Prince Justin the Flake Says What I've Been Thinking: Canada Is Becoming Something I Don't Recognize

If there are two words that I use with scorn, they are "flake" and "princess." In my mind they sum up a panoply of selfish, unhelpful characteristics. The latter I tend to use for women who have an exagerated sense of entitlement just because they've always been someone's darling. The former I use transgenderly to describe someone without depth, who doesn't take things seriouslly and, all too frequently, shoots of his or her mouth.

Justin Trudeau often is a flake, and, I realize, would qualify for the designation as "prince," should I want to expand my name-calling. But his statement on the weekend that he'd reconsider making Quebec a country if he thought that Canada was really "Stephen Harper's Canada" and that we "were backtracking in ten thousand ways" makes great sense to me.

The reaction in the Anglophone press has been predictable: how dare the whippersnapper sully his father's memory etc. But Stephen Harper's Canada is not Pierre Trudeau's Canada, nor Brian Mulroney's Canada for that matter. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the Conservative plan is to remake this country profoundly, and maybe Quebec may turn out to be the one place where social and economic values espoused by Justin's Dad have a chance for survival.

If you don't think there's a difference between Quebec and the Rest of Canada, remember that the Prince made his comments on the most popular Sunday morning radio show in French, and it took two days for them to be heard outside.