Well, no wonder all the pundits were saying that Justin Trudeau would win yesterday's Liberal Party leadership race. They must have smelled something in cyberspace. After a groundbreaking online process in which non-dues-paying party supporters could cast a ballot for the first time, Justin walked away with, oh, just 80 percent of the vote.
And nearly 105,000 people voted — the most in any party leadership campaign, ever.
So today's a really big day in Ottawa. Because Justin will go up against Mr. Pillsbury Doughboy himself, Stephen Harper, in his first Parliamentary Q&A since being elected leader. (The last time they squared off didn't go so well for Harper, who Freudian-slipped and addressed Trudeau as "minister.")
We'll see what happens. But for the first time in awhile, Canadian politics has gotten interesting again. A young leader has stepped into his party's power vacuum and borrowed, we cats think, quite a few pages from the Barack Obama playbook. Not only is Trudeau a good organizer and a prodigious fundraiser, he's opened up the process and gotten new people involved. (Next up: Helping to write the 2015 party platform.)
In the meantime, though, here's something in Justin's favor that's grabbed our attention: Among his other major legacies as Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau made Canada more welcoming to people from developing countries. Today, those immigrants are in the True North, working, raising families, becoming citizens, and taking part in public life. And they know that it was all thanks to somebody named Trudeau.
The United States is not the only country in North America whose demographics have changed. And now, like Republicans, the Tories must try to appeal to voters who don't look (or think) like them. Good luck with that, guys.
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