Here's a surprise.  Justin Trudeau shuffled his cabinet with an eye to next year's election.  The surprise is not allocating major executive branch posts with an eye to raw partisan advantage or that such conduct is taken for granted by pundits, and analyzed with an eye to its technical proficiency not its moral flaws.  It's that the next election is upon us so soon.

It seems just yesterday sunny ways were a novelty and the air full of promise.  Where did the time go?

Partly I speak in the usual dreary tones of adulthood; when we were young and carefree weeks seemed endless whereas now years flick by like highway poles, Boxcar Willie sighs.  But partly it's especially an issue in politics, where priorities are misplaced even by normal human standards.  I expect nobody is more amazed than the federal Liberals themselves that they'd barely cleared away the balloons from the victory party and it's time to go hammer in more lawn signs.

The smoothies who engage in politics, and we ghouls who lurch after them moaning commentary, infamously fixate on political tactics to the exclusion of policy.  Indeed, politics often resembles seduction in that the Casanovas courting voters are obsessed with what they hope to accomplish that night with literally no plan for the morning except an insincere kiss, a quick exit, and a follow-up call next time they're in the mood.

Thus young Justin's 2015 electoral platform was full of wine and roses about everything from electoral reform to a few stimulative deficits followed by a long relaxing balanced budget to harmonizing environmental and economic concerns.  It worked, partly on its and his merits and partly due to the political and policy failings of his adversaries.  But the Liberals were not so much insincere as daffy in promising all these things with no real idea how to deliver them, to the incongruous point of being simultaneously unable to spend allocated money on infrastructure or control the deficit.

Arguably the PM has always been daffy and always will be so it was entirely in character.  But his team, both those on the stump and those on the phone, contained many experienced political and even business figures.  And they too were not only unconcerned about making promises they had no idea whether they could keep or how during the election, they seem to have felt after they won that it didn't matter.

They made half-hearted attempts on some, punted others, kept a few and told fibs about how rapidly they were implementing their programme.  But there seemed no sense of urgency, let alone integrity, about the performance.  They appear to have felt, like parties across the spectrum and around the world, that the mere fact of winning in 2015 restored harmony to the cosmos, routed the forces of darkness permanently, and secured peace order and good government for the ages.  Like, again, the Don Juan whose whole ambition is to bed the girl (or boy) with no idea what a relationship is, why anyone would want one or what might be involved.

The politically obsessed also habitually take the view that victory by their opponents would, like Sauron recovering the One Ring, spell the end of all hopes and aspirations.  Hence the bizarre repeated insistence that this that or the other is the most important election of our generation or lifetime, although as elections differ in importance, some must be relatively unimportant, just as half of drivers must be below average.  And overheated rhetoric about Trudeau being a traitor who has ruined the country.  Or Wynne.  Or whoever.  Yet who now remembers why liberals reviled George Bush Sr. as the worst president ever?  (For the record, the worst American president ever was, and I think always will be, Andrew Johnson.)  In fact lots of bums, fools and frauds have won elections and only public acquiescence in the general drift of policy toward disaster gives their victories much significance.

So here the Trudeauites are, basking in the triumph of goodness over badness, common sense over ideology and federalism over separatism, having a leisurely nap, puttering about doing good and suddenly whoosh it's 2018 and they're facing the ghastly prospect of running for reelection in the most important campaign of our lifetimes… again.  And there's a smouldering pile of broken promises casting a rank pall over the land, and fresh-faced young opposition leaders promising fresh starts.  And all they can think of is to shuffle the cabinet, promoting some women, some minorities, some Quebeckers and, if there's a spare chair, somebody with relevant talent to implement policies they haven't yet thought of that won't be ready before next October.

Photo Credit: CTV News