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| Justin Trudeau: 35 going on 25 http://www.projectalberta.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=4110 |
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| Author: | Knave [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 10:26 am ] |
| Post subject: | Justin Trudeau: 35 going on 25 |
He's 35 going on 25 Terry O'Neill - Western Standard Monday, 26 March 2007 Justin Trudeau strolls through the front entrance of the posh clubhouse at the Nicklaus North golf course in Whistler, B.C., just before dusk on Feb. 23. There's no fanfare, no entourage, no paparazzi in tow. Surprising, considering Trudeau's dreamy mug was all over the front pages of the morning's newspapers, in recognition of his announcement of his official entry into federal politics the day before in Montreal. Trudeau had finally ended months of speculation by declaring his intention to represent the Liberal party in the Montreal riding of Papineau. This meant, of course, that Pierre Trudeau's eldest son had at long last made the decision to try to follow in his late father's famous and controversial footsteps. Justin Trudeau was at the upscale ski resort to raise money for the Canadian Avalanche Foundation, with which he became involved as a director shortly after the death of his brother Michel in an avalanche in 1998. The dress code was advertised as "mountain evening," which the invitation explained should reflect something alpine. Many guests arrived in ski sweaters and crisply pressed slacks, but Trudeau didn't follow the script. Instead, he showed up in blue jeans with a designer rip in the left knee, a sports coat and a striped shirt--its wide-open neck revealing an almost hairless chest. Revellers at the $175-a-plate event wouldn't necessarily have known it, but his get-up was virtually the same outfit Trudeau had worn to many of his numerous public outings over the last several months, whether it was to announce his candidacy or to address members of a chamber of commerce, as he did in February in London, Ont. Trudeau even embraced the tie-free, two-buttons-open look at a more formal avalanche fundraising gig in Calgary on Feb. 24, although he did ditch the jeans and jacket for a natty sand-brown suit. The look is definitely a youthful one. But then, even at the age of 35, if Justin Trudeau is known for anything, it's for his youth and the promise he holds for a Liberal party desperately seeking some vitality. A press agent couldn't have put it any better than did Glen Pearson last November, when Trudeau attended a rally to support Pearson's ultimately successful bid to win the London-North Centre byelection. "We have someone in our midst who someday may be prime minister," Pearson gushed about the Trudeau prince. "We are in the presence of royalty." But while much is being expected of the nearly middle-aged Trudeau, he seems to be the very embodiment of someone 10 years his junior. And it's not just the way he dresses. Consider this: while many other men of his age and privileged background are married with kids, and well established in their careers, Justin Trudeau is childless, has flitted from job to avocation to cause to acting gig with little apparent impact in any area in which he has alighted, and has only now settled on attempting to find a place for himself in the House of Commons. Even then, politics is a profession for which, despite the many figurehead positions he has held, he actually has few legitimate qualifications--other than his famous last name, of course, and the celebrity that accompanies it. Yes, he's been a teacher, but so have hundreds of thousands of other Canadians. And, yes, he's sat on the board of the youth volunteer organization Katimavik, but he clearly got the job through family and political connections. Yes, he's working on a master's degree in environmental geography at McGill University, but being a 35-year-old grad student isn't exactly an accomplishment to write home about. And, yes, he hosted last year's televised Giller Prize award ceremony to honour the country's literary set, but he's never written a book, let alone a major policy paper. In other words, he's a lightweight, but at least a well-known and apparently youthful one. "He's not taken very seriously," political commentator and recently retired Liberal MP Jean Lapierre said upon learning of Trudeau's decision to try to run for office. "So he will have to show that he has something in his belly. We don't know that yet." Lapierre also revealed that Trudeau wasn't even a member of the Liberal party until last fall. "I sold him his first membership card about four months ago," Lapierre said, "so he never really cared about the party before." Ouch. Nevertheless, that Justin Trudeau is a Peter Pan-ish 35 going on 25 may explain why the Liberals chose him to head their youth task force last year, even though he was nine years older than the official age limit of 25 for membership in the Young Liberals of Canada. That youth task force is as good a place as any to begin considering the young Trudeau's record, which in recent years seems to have been designed to give him maximum possible publicity with the minimum of actual accomplishment. The Task Force on Youth and Civil Engagement was one of several such study groups the Liberal party established in an attempt to "renew" itself, following its defeat by the Conservatives in January 2006. Two things are immediately evident about the task force's interim report, made public late last year. First, despite his name being on its cover page, Trudeau was not