Camelot in Canada?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/opinion/camelot-in-canada.html

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CANADA has never had much truck with serial ruling clans. The closest we’ve come to a dynasty was Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, a dance band (not actually by appointment of Her Majesty the Queen; that self-conferred honorific was meant to charm impressionable Americans) made up of four brothers, and sometimes a sister, who ruled generation after generation wherever it is that dance bands rule. But packing an orchestra with that monogenerational cluster seemed less dynastic than incestuous.

There are no Kennedys or Bushes in Canadian politics, let alone anything like the successive Kims: Il-sung, Jong-il and Jong-un. We have no shortage of dimwits and blowhards in high office, but ours have never run in families. Maybe the idea of a dynasty is just too gaudy, too overreaching for a culture that can’t help sounding modest even when it tries to brag — which explains why Canadian show-offs are almost inevitably banished to the United States. And let it be borne in mind that dynasties are curiously often coupled with financial, political and moral corruption. This is an impossible trifecta in Canadian life. It’s against the law.

And yet. Enter Justin (at last, a politician with a movie star/pop idol/ski bum name!) Trudeau — the 41-year-old newly elected head of the Liberal Party and putative candidate for prime minister in the 2015 election. That is, if he can revive a party that has withered down to a political nub since the glory days of its most swashbuckling prime minister, Justin’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

A dynasty needs first of all to be founded by one larger-than-life superhero or supervillain, hungry for the power of command. That talent gets transmitted to the next generation and the next, though sometimes the genes get watered down and all that’s passed down is the title (I give you Bashar al-Assad, chinless nincompoop heir to his Syrian strongman daddy).

Pierre Trudeau filled that superhero role; he sometimes even wore a cape. In his 15 years of prime ministership — from 1968 to 1979, and again from 1980 to 1984 — he displayed such un-Canadian panache that he triggered a public enthusiasm known as Trudeaumania. Even the Americans took notice. Not that his predecessors and successors weren’t often worthy sorts, but Mr. Trudeau stands out among them. A rich Montreal lawyer who bridged the often fraught divide between French and English Canada, he married a hard-partying young fox and never even tried to hide how smart he was.

Trudeaumania would ebb over the years, abetted by a lousy economy, as well as the country’s need for relief from the intensity of a Type-AAA personality running a nation where “introvert” was never a dirty word. Mr. Trudeau was eventually no longer anybody’s darling, and by 1984 he was gone from public life.

Have we been waiting, these three long decades, for the return of his heir? Square-jawed, with great hair and a winning smile and a decorous young wife, smooth and personable as a TV game show host, Trudeau the younger evidently intends to ride this Kennedyesque package of assets past his earnest but less charismatic rivals and his striking lack of political experience — not to mention the absence of a detailed agenda for making Canada even greater — right into that plush swivel chair in the highest corner office in the land.

Canadians are less inclined to go gaga over political razzmatazz than any other Western people except perhaps the Belgians. Our longest-serving prime minister, Mackenzie King (who lived from 1874 to 1950 and spent nearly 22 years at the helm), was a dyspeptic-looking lifelong bachelor who liked to commune with his late mother via crystal ball after a long workday on Parliament Hill. But so what; he was effective at his job, and Canadians always have favored substance over style.

It’s clear that it would take a total cultural turnaround for Canadians to anoint the young Trudeau as their leader over more proven political entities.

But that doesn’t mean that the political establishment isn’t a tiny bit worried. Canadian political life post-Pierre Trudeau has lacked a certain, well, pizazz. Even a sympathetic observer can detect disappointment in a run of prime ministerial personalities about as dynamic as a convention of C.P.A.’s, culminating today in Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party. People still have a sentimental affection for that halcyon era when Ottawa escaped the designation of dreariest national capital and are a bit beguiled by the young politician’s vitality and offhand glamour. The parallel between the age of Eisenhower and the advent of J.F.K. is apt, if not exact. And so, the staid Ottawa political establishment is suddenly faced with the nightmare of a what-the-heck-let’s-try-a-fresh-face electoral turnaround.

Canada, Land of Surprises.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p> Bruce McCall, a writer and illustrator, was born and raised in Simcoe, Ontario, and lives in New York City.