Get ready for Justin-mania!

I agree Jan.  I'm not a party faithful - I'm a member just so I can vote during a leadership convention.  I joined to vote for Layton - not because I liked him best, for if that were the criteria I would've voted for Joe Comartin - but because he was the most likely to move the party forward, gain seats, etc. 

JT will likely gain the leadership because he is so necessary to the successful rebuilding of the party. Still, it IS the LPC, as corrupt and entitled a bunch if there ever were, and given that they made Iggy Thumbscrews leader, knowing that his optics were poor, says a lot about the privilege of people who think they can display a stunning lack of judgement and still win.  The  complete failure of Iggy may have been a humbling experience, but will the party faithful learn from it?

Petro Canada was defeated by the Tories.  Mulroney started its decline and Harper finished it. The national energy plan was a knee-jerk response of the PET gov't, and included a rationale for undermining Canadian workers. OPEC got to be the bad boys, and every Western leader, including PET, exploited the situation to grind down any and all opposition to their gov'ts.

Cowardly, at best.

I'd meet in a seniors centre if I were you since that will be where you will find the people who have actual adult memories of the event. 

You might even get some of them to tell you how much they liked the slogan, "let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark."

Whatever the initial fanfare over Trudeau, should he win the Liberal leadership, it would not last.  He'd have his butt kicked in a debate, like Ignatieff and Martin did, and lose come election time. 

My hope is that the Liberals can do a bit better with ridings that have a high proportion of recent immigrants who previously went Conservative, and take these due to the last-name recognition factor, and reduce the Conservatives to a plurality win, with the NDP second and the Liberals an improved third.

I think it depends on where you're from geographically. My parents are immigrants who moved to Toronto. They have a lot of positive things to say about Pierre Trudeau. Although my dad pointed out he inherited his wealth, and was generally arrogant. And I'm sure there are parts of the country (Westward and Francophone) where that played particularly poorly.

I far as I can tell recent immigrants know little about Trudeau other than the Charter which comes up in citizenship courses. He has not been a prominent political force in this country for nearly thirty years so I don't see the connection to new immigrants. I think the Trudeau name is more recognizable to Canada born voters and immigrants pre-1990 and would not have a great deal of resonance with immigrants who have arrived here in the last 25 years. 

You`ll notice that the loudest protestations of Mulcair being ``angry`` come from Liberals or their supporters.

Let's break that down a bit. Ontario is a huge province, encompassing roughtly the frontier north (think Thunder Bay, Timmins, Cochrane, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie), the rural southwest and southeast (think Kingston, Kitchener, London), the industrial cities (think Windsor, London, Hamilton, Oshawa) the GTA including Toronto Proper, Vaughn, Mississauga, and Brampton, and Ottawa. The north is a Conservative-NDP battle, and the rural south is staunchly Conservative. Even assuming a straght-line transposition of the trending vote patterns from 2008-2015, that makes the Liberals only relevant in the GTA and Ottawa, or approximately 50 seats out of approximately 100, depending on how the redistibution works. Even assuming that the Liberals sweep all these areas (this would include seats that have tough NDP and Conservative incumbents) that would only net them a gain of about 50 seats, and to sweep all of Ontario (which will not happen as I've outlined) that would only give them about 130 seats, far short of what they would need for a governeing coalition. And remember that the Conservatives in whatever incarnation have always won about 18-20% of the seats in Ontario (notwithstanding the Reform/PC split) even under Trudeaumania.

Put another way, to focus on Ontario would not give the Liberals near enough seats to be in serious contention for federal government, and there's absolutely no way that Trudeau will have an impact on large portions of Ontario simply because the on-the-ground networks have been in decline, and evidence of that decline has shown up in the Liberals losing seats in Ontario like crazy from 2004 onwards.

who cares what wee justie does - so far he's empty of substance, and his work history claim to fame is "private school teacher" - and "snowboard instructor".

I think you are mistaking the MSM propaganda machine for the cart when it is in fact the horse.

Yep, I still haven't heard anything that would distinguish him as more angry than anyone else who debates in Ottawa as a career.

Looking at why Pierre won a majority during his first 1968 election is instructive about Justin's chances of success. Pierre had already had substantial accomplishments as Justice Minister in drafting legislation including "decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, the legalization of contraception, abortion and lotteries, and new gun ownership restrictions as well as the authorization of breathalyzer tests", (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau) while Justin has none.

Trudeaumania was still in full bloom when he called the election only weeks after being chosen leader, while Justin will have to wait three years after the flowering of Trudmania II, even if makes him leader of the party. Three years after being chosen leader, Pierre's Trudeaumania was gone and only having the luck of facing the antithesis of charisma, Stanfield, kept him in power as a minority government.

Finally, Pierre had the great good fortune to look courageous at the St. Jean Baptiste parade on the eve of the 1968 election by refusing to hide from the bottles and rocks being thrown at him, making him look like a hero, especially to Anglophone Canada who saw him as the man who would stand up to Quebec. With that he won a substantial majority instead of only a minority or bare majority that the polls were predicting. On the other hand, Justin has to deal with the legacy of the Trudeau name on the prairies where mud would be to kind a description and try to square his appeal to ROC with appealing to a more nationalistic Quebec. Having a St. Jenn Baptiste type incident occur at just the right time for maximum effect is unlikely to occur twice.

The odds are high that the bloom will be off the Justin rose well before the 2015 election even if, as likely, he wins the Liberal leadership because the competition is so weak.