Julian Fantino: Defending Us From Murderers, Nazis, and Justin Trudeau

The time it took for the Conservatives to take the Vaughan riding from the Liberals: 22 years. The time it took for their victorious candidate Julian Fantino compare the Liberals to Hitler: four days.

After running a low-profile campaign in the Vaughan by-election, Ontario’s former top cop and newest Conservative MP Julian Fantino has come out of his shell to exchange some barbs with Liberal MP and Captain Morgan look-a-like Justin Trudeau over whether or not the Charter is abused by criminals. The Liberals “would have been wise to at least wait for an issue to arise where [Fantino’s] comments are wrong” before tussling with him, says an Ottawa Sun editorial, defending the ex-chief’s attack on the Liberals “hug-a-thug” philosophy. Correct. If they had waited a few hours, they could have grilled Fantino for comparing the Liberals to Hitler in this interview with the Globe and Mail. And they kept this guy out of the limelight during his campaign? Go figure.

Judging from that Globe interview, Fantino’s strategy as an MP will be to continuously bring up his service record, using it as a cudgel to beat down any suggestion that he, a 68-year-old rookie MP, should have to answer to anyone who didn’t spend the last 42 years “working night shifts and facing people with loaded guns and dealing with murderers and rapists.” Maclean’s blogger Scott Feschuk gets creative in his criticism of this technique, resulting in some fun in that tongue-in-cheek, Canadian political blog kind of way. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Fantino’s victory chalked up another riding for the Conservatives in the all-important Toronto area. According to Sun Media’s Monte Solberg, “The blue army has breached the northern wall and now Toronto’s soft southern underbelly lies exposed.” Maybe, but Fantino narrowly won an election in which only 30 per cent of people voted and during which he declined to debate other candidates. If Stephen Harper grants him a cabinet position as is widely expected, it’s doubtful Fantino will get as easy a ride in the next election and the blue army may yet be turned back.

Maclean’s blogger Aaron Wherry adheres to the “brevity is the soul of wit” philosophy of punditry, laying out in one sentence why Fantino is the “perfect Harper Conservative.”