Are Greatly Exaggerated.
My apologizes to the late Samuel Langhorne Clemens – aka Mark Twain.
The His in this instance is of course our aloof and oft times rather dour Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper.
Media and Pundits are united in their belief that Young Trudeau is on a roll and is destined to become the next Prime Minister of Canada.
Indeed, Polls are showing YT with an up to 10% lead over the star crossed Harper.
With their policy convention closing this weekend in Montreal, those numbers should and likely will, rise even more.
But, as Yogi Berra is famous for saying, “it ain’t over til it’s over” and dear reader, it is a long way from being over.
All one had to do was listen to YT speak on Saturday night – why the young fellow said he stands for a ‘stronger economy and more jobs’. Who’d have thought – though the same can be said for the Tories as well as the NDP and let’s throw in the Greens and the Bloc’ers too. I was beginning to think Trudeau was going to come out next in support of ‘apple pie’ but of course, that would be an Americanism … but still.
Bottom-line, the guy is deep ….as in a 1 inch lake.
The one area where he has made a bit of a splash is with respect to the debt / deficit. He wants to make them greater. What a thinker. Does he not realize that such a policy is a job killer …. what was I thinking …of course he is not aware of that.
But beyond this, are a host of other ‘wedge issues’* upon which Harper can distinguish his party from the nipper’s:
- marijuana;
- climate change;
- tough on crime;
- abortion / euthanasia;
- provincial demands;
- Quebec’s continued demands;
- native demands;
- the pipelines;
- taxes.
* Wedge issues, for the uninformed, are those that split the opposition and allow a party to come down the middle successfully even if it lacks the support of the majority. Brian Mulroney did this with free trade in 2008 – the majority of Canadians voted for other parties but Mulroney was able to secure a plurality to secure victory.
The list goes on and on. There is much ammunition for a guy like Harper to use against Young Justin without having to turn to negative personal attacks, which if he does that, runs the danger of turning off voters who might otherwise have voted Tory.
Let’s hope Harper et al have moved on from such negativity.
The other problem I have with YT is in trying to visualize him as PM dealing with world leaders who are less naive and inexperienced than he – the Putins, the Ayatollahs, the Chinese leadership, and such. They would eat the poor lad for lunch and not even burb.
So dear folks, it is long from over. But that is not to say that in the end I trust the voter to do the right thing …after all, once upon a time they elected his father PM and Canada has never been the same.
Pity.
As I see it …
‘K.D. Galagher’