actually its primary author; a reader has to turn to the inside to discover the report's "lead writers" were actually two other individuals, Chris Holcroft and Danielle Kotras. Exactly how much work Trudeau did on the report is unclear. Second, the report is notable for its vacuous but still ominous findings: vacuous in that the paper's most important specific recommendation seems to be that Elections Canada "work with school boards across the country to hold comprehensive mock elections in high schools" to help young people understand the electoral process; ominous in that the paper declares that young Canadians with whom the task force met "want a return to activist government." The paper doesn't spell it out, but to anyone who lived through the governments of Pierre Trudeau, "activist" clearly means a high-spending, high-debt, interventionist government. It's nothing to worry about if you're a left-winger, but it's cause for great concern if you're on the right or even a main-street centrist. And this type of government is anathema to the West, especially Alberta, which bore the full brunt of the elder Trudeau's "activist" government in 1980, when the Grits imposed the National Energy Program, estimated to have sucked $100 billion out of the province's economy. Justin Trudeau's expression of this sort of interventionist sentiment, especially in relation to the need for government to take action to "save" the environment, shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone who has been listening to him in his many public appearances and interviews over the past half year. In fact, Trudeau has become something of a rich man's David Suzuki, the environmental Jeremiah who preaches global warming doom and big-government salvation. Consider this collection of recent musings: Quote: - "Canada actually isn't doing so well environmentally. We're falling behind. We're not taking care of things and a large part of the responsibility is on its citizens." (Owen Sound Sun Times, Oct. 2, 2006)
- "We are completely misunderstanding the fundamental relationship we have with this planet that sustains us. Our relationship with the natural world needs to fundamentally inform, shape and guide our lifestyles, from the simplest element to the biggest." (Victoria Times Colonist, Oct. 19, 2006) - "All of our advances in science and everything have led us to this point, and now we're going to have to do something that no civilization has ever been able to do, which is to have certain behaviours, to reach the top, and then suddenly change direction, change our habits, and change our ways away from the very things that brought us here." (National Post, Nov. 8, 2006) - "We have achieved tremendous success with this civilization, but it has come at a cost. We're at a point where the behaviour and habits that got us here are the very same ones that will ruin us. They will cause total collapse." (Montreal Gazette, Feb. 15, 2007) As evidenced by Lapierre's less than laudatory comments about Trudeau's decision to seek the Liberal nomination, his entry into politics hasn't exactly been cheered, even by fellow Liberals. In fact, he was criticized within the party for making his headline-grabbing announcement on the same day as leader StÈphane Dion was delivering a major speech about Afghanistan. Nevertheless, criticisms from both within and outside the party have centred more on his lack of experience than on his public pronouncements. Clearly, though, his calamitous predictions bear scrutiny, too. The Western Standard sent a selection of his quotations, including the ones above, to two expert observers. Their reactions were less than positive. Jason Clemens, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, says Trudeau is just plain wrong when he says the environment in Canada is getting worse. Measurements consistently show that water and air quality are actually improving in this country, Clemens says. Moreover, he argues that Trudeau shows a basic misunderstanding of the free-market economy when he argues that big government should intervene, through such mechanisms as subsidies and taxes, to improve the environment. "So I guess my challenge to him would be: name me the situation where that approach has actually solved the problem. . . . Historically, I just can't think of any major problem where the government took that activist approach and actually made things better." On the other hand, Clemens says that one thing going in Trudeau's favour is that, unlike Dion, he seems to recognize there will be a hefty price tag attached to green initiatives. Environmental consultant and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore believes Trudeau "is certainly apocalyptic" in his worldview. "I had many of the same sentiments at that age," Moore says. "Now I believe it is wise to remain calm at all times, especially if a ship is sinking." Moore has hope that new energy technologies will reduce fossil-fuel consumption and that the Earth's population will stabilize. "[Trudeau] sounds like a bit of a dreamer and is too pessimistic for me," Moore concludes, "but like so many people today, probably just buys into Suzuki, [former U.S. vice-president Al] Gore and [environmentalist James] Lovelock." There are always two sides to politics, of course: style and substance. Moore and Clemens don't think much of the substance. What about the style? Political scientist Faron Ellis of Lethbridge College in Alberta thinks Trudeau's celebrity may actually backfire on him. "People who are looking for the second coming of the old man," he says, "are probably going to be sorely