With Trudeau as PM, you can almost hear the train coming

Could the West Island see support for the Kismet Family Centre too?

Sunny days, my friends. Sunny days. You have to smile. Those prayerful hand gestures, the touching of the heart, the radiance of the smile, Sophie’s adoring companionship. It is magic, like the end of a Shakespeare romantic comedy at Stratford, when everything that should happen finally happens and the world is right again.

And the bad guys have been run off the stage.

This national pageant had to be. You knew it was coming from the first day Justin Trudeau descended into Starbucks and started taking selfies, which projected him to the head of the federal Liberal party. The election was just a giant selfie of Canada with Trudeau. It is a fairy tale dreamed up by Margaret Sinclair in the Trudeau nursery.

And you have to feel good. You have to feel like this could be a time of real change. It is, in fact, a real change, even if you know that it is likely to grind to a halt as it runs slam into the lives and careers of the thousands of people in the civil service who have permanent jobs, have made no promises to anyone and don’t have the budgets to match the new political aspirations. And it is the civil service that has to make things change. Trudeau can talk about it, get everyone excited about it, make plans about it, but he can’t add hours to a day. Even he has to follow some rules.

But after Justin Bieber, Justin Trudeau is obvious. It’s in the same virtual social world of mobile-magic success.

And maybe even the civil service is happy with the departure of Stephen Harper and the end of his old-fashioned anti-government. Maybe there’ll be a little aspirational chaos now that will spark some real changes.

And so what if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau only manages to honour 25 per cent of his campaign promises. You’ll still have to thank him for “sunny days” when suddenly, once again, everything is possible. You want transit? We have transit. You want proportional representation? We have a book full of ideas. Abolish the Senate? Let’s look at that. You want your mail delivered to the door? We’ll send you your own neighbourhood postperson with a personal letter from Trudeau with a smiley on it and news of an income-tax cut. You want Reconciliation? We’ll implement all 94 recommendations from the commission report even if we haven’t actually read them all yet.

In every field we have change coming. Even Canada Post has postponed my community mailbox. Mayor Coderre won’t have to take his jackhammer to any concrete slabs for at least four years.

It is truly breathtaking. It is as ambitious as Xavier Dolan thinking he can become an international moviemaker and doing it. Or Céline Dion becoming the greatest Las Vegas headliner of the century. The sheer ambition of it all is totally refreshing. You may not like it, but the head spins with possibilities. Why, we might even fix the climate. Not to mention marijuana. It really is like a new generation let loose to play with government like children in a room full of lifesize Lego. Can government actually change that much that fast? Can politics change that much? Can people change? Sunny days indeed!

Poor old Harper suddenly looks like an older generation. His Reform Party doesn’t mean anything any more. Maybe because during his 10 years in Ottawa he forgot to make reform happen. People aren’t even talking about the ex-prime minister as he retreats to the West. He just didn’t make enough friends.

Then again, maybe Trudeau and his young band of progressives will grow prematurely old in four years or there will be a new version of the Sponsorship scandal or some other black cloud will fall on the party.

Well, there will always be the New Democratic Party, waiting for their chance like Cinderella in that kitchen.

So, what’s in it for the West Island? How about support for Clifford Lincoln’s Train de l’Ouest project? Why not?

And infrastructure money for the Kismet Family Centre?

Why not? There we were at a fundraiser for the Kismet Family Centre project recently, mingling with some of the political, economic and social elite of the northern part of the West Island. And there was Francis Scarpaleggia, our re-elected Liberal MP, chatting with our very own train hero, Lincoln, and Frank Baylis, the new Liberal MP for Pierrefonds-Dollard who had the best election poster in the West Island.

I was just thinking that now it’s time for our local political stars to go to work on those election promises. I hear that train a-coming!