My father would have been 80 last week, so that got me to thinking about Justin Trudeau.

Let me explain. When my dad was dying eight years ago — felled, too soon and too fast, by lung cancer — Justin got in touch with me. I was drowning in grief in those dark days and Justin gave me some advice that I relied upon, and which helped me get through my father’s death.

Tell him the things you never said to him before, Justin said. Be with him as much as you can, and just be his son, he said. So I did those things. It helped.

Justin and I were friendly in those days, but not close friends. In the intervening years, we have lost touch. He has become an MP, and I’ve become a critic of (and perhaps part of) the Liberal Party’s ongoing existential crisis. So we don’t communicate much anymore.

But, like everyone else, I pay attention to what Justin is doing. 

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Read this:

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction, but the most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing Tea Party, whose main target is the regulatory state that seeks to protect ordinary people from financial speculators. Something similar is true in Europe as well, where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move.

There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter­narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual ­debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.

Watch this:

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For years, I’ve been arguing that liberals and progressives need to get tougher when fighting conservatives. Way tougher.

But l’affaire Toews suggests that (a) liberals and progressives agree and (b) they’re eager to get even dirtier than the Cons.

Listen to an old man, kids (or, better yet, buy and read my books). Go after your opponent’s public record. Not his or her private life.

(That said, I am blown away about how visceral is the hatred for Vic Toews. Never seen anything like it.)

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Is anyone else as sick of that as me? Enough, already.

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As everyone knows by now, ESPN did the right thing:

“The headline — “Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets” — appeared on ESPN’s mobile website at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and was removed by 3:05 a.m. Battling to contain a furor, the sports network fired Federico and suspended anchor Max Bretos for 30 days.”

So, have Maclean’s and the National Post done likewise with Mark Steyn, who wrote for both media outlets for years, and who has also called Chinese “chinks”? Um, no.

“Mark Steyn has a penchant for using ethnic slurs, including “chinks” and “japs” (Spectator, 3/24/01), but he is at his most prolific and poisonous on the subject of Muslims…this is the man who calls Chinese people “Chinks” and Japanese people “Japs.” He calls Indians “wogs.”

How will Maclean’s and the National Post cover the ESPN/Lin story? I can’t wait to see the oleaginous Selley on this dilemma: it’ll be interesting, but likely not inspiring.

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Dangerous!

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Read it, Geoff and Jordan.

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Being Irish and Catholic, I am a sucker for well-written obituaries. This one, along with being near-pitch-perfect, benefits from some wonderful subject matter.

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It’s a tale of two nations, you might say.

Up here? Well, the Canadian bill — Bill C-30, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act (PCIPA) — saw opponents come together to publicize Toews’ divorce files. The sickening campaign culminated in a shocking Ottawa Citizen story Thursday, which revealed the Twitter account that had been disgorging salacious details about the Toews family had been — wait for it — run out of the House of Commons.

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Of course it is – sort of.  So sayeth this pollster:

Some Canadians believe that the country’s values have shifted over the past decade, a new Angus Reid Public Opinion poll conducted in partnership with L’Actualité has found.

In the online survey of a representative sample of 1,006 Canadian adults, more than a third of respondents (37%) believe that the values of Canadian society are more right-wing now than 10 years ago, while 22 per cent report no change. Only 15 per cent of Canadians think the country is now more left-wing oriented.

Almost half of Canadian men (48%) think the values of Canadian society are more right-wing than ten years ago. Only one-in-ten respondents over the age of 55 (9%) say that Canada is now more left-wing oriented than a decade ago.

More than half of Canadians (56%) believe the Federal Government has an important role to play to redistribute the wealth and intervene in the economy, even if it means increasing taxes.

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