disappointed." Once one looks past all the hype surrounding Justin Trudeau, it's evident, "this is just a rich kid who has done nothing," Ellis continues. "He was supposed to be a teacher, but didn't stick with that. He's got the celebrity. You know, the most important thing that brought him celebrity was the deaths of family members, right? His dad and his brother. . . . You've only got so many family members to keep that going." Double ouch. (Trudeau's first big media splash came when he delivered a eulogy at his father's funeral in 2000. He won wide praise for the speech, but it's little known that his longtime buddy Gerald Butts, currently an assistant to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, helped write the eulogy. In retrospect, the speech seems sophomoric, especially in its use of an inappropriate quotation from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar--"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears"--as an opening line. Trudeau didn't cite the next line--"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him"--and, of course, didn't mean that, but any literate English speaker could have been left wondering.) B.C. political analyst and broadcaster Bill Tieleman describes Trudeau as a dilettante. "You can't even say he's written some interesting papers on politics, has been involved as a door knocker or organizer," Tieleman says. "He's a media creation at the moment." This doesn't mean he won't get elected, but "Justin Trudeau's political weight seems to come more from his mother's side than his father's." Triple ouch. (That's a reference to Justin's mother, Margaret, whose scandalous behaviour while still married to Pierre Trudeau was to the Canada of the 1970s what Britney Spears' current shenanigans are to the world today.) Justin Trudeau refused to be interviewed for this story, though he did give a brief comment about his candidacy when approached at the Whistler event. "For me, being involved with communities, like the mountain community, like the avalanche community, has allowed me to connect with Canadians, and understand some of the real priorities they have," he said. "My life has been, over the past decade or so, being involved with a number of organizations, and this is one of the organizations that I have learned and grown an awful lot through, and understood a lot of the way that society needs to take on its responsibilities, involving education, involving funding of particular organizations and programs, and that is all sort of an amount of experience that I will bring with me to Parliament." Asked how important it would be for him to carve out his own reputation, distinct from his father's, Trudeau was straightforward: "Well, listen, everyone already has their minds largely made up about me from the outset. My challenge is going to be to have them discover who I really am and what I really stand for at the base. And no amount of me telling them what I am and what I stand for is enough. I need to get to work and show them that. And the first way to do that is what I do very well, and is to connect with people and listen to people and learn how to represent, particularly the constituents in Papineau." Not exactly stirring stuff. Trudeau had nothing to say about everyday concerns involving employment, taxes, education, the economy or child care; he didn't even offer any concrete ideas about how he'd implement his environmental agenda. It was the same the day before when he announced his bid for the Grit nomination in Papineau, a riding currently held by the Bloc QuÈbÈcois. True to form, Trudeau talked style, not substance, saying he wants "to change the way the game is played, to a certain extent; try to bring back a certain amount of nobility and reduce some of the cynicism there is around politics these days . . . Canadians need to hear a different message. Canadians need to start believing in something noble about politics and I'd like to be a part of that." Trudeau's evocation of nobility implies, of course, that he believes he, himself, is noble. Maybe he actually thinks he is. After all, the first definition of the word in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary is "belonging by rank, title, or birth to the aristocracy." But that's the easy part for a fellow with such a famous and successful father. It's the second definition--"of excellent character; having lofty ideals; free from pettiness and meanness, magnanimous"--that will be the real challenge. Source; http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/i ... le_id=2383 |
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| Author: | First Lady [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:26 pm ] |
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Enjoyable read. And very accurate assessment of Justin I believe. I must draw attention to this quote: Quote: ...... Trudeau even embraced the tie-free, two-buttons-open look at a more formal avalanche fundraising gig in Calgary on Feb. 24, although he did ditch the jeans and jacket for a natty sand-brown suit.
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| Author: | Sneeze [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:41 pm ] |
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Dont worry I'll get him next time... he wont have the luxury of camo. |
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| Author: | Knave [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:43 pm ] |
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First Lady wrote: Enjoyable read. And very accurate assessment of Justin I believe.
