Justin Trudeau to throw his hat into the ring

[Tropicana]

Re: Justin Trudeau to throw his hat into the ring

Not surprising that DK and Beverly got together. It was always said that her politics was more in line with that of DK Duncan than Michael....I heard this from a guy who was part of Trevor Monroe's group.

<span style="font-size: 14pt"><span style="font-weight: bold">I hope Evanovitch will come by and confirm this.</span></span>




<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Ardent groom takes blushing bride

In a repeat of his proposal performance, D.K. Duncan went down on one knee as he slipped the shiny gold wedding band on the finger of his bride, the new Beverly Anderson Duncan. The two tied the knot to seal a 32-year love affair on the lawns of Devon House, under the watchful eyes of family members, friends and long-time political colleagues. Don't miss Sunday's Outlook for all the exciting details.</div></div>

[Tropicana]

Re: Justin Trudeau to throw his hat into the ring

<span style="font-weight: bold">Justin Trudeau to run for Liberal leadership but is he all splash and no substance?</span>



<span style="font-weight: bold">He's taking the plunge.</span>

Sources for La Presse are reporting that Justin Trudeau will be seeking the leadership of the Federal Liberals. According to the French-language Montreal newspaper, Trudeau will make the official announcement in his home riding of Papineau on Tuesday.
While many in the media are already crowning Justin as the King of the Liberals, political analyst Warren Kinsella says that's not what is best for the party.
&quot;He would be the front-runner,&quot; Kinsella told Yahoo! Canada News in an email exchange.
&quot;But a lot of us Liberals don't want or need a coronation. We need a competitive race with lots of great, viable candidates and ideas. Justin needs that, too.&quot;
Kinsella, who was a Jean Chretien staffer, adds that Trudeau has the sizzle but needs the steak.
&quot;He needs to talk about ideas and policies. He has the charisma thing nailed. Now he needs to tell us what he thinks.&quot;

Former Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who was in caucus with Trudeau, believes that Trudeau won't have any trouble showing Canadians his 'steak.'
&quot;He's smart, young and intelligent and will have time to hone the skills to start his bid for PM. Liberal supporters who sat out the last election or drifted to the NDP in the last election will now have a serious rethink,&quot; McTeague, who now now operates Tomorrowsgaspricetoday.com told Yahoo!.
&quot;The future is bright for the Liberal Party, but it will take work and a fresh approach to re-engage Canadians, especially the new generation, where Justin has a considerable advantage.&quot;
Not everyone, however, believes in Trudeau's abilities.
Jim Ross, who was a senior Conservative government staffer on the immigration committee when Trudeau was the Liberal immigration critic, told Yahoo! Canada News that the son of Pierre is unimpressive.
&quot;He's a lightweight who didn't know his stuff,&quot; Ross said.
&quot;He was the least knowledgeable of any of the opposition critics who I dealt with.&quot;

We also spoke to Abacus Data pollster David Coletto who says Canadians aren't necessarily looking for a professor to be prime minister.
&quot;I think it is a misconception to say that Canadians are looking for a leader who has deep policy knowledge. They want someone who they can trust, who is authentic, and who shares their values,&quot; he said.
&quot;Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion were likely the most academically accomplished Canadian political leaders in a generation and they were unable to connect with Canadians. The world of Twitter, Facebook and 30 second sound bites is not conducive to a deep thinker who cannot explain his or her positions in less than 140 characters. &quot;
And what does his research predict will happen if Trudeau wins the leadership?
&quot;We asked Canadians how they would vote if Trudeau was Liberal leader. Under a Trudeau leader scenario, the Liberals were statistically tied with the Conservatives and he would have taken 25 per cent of the NDP's vote,&quot; Coletto told Yahoo! in an email.
&quot;Trudeau would throw a wrench into the NDP's plans to consolidate the anti-Conservative vote while giving the Conservatives and the BQ some breathing room due to vote splitting in Ontario and Quebec.&quot;
Whether he's just another pretty face or not, thanks to Trudeau, Canada's political landscape has just become a lot more interesting.

