Justin Trudeau: Not much more than a pretty face

There was a time when nobody hated Canada. American students would sew Maple Leaf flags to their backpacks, and the New York Times magazine advertised fake Canadian jacket wraps to disguise US passports; the assumption being that hijackers and hoodlums always judge by a cover. Thank God, all that has changed. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has transformed the country's foreign policy, making Canada a major player in the war on terror, and arguably Israel's closest ally. His Conservatives are hardly the heirs of Mrs Thatcher, but they have certainly broken the generational chain of left-wing liberalism that was turning the nation into a snowy social democracy.

Heirs, however, are now a major concern. The new leader of the Liberal Party, the natural party of government and effectively the national opposition, is Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre. As prime minister between 1968 and 1984 Pierre Trudeau dominated Canadian politics, and turned the country from a debt-free conservative friend of the West into a "non-aligned post-colonial" country with enormously costly social engineering programmes, and a foreign affairs department that had never met a leftist dictator it didn't like.

Trudeau abandoned individual freedoms and introduced collective rights, forced through an immigration policy that discriminated against Anglo-Saxons, so as to change Canada's demographic and cultural identity, and reshaped the country in his own image.

He is gone now, but his ghost still haunts the corridors of the chattering classes, and his stature has grown with distance. Now comes his son. Whatever Pierre may have been, he was not a fool. Well-travelled and highly-educated, he was an impressive man. Not so Justin, a former drama teacher who has never said or written anything of note. But he's pretty, has relentlessly curly hair, a winning smile and a beautiful wife — and most of all he's a Trudeau.

His popularity among young people and old movers and shakers made his victory in April over estimable but dull rivals for the leadership of the Liberals inevitable. Despite calling a Conservative minister "a piece of shit" in the House of Commons, threatening to break up the country if it ever even dared discuss reversing its support for same-sex marriage and abortion, and condemning the government when it described female genital mutilation as barbaric, he could be Canada's next prime minister.