You could count me amongst the latter.

The first three words of the eulogy were, “Friends, Romans, Countryman,” and the emotional performance was so rehearsed and needy, so over-wrought with technique, that it completely turned me off. His slight lisp made him enunciate each word with greater force, and the stresses felt unnatural, built for manipulation rather than a natural expression of feeling and sentiment.

It was as if as a child of celebrity, he craved the burning light of fame, and that there was no circumstance, even that of his father’s funeral, in which he would not step into the light of another life. He just seemed to enjoy this day in the spotlight more than was appropriate, you know?

So I was a hater, dismissing him as a “high school drama teacher,” and lumping him in with Ben Mulroney, host of a breezy celebrity news show, whom I saw as another shallow, attention-seeking child of a Prime Minister.

It was easy enough to resent Trudeau his ready-made celebrity. He was good looking, naturally charismatic, had the touch of aristocracy, and people seemed as desperate to make a star of him as he seemed as desperate to become one.

Of course, we are admonished to be kind, for everybody we meet is fighting a hard battle. That Trudeau grew up wealthy and famous is true, but he also grew up in the toxic, corrosive glare of fame. His mother, suffering from mental health issues, was often absent, luridly splashed across papers and viciously mocked,

while his father was doing the nation’s business. It must have been lonely and strange for young Justin, and then he lost his beloved brother, one of the few people on the planet who might understand. Surviving this upbringing intact is actually entirely heroic, a testimony to character rather than a “free ride”.

Throughout the campaign, throughout Trudeau’s life, he was made light of. People challenged his intellect, although it was never exactly clear why, they condescended to him by calling him by his first name and sneered at his hair, as if trying to feminize him, as if they were schoolyard bullies calling him “a girl.” As if that was an insult.

Justin Trudeau took it. He did not get bitter, he did not change or become angry, he remained the same optimistic, essentially happy and earnest person that he had always seemed to be, and he continued.

A few weeks ago during the Munk debate on foreign affairs, something the girlish and daft Trudeau was presumed to know nothing about, somebody was riding Trudeau for one of his father’s policies, again, imperiously, as if lecturing a child. And as this was taking place, Trudeau let his back stiffen just a bit and interrupted him. As if taking a step forward somehow, he asserted that he was proud to be his father’s son, and that he hoped to continue to build on the Canada that his father helped create. He was not furious or panicky. He was simply sure of himself.

And in this moment something changed. All the flimsy, lazy insults were unmasked, all the sniping and juvenile attack ads fell away.

And there, without embellishment, stood a man, a man of some substance who could not be so mocked. Trudeau, once again, for the millionth time, perhaps, was proving he was above and beyond this petty mewling. He was in a different grade than the men attacking him. He was not aligning himself with the Ford Brothers to get votes.

Trudeau was more than we had expected, not less. He has proven himself in ways we can’t even begin to understand, and we should trust in him and his decency, pushing the baser, cynical fabrications aside.

Don’t be scared to vote for Justin Trudeau. He deserves our respect and support, so, so much more than those he is running against. I am proud of him, and I cannot say that about any of the other leaders.

adding that he, too,  just like a Regular Joe, enjoyed watching the life-simulations depicted on television programs. It was as if some rudimentary form of Artificial Intelligence, one that existed in a strange human-like form that for all it’s advanced technology just couldn’t get the hair right, was trying to prove its humanity to a skeptical public. It was so clumsy it was almost sweet– like a grandparent saying YOLO in the wrong context.

However, the truly funny thing about this pronouncement was that nobody, not a single politician from any party, had ever suggested that they had a plan to tax Netflix. With this, it seemed that the Conservative strategy was laid bare—they were going to announce a really horrible, really unpopular idea every week, and then assure the public that they would fight tooth and nail against such an appalling idea. This tactic would confuse the public, who would mistakenly think that the combative stance assumed by the Conservatives meant that one of the other political parties had actually proposed the idea and that taxing Netflix would be essential to their governance.

