Eighty percent is a big number. There are no hard and fast rules as to what constitutes a “coronation”, but 80% has got to be pretty close. I speak of course about the level of endorsement received by Justin Trudeau in this week’s leadership vote.

The big number is something that can’t be denied, that can’t be taken away from Mr. Trudeau. The result causes one to reflect again on the race and why the fine group of people running against him could only muster 20% of the vote.

It wasn’t always so. It’s been noted that the Dauphin won the leadership almost exactly 45 years after his father became Liberal leader. The 1968 leadership is actually very instructive.

Far from being a “coronation”, Pierre Trudeau was hard-pressed to win that vote. He won by 249 votes (50.9%) over Robert Winters, partly because John Turner (yes, THAT John Turner) refused to drop off the last ballot. Turner garnered 195 votes in the final count.

Many aspects of the 1968 convention affected the Liberal Party, and Canada for decades. The election of Trudeau shifted the party well to the left. Imagine, runner-up Winters favoured the privatization of Crown corporations! Kind of reminds you why some people were Liberals back in the day.

Paul Martin Sr.’s poor showing lit the fires of ambition in his son, which did not extinguish until 2004. Turner became the “leader-in-waiting” for almost a decade, his manoeuvring against Trudeau presaging the Chretien-Martin feud of later years. Chretien himself became a Trudeau loyalist at the convention after his mentor, Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp, supported Trudeau.

Of Trudeau’s seven main opponents, all were federal or provincial cabinet ministers. What a contrast to 2013. Where were the heavyweights this time? Where was John Manley, Frank McKenna, Scott Brison, Hedy Fry? As I’ve suggested in these pages before, how could one expect any such candidates to emerge? As a party that exists only for power, when there is little guarantee of easy power and position, there isn’t much of a drawing card. Remember poor, bitter Ken Dryden, ranting from the opposition benches? Opposition wasn’t what he signed up for!

What a sharp contrast, also, with the current government. While Trudeux’s commitment to the Liberal brand should be acknowledged, it is arguably not as admirable as when, for example, Peter MacKay fought for the leadership of the 5th-place PCs in 2003; or even when the Prime Minister ran for the leadership of the fractured Canadian Alliance in 2002.

It is reasonable to predict one thing. Should Mr. Trudeau appear to be reversing Liberal fortunes, the power-seeking “names” will return.

   

While vacationing in the Lower 48, I’ve made the mistake of occasionally tuning into CBC Radio One on the internet.  Nostalgia? Home-sickness? Stupidity?

So it was that the morning newscast yesterday led off with a story on hydraulic fracking. No surprise, I guess, if it was to recount the latest controversy surrounding this petroleum recovery process.

But no, the story had an informative slant, delivered with almost child-like wonderment by the reporter. Apparently there is this new technology called “multi-stage fracking” that has revolutionized the oil and gas industry! And, added the CBC correspondent, “few people seem to know that much of this process was pioneered in Alberta”. Wow, you could knock me over with a feather.

As it was the morning of April 1st, my first, conspiratorial thought was that this had to be a joke; perhaps a story re-cycled from five years ago? I then waited for the chuckling admission from Mothercorp … which never came. So it was in fact a straight up, real report delivered, as Mr. K would say, “without irony”.

When I realized this, I was rather of two minds about it. The snivelling optimist in me  thought I should be thankful that CBC was running a real news story on fracking, show-casing the industry and actually highlighting Made-in-Alberta technological achievements.

The other side of me was less magnanimous. “Where the hell have they been for the last decade”? I thought. How could they deliver a story like this, apparently ignorant of these monumental industry developments? Well apparently they can and I know precisely where they HAVE been for the last decade. They’ve been reporting all the activists’ protests against fracking (and continue to do so), the “controversy” surrounding the process, interviewing the various Indie filmmakers’ “definitive” works on the subject, and of course reviewing Matt Damon’s take on it. That’s what they’ve been doing.

They haven’t seriously attempted to report facts – like the experience in Pennsylvania which I wrote about in these pages. The fact that not a single instance of groundwater contamination due to fracking has been proven in that state. No, they’ve been content to report, unfiltered, the manifestos of activists and the opinions of celebrities.