[Tropicana]

Re: Justin Trudeau to throw his hat into the ring

Guess we will soon see a Manley in office following this line of reasoning.

<span style="font-weight: bold">Trudeau's son would lead Canada Liberals to win: poll</span>

Justin Trudeau, son of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, would take his Liberal Party from a distant third in Parliament to forming the next government if he were chosen as Liberal leader, according to a poll released on Thursday.
The Forum Research phone poll, conducted for the National Post newspaper, said that if the 40-year-old member of Parliament was Liberal leader and an election was held now, his party would win 39 percent of the popular vote.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives would be reduced to 32 percent, and the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), currently the biggest opposition party, would be pushed back to third place with 20 percent.
Trudeau, a former school teacher, is expected to launch his run for the Liberal leadership next Tuesday, and with his 151,000 Facebook followers and the cache of his family name he would be the overwhelming favorite to win.
Until candidates lay out their policies, they often start with higher poll numbers than they end up with, but this poll gives some indication of the strength of the Trudeau name.
The Liberals have more often than not run Canada, and Pierre Trudeau was prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. But for the past several elections the party has been squeezed by the NDP on the left and the Conservatives on the right. It suffered its worst showing ever in the 2011 election.
Liberal insiders say Trudeau tends to the left of the party.

<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 14pt">This is good news.</span></span>

The Forum Research poll was taken on Sept 26, the day news emerged that Trudeau would declare his candidacy. Forum surveyed 1,707 people, a sample size considered accurate to within 2 percentage points 19 times out of 20.
By comparison, an Environics poll taken before Wednesday's flurry of news about Trudeau, put the NDP at 35 percent, the Conservatives at 31 percent and the Liberals down at 20 percent.
Environics surveyed 1,600 decided voters, for a 2.4-point margin of error, from Sept 10-23.
The next election is not scheduled until October 2015.

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I wish our family had been normal'



Rachel Manley: 'hopelessly emotionally dysfunctional', faked a suicide attempt as a teenager to get her father's attention

Rachel Manley, daughter of the former prime minister of Jamaica, tells Cassandra Jardine about living in a politician's slipstreamIt cannot be easy being the child of a prime minister, let alone a famously charismatic one who served three terms. It can feel as though your father belongs to the public as much as to his family; he is rarely able to take an interest in your life because his mind is full of international problems.

"I sometimes felt like I was a tourist going on a trip to the city of Daddy," writes Rachel Manley. It seemed that her father, Michael Manley, cared more about Jamaica than he did about her.

"I wish we had been a more normal family," she told him as he lay on his deathbed in 1997.

"Ah, my first born, what is normal?" he replied. For him, normal was public office and a fractured private life.

