political person had done what Margaret Wente did, Margaret Wente would be braying for said political person’s head.
4. I’m going to Ottawa tonight for business. A visit to The Black Tomato is inevitable, and advisable.
5. I need a haircut. I look like the crazy professor in Back To The Future. I frighten small children.
6. Speaking of which, I have two kids in high school. Life is what happens when you aren’t looking. Trust me.
7. The songs I write for SFH, SFH will tell you, are all ultimately about self-loathing and loss of faith. There’s a reason for that.
8. The best diner in the world is The Patrician, on King Street East. Tell Terry I sent you, and he may abuse you a little less.
9. I’ve been doing this dumb web site for more than a decade. I’ve been writing a daily journal for forty years. Never missed a day. Haven’t been profound once.
10. I can see the end. Can you?
Look, Feist went to my Calgary high school, Bishop Carroll (as did Alison Redford and Danielle Smith). She’s amazing. But Polaris should be about new talent, not people who have already been featured in an Apple commercial.
The Japandroids are the guys who should have won. And, by the by, this is the song of Summer 2012: bouncing along a backroad in Maine, sun beating down, and four kids screaming along to every word of this amazing, genius anthem. Joy, it was. Perfect. Best Summer ever.
Polaris folks, you made a mistake.
Harper-lovers — most often conservatives, but also a wide swath of Canada’s media establishment — regard their man as a latter-day St. George, slaying the twin-headed dragon of socialism and liberalism, and remaking Canada in the image of our WASPy antecedents. (When, in fact, he has piloted his Conservative party to the centre of the ideological road, and leads the most ethnically diverse caucus in the House of Commons.)
His detractors are flummoxed by Harper’s position atop the polls, as in the Abacus survey which showed his party is still the dominant force in Canadian politics, more than six years after he became PM.
His acolytes believe his popularity can be traced to conservative orthodoxy. Harper’s haters, and his helpers and hangers-on, are misinformed. Both sides believe Harper is an activist. Both sides believe he never rests in aggressively pursuing his agenda, whether they approve of it or not.
They’re wrong. Harper has survived and prospered for one reason: He stays out of your face.
Five things about this:
1. Calling supportive media organizations like the Sun “a bunch of pricks” is not highly strategic.
2. These hillbillies are losing their minds in public. Seriously.
3. A judge is still out there, reviewing Rob Ford’s conduct, and could decide to boot His Worship out of office. That judge, like all judges, avidly reads newspapers.
4. I do not know a single conservative who defends these guys anymore.
5. I want one of those buttons, Vaughan.
I’m on the set and about to go on air at Sun News. So I don’t know what happened here.
I do know Ken to be a very good guy, our politics notwithstanding.
In other news: wolf starts providing strategic counsel to sheep.