Friday 26 April 2013

Stephen Harper has always been a robot, and Justin Trudeau was never a math teacher

Justin: Math is way more dramatic
The pissing match between the Conservative Part of Canada, led by a cyborg name Stephen Harper, and the Liberal Party of Canada, led by a ponce named Justin Trudeau, has revealed, if you’ll allow the oxymoron, the profound shallowness of both leaders.

The Conservative Party came out the gate after Trudeau’s coronation as Liberal leader with an attack ad showing the dauphin bowing and prancing as he removes his shirt. Poor form, given that Trudeau was doing the striptease as part of a charity fundraiser for the Canadian Liver Foundation.

The full-length version of the ad has Trudeau saying that “Quebecers are better than the rest of Canada because, ya know, we’re Quebecers or whatever.” What the ad does not say is that Trudeau was offering up a critique of his late father, Pierre Trudeau, and not presenting his own views.

Given its duplicity, the ad is true to form for the Conservative Party, and hardly surprising.

Then came the response from the Liberals, showing Trudeau sitting on a teacher’s desk with a Canadian flag on it and some math on a chalkboard behind him. In the ad we hear him say: “I’m proud to be a teacher. I’m a son, but also a father. And although I am a leader, I am here to serve.”

Wow. A man who is also a son. Who’d have thunk? The entire statement – teacher son father leader here to serve – could be true of...a few hundred thousand other Canadians. But the real dodge, and a sad one at that, is that Trudeau was a drama teacher, not a math teacher. And, judging by his performance, he wasn’t a very good drama teacher.

In the ad Trudeau does not mention the sacred middle class, though there is the usual mushy talk of togetherness and joining. Apparently, we’re supposed to join Justin so that he can serve and lead and we can all be, like, together. It’s creepy. At the end of the ad, you just want him to go away.

To date, Canada’s official opposition, the New Democratic Party, has kept a low profile, allowing the governing Conservatives and the surging Liberals to go after each other. We do have this April Fool spoof ad from the NDP in British Columbia, "Adrian Dix: Risky in a 90s kind of way" – a welcome relief from the Conservatives’ default insistence on puerile nastiness, and the Liberals’ pathetic, over-earnest vacuity.

(TE Wilson is the author of Mezcalero, a Detective Sánchez novel.)



Twitter: @TimothyEWilson
Email: lapoliticaeslapolitica [at] gmail [dot] com

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