I must draw attention to this quote: Quote: ...... Trudeau even embraced the tie-free, two-buttons-open look at a more formal avalanche fundraising gig in Calgary on Feb. 24, although he did ditch the jeans and jacket for a natty sand-brown suit. First Lady will commence fawning in 5......... 4.......... 3.......... 2....... |
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| Author: | C.Morgan [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:49 pm ] |
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Knave wrote: First Lady wrote: Enjoyable read. And very accurate assessment of Justin I believe. I must draw attention to this quote: Quote: ...... Trudeau even embraced the tie-free, two-buttons-open look at a more formal avalanche fundraising gig in Calgary on Feb. 24, although he did ditch the jeans and jacket for a natty sand-brown suit. First Lady will commence fawning in 5......... 4.......... 3.......... 2....... She is too busy poking at somebody who had a coincidental fashion choice recently. The usual fawning should resume soon. 
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| Author: | First Lady [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:00 pm ] |
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Knave wrote: First Lady will commence fawning in 5......... 4.......... 3.......... 2.......
Why else would you post this ... if not to bait me? |
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| Author: | Knave [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:01 pm ] |
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C.Morgan wrote: She is too busy poking at somebody who had a coincidental fashion choice recently. You didn't wear a brown suit, did you? Quote: The usual fawning should resume soon.
Can't wait.... |
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| Author: | Knave [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:02 pm ] |
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First Lady wrote: Why else would you post this ... if not to bait me?
Oh, it's purely intended to bait you. Hey, fair is fair. I get digs from you (and D) about the "date shirt." I have to get back, somehow... 
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| Author: | First Lady [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:03 pm ] |
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C.Morgan wrote: She is too busy poking at somebody who had a coincidental fashion choice recently.
Ah, we can't even tell if it was one button or two.....
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| Author: | C.Morgan [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:03 pm ] |
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Knave: Quote: You didn't wear a brown suit, did you?
Never. May have done the jacket without the tie thing recently however. |
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| Author: | Knave [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:11 pm ] |
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C.Morgan wrote: Knave:
Quote: You didn't wear a brown suit, did you? Never. May have done the jacket without the tie thing recently however. Good thing about the brown suit. I've only seen someone wearing one, once -- at a funeral. And it was the guy in the box who had it on..... |
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| Author: | Sneeze [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 2:51 pm ] |
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Quote: Good thing about the brown suit. I've only seen someone wearing one, once -- at a funeral. And it was the guy in the box who had it on.....
hey now, how about Jim Rockford? He was major badass in his brown suits. He could solve anything. Beth Davenport was always attracted to the brown suit style... mmm Gretchen Corbett.... 
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| Author: | First Lady [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 2:55 pm ] |
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Sneeze wrote: Quote: Good thing about the brown suit. I've only seen someone wearing one, once -- at a funeral. And it was the guy in the box who had it on..... hey now, how about Jim Rockford? He was major badass in his brown suits. He could solve anything. Beth Davenport was always attracted to the brown suit style... mmm Gretchen Corbett.... You're not old enough to remember Rockford. Must be late night reruns..... And you should be paying close attention to this... for impersonation reasons......
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| Author: | C.Morgan [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 2:57 pm ] |
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Sneeze wrote: Quote: Good thing about the brown suit. I've only seen someone wearing one, once -- at a funeral. And it was the guy in the box who had it on..... hey now, how about Jim Rockford? He was major badass in his brown suits. He could solve anything. Beth Davenport was always attracted to the brown suit style... mmm Gretchen Corbett.... This guy cleaned up pretty well with the gals during the same time period. 
There are many parts of the 70s best left behind. |
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| Author: | Sneeze [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 3:12 pm ] |
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Quote: There are many parts of the 70s best left behind.
I will agree... its kinda messed up that Earth Wind & Fire was dominating billboard charts the same year Floyd Released -Wish you were Here and Zep released Physical Graffiti. Or how about KC & the Sunshine band giving Elton a run for his money for half a decade... What were you seniors thinking 
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| Author: | First Lady [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 3:36 pm ] |
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Sneeze wrote: What were you seniors thinking
Bite your tongue, you lil'whippersnapper.
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| Author: | sazook [ Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:11 pm ] |
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Its POLKA time!!!!!! |
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