By Jim Hagarty
2015
Not one journalist, pundit, prognosticator nor any expert of any kind predicted Justin Trudeau would become prime minister of Canada a month ago. And yet, all these same brainiacs continue day after day to sell him short, now that he has been elected, and continue to make predictions even though all their previous predictions were proven wrong. Their motto should be: Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. A journalism teacher I once worked with told one of her students one day that there was no place in the world of journalism for her and that she should quit and take up something else. The student in question turned down her teacher’s advice, became a successful newspaper reporter, then editor, and now has a great career in public relations. She once told me the fuel that propelled her was the anger-tinged rejection by her misguided instructor. And an the managing editor at a daily paper I once worked at, when readers reacted negatively to something we had reported, used to wrily say, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.”