"Public life was the real thing and the rest of life was interruptible," Rachel realised. "The people I loved always needed to excuse themselves from some more profound cause to see me."
Manley became prime minister of Jamaica in 1972, when Rachel was 25 years old. He had taken over as leader of his late father's People's National Party five years earlier and stormed to power with a landslide election victory, with ambitious and popular plans to reform Jamaica's long-neglected economy through his belief in social justice and self-reliance.
A friend of Fidel Castro, whose Cuban reforms he admired, he was a vocal critic of America and what he saw as its culture of colonialism.
Rachel loves to talk about him, with the passion of one who has established more of a hold on him in death than she was able to in life. Leaning forward, she says: "My father was the kind of man one either disliked or longed for intensely. He had enormous charisma and you can never get enough of such people.
"Nowadays, charisma is a pejorative term, used of those who charm the media, but he was magical. He was a loner, he didn't have friends, and there was something in him that you could never own or possess - not his wives, not his children."
It was only during the last six months of his life that she managed, at last, to spend as much time as she wanted with her father. The prostate cancer that had caused him to resign as PM in 1992 had spread to his bones, and the end was looming.
For hours, she sat with him as he looked out through his bullet-proof window, taking calls from those, such as Nelson Mandela, who wanted to pay their last respects to a champion of the dispossessed. In between times, she hoped to resolve the issues that had led her, in her twenties, to become, as she describes it, a "small embittered island".
The treasured time by his sick bed is the starting point for her memoir of life in her father's slipstream, In My Father's Shade, published this month.
Her frustrated love for him sears through every page, for not only did she have to contend with his long-term passion - politics - she also had to battle for his affection against a string of "big-bottomed" beauties who caught his restless attention. She hated each one of these "high-rise buildings" on her father's horizon. With his various marriages (five, in all, including that to Rachel's mother) came four half-siblings who also vied for his limited attention.
Her mother had been the first of Manley's wives - Jacqueline Ramellard, a French woman whom Manley had met after taking a serviceman's scholarship at the London School of Economics in the late Forties. When Rachel was two, her mother fell ill and she was sent to Jamaica to live with her paternal grandparents - Norman Manley, Jamaica's first prime minister, and his artist wife, Edna.
She was five when her father returned to Jamaica and became the focus of her life. He was tall and good looking, musical and sporty, and she admired him beyond words. He was, she says, the magnet that drew all to him, the drummer who set the rhythm of her life, the elusive word that was missing from her sentences. "I never found another man handsome because my father was so handsome," she says.
In person, Rachel does not appear to be as sad as in her book. She writes of how, at one point, as an anguished teenager, when her father was away on yet another trip, she faked a suicide attempt, hoping to attract his attention. She drank several glasses of rum and left an empty bottle of aspirin beside her bed, having flushed the contents down the lavatory. It didn't work. Her uncle rumbled her and Manley scarcely noticed her cry for help.
But in the London hotel where she is promoting her book, she laughs often and chats merrily - with the abandon, followed by anxiety, of a perpetual adolescent. Writing has been her saving. Her grandmother first encouraged her to try poetry - she now teaches creative writing to college students and another of her autobiographical books, Drumblair, is on school and university syllabuses in Canada, where she now lives, as it captures the historical moment when Jamaica changed from being a colony to an independent state.
Her private life has been more troubled. She describes her third husband, Israel, a Canadian broadcaster, as a "saint" for putting up with a woman who is so haunted by her father. She has two sons, one each from her earlier, short-lived marriages. "I've managed to make them both hopelessly insecure," she says.
"I think they love me, but they realised early on that I am hopelessly emotionally dysfunctional. I'm very like my father. I find my professional life no particular effort; school, university, jobs come easy, but I find the emotional parts of my life very difficult. He, too, found them mystifying and challenging. My uncle used to say my father was no good with less than 20,000 people. I am also happiest centre stage, but shy socially."
Much of the political material was cut from her book because her publisher felt her reflections on the father/daughter relationship should be the heart of it. She regrets this because, however difficult it was to accept that, for her father, Jamaica came first, she is proud of what he eventually achieved for his country.
His socialist experiments in the Seventies failed badly; violence marred his second election victory and three assassination attempts were made on his life. He was replaced in 1980 by a more Right-wing government but, when he was returned to power for the third time, in 1989, he confounded expectations by embracing free market policies.
"Right-wing commentators said that he had seen the light; Left-wing ones said he had betrayed them, but I think they missed the point," says Rachel. "He was a pragmatist. He didn't sit back on socialist principle, he took a Right-wing agenda and re-interpreted it in a Left-wing way; he created programmes for small entrepreneurs.
"There is still bitterness about what happened in the Seventies, but history should be generous to him. He gave Jamaicans a sense, for the first time, of not living in borrowed shoes. He meant his legacy to be financial independence, but he left the country with spiritual independence."

As for Rachel's own yearning for her father, perhaps writing it all down has proved cathartic? "Not at all," she says. "I still think of my father every minute of the day. I still quarrel with him for going away."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3624958/I-wish-our-family-had-been-normal.html