So what are we to think about this latest, seemingly fact-based report? Is it a much-belated attempt at corrective action? Past behaviour, forces me to conclude that, no, that’s highly unlikely. It’s more than likely a fortuitous error, or worse, the one fair story they can point to when accused of biased coverage. Call me a cynic, but there it is.

   

Despite the best efforts of a warming, that is “changing” climate, snowcat tours of the Rocky Mountains’ Columbia Ice Fields are still very popular.  Calgarians will know that they can enjoy a little bit of that adventure every winter day, just by driving the city’s residential streets.

You see, as hard as it is for outsiders to believe, there is no ploughing of snow on residential streets in Calgary. I described the whole seasonal fiasco in this quite inspirational post a couple of years ago. This winter has been fairly mild in Calgary but, because of the aforementioned lack of ploughing and an uncooperative climate/latitude, ice doesn’t actually melt off many Calgary streets until well into March.

Despite the renowned Chinooks, Calgary doesn’t get the balmy mid-winter rains of central Canada, that melt snow and ice and wash away salt and sand. Areas not actually exposed to the sun are particularly prone to pernicious snow and ice buildup. Hence the glacial terrain on city roads. None of this any comfort to the beleaguered Calgary motorist or pedestrian.

Adding insult to injury are the proclivities of our outspoken mayor, Naheed Nenshi. His Worship is known as an intelligent man, of firm opinions, readily and endlessly expressed. The Germans have a word that might best describe this, namely that he has a “Mundwerk“. That translates into 21st century parlance as, roughly, a “mouth that walks like a man”.

The mayor is remarkable in many ways, having emerged, fully formed, from the academic ether a few years ago. I first saw him in person acting as a commentator at the Calgary convention centre the night of the 2008 federal election. His deep-throated anti-Conservative invective echoed loudly around one corner of the room. Having just returned from 19 months in Ottawa, and never having seen the impassioned gentleman before in my life, I asked a passerby who he was. “Oh, that’s Naheed Nenshi, an instructor from Mt. Royal College” I was told. “Ah”, I said. It was then that I knew Keith Brownsey had met his match.

In more ways than the obvious, Nenshi is no champion of Calgary’s silent majority. He has the usual fixations of post-modern municipal government, namely anything but the basic services that average people actually care about. A stark example of this was his recent attendance of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Traveling on the taxpayers’ ticket, the mayor took the opportunity to grandstand on the issue of pipelines, claiming that the province and feds had bungled the Keystone pipeline file and that he had successfully lobbied “senior U.S. officials” at Davos. Given that it might have taken some time for him to explain to the Americans who he was, the purported lobbying was quite a feat indeed. Good thing he had everything back home taken care of – road construction and repair, waste removal, budget tightening, program analysis and reductions; oh yes, snow removal too – that he had time to devote to higher matters like pipelines.

While it is easy to scorn Mr. Nenshi’s activities, his opponents would be ill-advised to underestimate him. Besides the necessary intellect, there is the aforementioned “Mundwerk” and the fact that his persona will compel the media to give him a pass. His interests and inclinations will almost certainly cause him to run provincially or federally in due course – as some of his leftish predecessors did.

If his effectiveness baring winter pavement is any indication, taxpayers should remain vigilant. And once he has the mayoralty gig engraved on his resume, they should beware an inevitable political reincarnation.

   

There are varied opinions about the Globe and Mail.  One school of thought, likely favoured by the broadsheet itself, suggests it’s the national paper of record. Another view is that it is aimed at Toronto stockbrokers of a certain lifestyle.

An article in yesterday’s Globe tends to support the latter interpretation, in fact it suggests a striking, shark-jumping moment. Or jumping something anyway.

The article, third most-viewed on the website as of 9 PM EST yesterday, expounds on a certain male appendage. Not quite at the level of a “monologue”, it nonetheless plumbs the depths of something. Those poor discredited slippery-slope-ists, seeing something like this, must feel truly re-energized.

