Measure Of Central Tendency

All this week, I have been holding my breath waiting....hoping....praying for the backlash from the left against Justin Trudeau for supporting Harper's anti-terrorism bill.

We've seen Junior drop bombs on his own troops before. Denying open nominations. Decoupling the Senate caucus. Putting Massimo Pacetti and Scott Andrews into limbo.

But this? This goes against the very grain of Liberalism as it currently stands. And nobody within the Liberal party seems to care. Not only that, but none of the social justice warriors outside the Liberal party seem to care.

Coming off the heels of the Charlie Hebdo killings, where the left loudly and proudly blamed the racist French for the violence, this is a startling turn. I'm at a loss for how to reconcile it, especially when we have Liberal MP's saying aloud that Harper is to blame for ISIS targeting Canadians and when Obama ignores the elephant in the room in favour of the Crusades and slavery at a prayer breakfast.

The CPC have long since declared Trudeau dead. They look at polls, at by-election results, and the like. What they're not looking at is how Trudeau's own supporters are behaving, and what the rest of the left are saying. They consider these people to be marginal.

Even in the wake of the recent municipal and provincial elections, they do not understand that how the left feels about how authentically progressive a candidate is means a lot more for an electoral result than any of their vaunted "messaging". If your opponent's campaign is self-destructing, that doesn't make you a genius (though they would, naturally, very much prefer to take credit).

The Liberals do understand this at some level, because they dispatch one of their sycophants in the Huffington Post to condescend to NDP voters on the subject of how Mulcair's middle class tax credit helps the rich instead of the poor and downtrodden. They did the same thing to tremendous effect in the provincial election, and I could see the NDP implosion coming a mile away. Then Olivia Chow did the same thing to herself in the municipal election, and the outcry from leftists was loud and insistent and, most importantly, fatal.

For Trudeau, or Mulcair, to go down in flames, this is what needs to happen. The left must engage in a fit of self-immolation, which must be public enough that the party elders can't keep a lid on it.

Until this final piece of the puzzle falls into place, Trudeau is not dead.

Now there is another and much more terrifying possibility. Because of his lineage, and because of the desperation the Liberal Party of Canada is in, it might very well be that Trudeau's supporters will follow him no matter where or how he leads them. And if this is true, the CPC is toast.

When I see Muslim groups denouncing Harper for his comments and ignoring the fact that Trudeau has signed on to a piece of Harper's legislation that many on the left have written off as another method of targeting Muslims, I get the uneasy sense that it really is all about #StoppingHarper. That the left in this country will become an unthinking mass of robots determined to vote Liberal, blind to Trudeau's real and very dangerous flaws, to say nothing of his lack of progressive credibility.

As terrifying as this is to write, the future of this country depends on how good the left is at sucking a golf ball through a garden hose.