Thus, Brian Mulroney’s folksy Irish blarney was a reaction to Pierre Trudeau’s aloof asceticism. Jean Chretien’s populist federalism was an answer to the Mulroney regime’s flirtations with Quebec separatists and corporate elites.

Paul Martin’s government tilted anti-federalist and to the right, in the way that his predecessor Chretien had been an unapologetic federalist and progressive. Stephen Harper’s small-town Canada, hockey-loving, Tim Hortons affectation was deployed effectively, and brilliantly, against Martin’s millions, as well as the two ivory-tower types who followed, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.

U.S. President Barack Obama was the polar opposite to George W. Bush; Bush could not have been more dissimilar to Bill Clinton; Clinton was completely unlike Bush’s father, George Sr., and so on and so on.

I’ll only say this: saw it yesterday with Son 3. He loved it, I hated it.

It is basically a movie about children murdering children. That makes it despicable enough. But what makes it worse is that it pretends to disapprove of children murdering children – while simultaneously profiting from precisely that.

They suddenly lost their charismatic, talented leader in the summer. They had an interim leader who used to be a card-carrying separatist.
They had a leadership race that was duller than dishwater. They have a caucus bursting at the seams with children, none of whom were expected to get their deposit back, let alone elected. They haven’t said or done anything of significance inside or outside the House of Commons since
May 2011. In fact, they have had a year that has been remarkably unremarkable.

But here’s the thing: As of this week, the pollsters at Environics tell us, they are tied for first place with the governing Conservative party. And their extraordinary victory in last May’s general election, which every pollster and pundit (including this one) regarded as temporary, an anomaly?

They’ve now elected a guy who is the polar opposite, on all fronts.