But should one be surprised?  Recalling stories like the twittering of Mr. Weiner’s wiener, the article seems almost like a philosophical treatise by comparison.

Given the fact that “sex sells” and popular culture in general, one shouldn’t be surprised at all. However, superior wits and intellects have gotten a lot more with less as it were. Less explicitness. There are many examples from Seinfeld alone, perhaps the episode “The Stand-in” stands out the most. There, it’s referred to simply as “it” and with side-splitting results. That one speaks for itself.

Of course the obvious question is, once an “institution” like the Globe has gone that far south of the equator, how do they get back? Maybe someone could give them a map?

   

From Mr. and Mrs. K, and from Dr. and Mrs. J, a very Merry Christmas to everyon. Joy, peace, companionship, love and health

   

By now many of you will have heard all the reasons why Romney lost yesterday. Well, guess what?  They’re all right. In an election this close, any single one of these factors could by itself have caused the Republican loss.

Let’s review a few of them (and where I heard them):

1/ Vicious attack ads “killed” Romney (everyone)

2/ Romney didn’t nail the President with Benghazi in the third debate (O’Reilly)

3/ Hurricane Sandy (Krauthammer et al.), with special emphasis on the Christie hug (Krauthammer)

4/ America has too many people who “want free stuff” (O’Reilly)

5/ The media’s slobbering love affair (Goldberg), which could be broken down into any number of individually fatal factors – e.g. no Benghazi coverage, no Romney coverage, etc.

6/ The Dems turnout model was more correct, the corollary being that the Republicans did not effectively reach out to minorities

7/ The loopy “war on women” rhetoric

8/ It’s very hard to knock off a sitting president (Coulter et al.)

9/ It’s almost impossible to beat Santa Claus (Limbaugh)

10/ Marco Rubio should have been on the ticket

And the list goes on. Readers can choose which of these, or others, they believe were the crucial factors. Forget about American conservatism, this is a bad result for America period. One can only hope that this is the high water mark of American Leftism, knowing of course that it will return and return.

It’s worth bearing in mind that conventional wisdom said U.S. conservatism was dead with Goldwater’s loss in 1964. That was followed by 20 out of 28 years of Republican administrations.

Now that I think of it, not everyone was right. Dick Morris was definitely wrong…

   

Back in the Paleolithic, when I was first interviewing for jobs in Calgary, a crusty old geologist from Shell asked me whether I had any relatives working for Shell. “No, I don’t think so” he was told. “Good” he said, “if you did, you’d never work for Shell”.

By contrast, other companies promoted sons of executives to executive positions. Of two sons of an ESSO exec, promoted to senior management there, one was respected and competent, the other regularly ridiculed around the water cooler.

It’s hard to imagine politics would ever have employment restrictions like Shell. On the contrary, the phenomenon of Justin Trudeau suggests the hereditary model is alive and well.

Interestingly, John Moore seems miffed about people apparently resenting Trudeau’s hereditary short cut into the limelight. This he terms “reflex loathing” and “anti-Justin double-think”.

Moore’s tongue-in-cheek comparison of Trudeau with the inexperienced Stephen Harper of 2002 also misses the mark. I believe it’s not Trudeau’s inexperience that drives some resentment, but rather that combined with the hereditary fast-track. This is I think the same sentiment that greeted someone like Belinda Stronach. People will look askance at someone who gets a “by” into public life due to daddy’s name and their aesthetic superficialities. They just will.

As a recovering Anglo-Montrealer myself, it’s not surprising that Moore suffers from Trudeau nostalgia. His hearkening back to Canada’s love affair with Trudeau pere simply doesn’t ring true for many, or most, Canadians. I’ve written in these pages before how, after 1968, Trudeau never won a majority of seats outside Quebec, and relied increasingly on support from that province to win elections. And that was running against Stanfield and Joe Clark…

Moore is right about one thing, that time will tell the measure of the man; the proof will be in the pudding so to speak. That said, readers will probably have seen these much better analyses by Rex Murphy and especially John Ibbitson.

