Swing to the left
by Tom Sullivan
Political dynasties are not unheard of. The U.S. presidency went from Adams to Adams and from Bush to Bush. It could go from Clinton to Clinton next fall. On the other hand, Jeb! might be a Bush too far.
Yesterday, Canada went from Trudeau to Trudeau in a swing to the left:
Canadians voted for a sharp change in their government Monday, resoundingly ending Conservative Stephen Harper’s attempt to shift the nation to the right and returning a legendary name for liberals, Trudeau, to the prime minister’s office.
Justin Trudeau, the son of late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, became Canada’s new prime minister after his Liberal Party won a majority of Parliament’s 338 seats. Trudeau’s Liberals had been favored to win the most seats, but few expected the final margin of victory.
Well, that’s promising, and perhaps catching. Maybe that’s why Scott Walker proposed building a wall on our northern border.
“I didn’t make history tonight, you did,” Trudeau told supporters. Stephen Harper stepped down as head of the Conservatives:
The tone was set by an early Conservative attack ad that claimed Trudeau wasn’t ready to be the country’s next prime minister and took aim at his looks with the comment, “Nice hair, though.”
“What Trudeau did was surprise the field, and he stiffened the spine of a lot of liberals who were wavering,” said Nelson Wiseman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
Trudeau also touted a path for Canada that he said was more ambitious than his opponents’. His slogan “Real Change” echoes Barack Obama’s successful “Hope and Change,” and Trudeau admires how, in his view, Obama transformed grassroots democracy.
What, no nastiness and xenophobia?
In his victory speech, Trudeau said the Liberal Party won because it put forward an optimistic message. “This is what positive politics can do,” he told supporters. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together. Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less.”
Hmm. “America shouldn’t be satisfied with less” doesn’t exactly sing as a 2016 campaign slogan, but it’s got the sentiment about right.