Out of nothing, something– it was the conjuring of a perfectly evil plan.

In keeping with this theme, the next thing that Harper announced was also incredibly weird, only on this occasion instead of lining himself up in opposition to the weirdness, he was trying to initiate it. Stephen Harper suggested banning Canadians from traveling to terrorist-controlled countries.  The idea behind this would be preemptive, serving to stop young, naive, would-be-jihadists from traveling to Syria, being trained by their dark forces, and then sent back, with ISIS flags now sown on their backpacks, to destroy the homeland.

This notion, crazy, paranoiac, wholly against the Charter and impossible to implement, seemed positively Trumpian in its blunt vulgarity. However, the point was never to impose such absurdity on the population, but to get the other parties to argue against it, thus making them look soft on terror.

It’s PSYOP’s, really, with the ruling government attempting to spread disinformation and confusion in an attempt to manipulate the mood of the electorate so that they’re not actually voting based on information, but on a “gut-feeling.” People will “feel” like the NDP want to tax Netflix simply because Harper said he was against doing such a thing, and after all, the NDP tax everything anyway, right? Likewise, people’s fears that the Liberals are soft on terror (Trudeau’s always getting his picture taken with Muslims!)

will only be reinforced, because now the Liberals have to argue that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with traveling to a country that most people associate only with blood-thirsty terrorists.

Harper’s strategy is to set off smoke bombs.

He’s not interested in persuading people with his inventive policy, but in sowing uncertainty and even fear, so that the undecided and those who don’t follow politics all that closely, the people who don’t really know what’s going on (because Harper has set about creating this bewildering cloud of Orwellian uncertainty and double-talk) will take the path of least resistance and opt for “stability” and maintaining the status quo.

In a nutshell, it’s everything that’s wrong with politics.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen a video of this kind, and each time that I do have the same visceral, almost emotional response. Instinctively, like my primal core has suddenly been activated, I know that something’s wrong. I know it in my bones.

The stripped and ruined landscape, stretching endlessly around you, is awesome in the worst sense of the word. It’s a sincere horror, and looking down at it you feel like you’re viewing a crime scene where acts of unspeakable cruelty and evil have taken place. It’s like that lofty view, which grants such scope and perspective, completely alters one’s view, orienting it toward the eternal. I know that I’m coming in at a pretty high pitch here, but it’s truly how it makes me feel.

The oil being extracted from the tar sands, as I’m sure you know, is very costly to process, with the emissions created from developing it being 12% greater than conventional oil. It couldn’t be dirtier, and each barrel of oil requires three barrels of water to produce it. The question of whether oil is more valuable than water is a fundamentally ridiculous one, and that this question was even open to rational inquiry will be seen as a tragedy in 50 years.

The Athabasca Tar Sands are utterly massive. Covering about 140,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, it’s larger than countries like England, Greece and North Korea. The land will be obliterated, as if from a nuclear apocalypse, and the equipment and structures that are used to mine the oil are so large that they command their own weather systems. It’s a dystopian vision, as if a predatory alien culture had descended upon the planet and began to ruthlessly drain it of all resources while maintaining absolute indifference to whether the host organism lived or died. (There are two smaller Tar Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake, each about a fifth of the size of Athabasca.)

The Prime Minister of this country has said that he won’t do anything to address climate change that would cost Canadians any jobs. The Tar Sands, ruinous and retrograde in so many ways, is a job creator, and so in the face of all other reason it goes forward. However, one glance at the razed, apocalyptic world it inhabits, this kind of Mordor, and even a child can cut through all the rhetoric, economics and complex global politics to see that what’s taking place is plainly wrong.

The Ottawa that I remember is a sincerely, and wonderfully decent place. The average person, somebody who might work modestly within a cautious and secure bureaucracy, was friendly, wholesome and responsible– the kind of person you hoped might live beside you.

