I am a Trudeau fan, but …

justin
Pat Harrington who played the superintendent on the 70s sitcom “One Day at a Time” (yeah, I know it’s an old photo).
pat-harrington-1-sized
Justin Trudeau. … wait… did I mix these guys up again?

I am a little worried about the fawning admiration the press is giving to our new Fearless leader, Justin Trudeau. It has crossed the border of “good news” reporting to the land of hero worship. Indeed, there is a lot to feel good about: his balance of cabinet among men and women, the bringing back of the long-form census, increasing funding for the arts, and many other things seem to bring back the warm fuzzies.

But not all things give me those feelings. First of all he lost big in the prarie provinces, but won a landslide in the Greater Toronto Area. One can almost feel the days coming back of Western alienation, the days his father presided over. I think that this is preventing him from speaking his mind on Keystone/XL.

Another problem is his choice of cabinet ministers. Yes, it is 50% XY and 50% XX. Trouble is, most of those cabinet ministers come from Quebec and Ontario.  5 of them are from the city of Toronto. There are two more from Markham, which is just north of the Toronto border. That’s more than one in five cabinet ministers. But it is expected since Trudeau did so poorly in the praries, and so very successful in the GTA, where there are about 56 seats extending from Whitby to Hamilton in a sea of red. Two exceptions are the Markham-Unionville and Thornhill ridings, which went blue. Other than that, I notice that ridings have fallen back to their traditional pattern where rural Canada seems to vote Conservative, and urban Canada tends to vote Liberal. The GTA was Trudeau’s trump card, being very densely populated with about one in six Canadian residents.

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