All Hail the Dauphin

We're now waiting through this awkward little interregnum before Trudeau gets sworn in next week, which is making everyone go a little bit stir-crazy perhaps. Me, too. But I thought I'd venture a prediction, to pass the time: the National Post and the Globe & Mail will, in 2019, call for Trudeau's replacement by whoever his Conservative opponent happens at that time to be.

It would not matter whether the Conservative Party leader was Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney, Peter Penashue, or Doug Ford. They would endorse the party anyways. It would not matter whether he was calling for blatantly unconstitutional acts. It would not matter whether he was calling for the creation of McCarthyite snitch lines. It would not matter if the party were to be convicted -- again -- of electoral fraud.  They would endorse the party, come what may.

Which is why we can expect most of the major media outlets to spend the next four years hunting for whatever absurd opportunity they can find to mock and belittle Trudeau. At the end of which they will call for his replacement. It won't matter what the economic performance of the country is. It won't matter what his policies are, or his popularity.

Take, for instance, the National Post's sarcastic coverage of Trudeau's visit to Queen's Park, penned by a reporter who prefers to call Trudeau "the dauphin." She isn't alone in this.  People who drone on endlessly about how Harper is only criticized by people with "Harper Derangement Syndrome" invariably themselves have "Trudeau Derangement Syndrome," which reduces them to epithets that they really ought to be embarrassed to print, if only because they're epithets that have already been used only about five trillion times and journalists, even columnists, normally care a bit about originality.

In this case I'll just settle for a civics lesson. Justin Trudeau is not "the dauphin." For one thing, he can't be now that he's the Prime Minister-designate. For another, he never was. Canada already has a dauphin, and whether you love him or hate him or simply don't care about him, any talk of replacing him without taking the appropriate legal steps to do so is bordering on treason.

 At Sixth Estate I used to talk quite a bit about the media. I expected to do so again on this blog. For the moment I'm not sure. With their absurd endorsements of a couple weeks ago the major newspapers revealed themselves to be profoundly unserious, unprofessional, and foolish, and what's more, everybody intelligent enough to realize that already realizes it. This blog will need some other purpose.