There’s a lot of planning in Ottawa. Nothing happens without forethought in the city, and sometimes it feels as if life doesn’t happen in real time, exactly, but in a kind of cushioned, protected time. Parliament, in spite of being perched on a cliff and its jagged Gothic flourishes has always felt about as accessible and threatening as a Keg restaurant. There was just nothing menacing or intimidating about the place. It was like the Block Parent on the street, the home of a kindly couple that never had children and would always protect you when the local bully tried to steal your toque.

You felt safe, even welcomed there, like you might even get fed some Kraft Dinner before heading on your way. In fact, Parliament was so homey that a colony of cats actually lived there for years.

And to watch the city experience something as merciless and bloody-minded as the shootings, something that existed at such a terrifying remove from our comprehension and control, was unbearably sad. The rules by which Ottawa lived, that had come to subconsciously frame my psychological landscape, did not apply. The world that I imagined existing when I grew up likely never really did, and now, from the distance of middle age, I can see it receding quickly.

The eruption of violence, in a city that had always seemed frozen in time and almost magically apart from the real world, was a blunt and pitiless assault on the myths that have sheltered and nourished me over the years. It was like watching somebody whom had always protected me and I loved, getting beaten up and being powerless to intercede. A kind of chaos, emerging from a vast and dark pool, had descended on the ordered and good, and the sadness I felt about watching that was deep and heavy in the bones—the echoing gunfire amidst Gothic arches and limestone columns, a sound not soon to be forgotten.

What follows is Rob Ford’s response:

“The pandas? What do I think of the pandas? I think I goddamn love pandas!! (Takes reporter and places him in genial headlock while giving him a Noogie.) Ah, just fudging around, look, to be serious with ya for a second though, I got to say that I’ve always related to the panda. They’re big, strong and fiercely committed to their people, just like football players.

And you know, they’ve always got the eye black on, so you just know that they’re ready to go into battle. I’d be proud to go into battle with an army of pandas, and Jesus, if I had a team of football playing pandas we’d be as undefeatable as the free market! Just think about it. We wouldn’t lose a single game. Not. A. Single. Fucking. One.

Anyway, I have to give props to our communist Chinese friends for loaning us these pandas and letting them live in freedom for a few years. Hopefully, once the pandas get a taste for the independent, small government, big city dynamo that is Toronto– it’ll really get them turned-on. Guns ‘N’ Roses turned-on. Toronto is like an awesome guitar solo, you know?  Toronto will make the pandas hot, really hot, feeling all sexy like they’re watching a yoga class!  Does it to me everyday. The city girl make me hot, man, hot, sweaty hot. But Geez, it’s hard to imagine that pandas don’t like sex, but it’s a fact of science. Weird, that. So it’s my hope that Er Shawn is like the Jennifer Aniston of pandas and Dammy can’t keep his paws off of her. It’ll be Panda Time all the time, and we’ll become an industry leader in panda breeding. That means more jobs. More jobs for people who never even dreamed that they might one day get to see panda sex. (High-five)

Toronto is the city, stinkin’ rich in Asian culture and with a great Chinatown full of real cheap eats (and a spitting problem that I will take care of) where dreams can come true.  We’ll be known as panda city and we’ll have those little warrior bears all over the place! It’ll be so cute it’ll make you barf, and listen, I bet you my bottom dollar, that when my fucking downtown fucking casino opens, that the whores will be two for one and that all those baby pandas will clean up the raccoon problem that has plagued this city for years! If I, or any of my constituents have raccoon shit in their eaves troughs again, the whole frigging species is going get it. Raccoons, consider yourself on watch because Rob Ford and the pandas have a plan, and you aren’t in that plan.

And you know, this might sound all freaky or something, but I’ve had a lot of funny dreams involving pandas. Can’t quite explain it. I once wore a panda mask on Chat Roulette, didn’t even know why. Saw the video after the fact. Anyway, seems like fate that my city is going to be the city of panda sex–wild, eh? ”