There is no doubt that there is some danger residing in Trudeau II. If his superficialities and other qualities are attractive enough, he may become an empty vessel carrying every pernicious policy Canada has been spared for the last seven years.

This was the fatal combination embodied by his father, who was attractive and intelligent enough to stay in power to the detriment of, particularly western Canada. Trudeau Jr. is already benefitting from, in many quarters, significantly deferential media. All the more reason to oppose him as strongly as possible.

   

Readers may have missed a recent item on CBC Radio One The World at Six, so let me summarize. Apparently recent developments in Venezuela’s presidential campaign warranted a feature report on Hugo Chavez. The Latin American strongman is seeking a fourth six-year term as president. CBC’s perspective was, er, noteworthy.

Mothercorp’s Latin America correspondent, Connie Watson, took what one might call an indulgent approach. She referred to Mr. Chavez as, amongst other things, the “charismatic leader” and marvelled at his ability to speak for 20 minutes without notes.

This perspective is interesting, given that it would be hard to imagine CBC admiring the charisma of leaders such as, say, Francisco Franco or Antonio Salazar of Portugal. In fairness, these gentlemen weren’t particularly charismatic. As I recall however, back in the day, CBC ran multiple reports on the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion – Canadians who fought on the Communist/Socialist side in the Spanish Civil War – and bemoaned the fact that they were not officially recognized as veterans by our federal government.

Interestingly, even as bland a source as Wikipedia, which mentions Chavez’s “progressive” politics, is more critical than CBC. They note the dictator’s statement that “if a right-wing president takes office (in the upcoming election), it would mean an end of social reforms (and) lead to civil war”. They also mention that he has been sanctioned by Human Rights Watch for “fundamental disregard for the principle of judicial independence”.

As a follow-up, one can perhaps look forward to a feature CBC interview with Sean Penn. Or we can just enjoy the long weekend. Have a good one.

   

This Canada Day will be remembered for at least one thing in our household, a phenomenal home fireworks display – care of Costco on-line delivery. I highly recommend readers check it out. It was worth every penny.

Waiting for total darkness at these latitudes is a challenge this time of year, especially with a near-full moon shedding light on the subject. But it wasn’t just the late night that had me hacking in my cornflakes yesterday.

I happened to read about the latest group honoured with the Order of Canada. That started something.

I just had to look at the mix of people on the list. The award was founded in 1967 with the intention of honouring “outstanding lifetime achievement in one’s field as well as community service”. Readers can judge whether the following numbers bear this out.

Of the 69-odd recipients, only 10 were employed in the private sector, a couple more if architecture and the “fashion industry” are included. About 15 work in science, whereas 22 or 23 are in the arts (again depending on whether you include the architect).

The distribution by province seems to have received attention from the committee, as the numbers are fairly balanced. However Albertans received 10 awards, and Quebec 19 – both over-represented by percentage of the population.

One may judge the importance of certain fields in the minds of the panel. For example, those involved in health care or the health sciences made up 12 of the 15 scientists. I didn’t include the three “environmentalists” in the latter category. Those very concerned with the environment will no doubt be disappointed by their relatively poor showing.

I was shocked to see a well-known geologist on the list, Paul Hoffman. Not because he doesn’t deserve it, but rather that the field received the attention of the panel. The credit for this goes to Mr. Hoffman. He can, I think, best be described as an iconoclast. I remember seeing him receive a major award once, whereupon he used his acceptance speech to denounce the Geological Survey of Canada and what he termed, if I remember correctly, the misguided mediocrities who ran it.

But which profession makes it most likely for you to win this prestigious award? You guessed it, journalism. Six individuals, almost 10% of the total, have the word “journalism” in their short published bios. And they would make up what percentage of Canadians?

This is apparently nothing new. A prominent journalist of my acquaintance joked to me a few years ago that he was the only senior member of his paper’s Ottawa bureau NOT to have received the Order. Tsk tsk.

Again, readers may judge for themselves. Whether history will judge some of the recipients as favourably as the Order’s panel, or even judge them at all, will some day be evident. It might be judicious for some recipients to enjoy the accolades will they can. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you.