CANADA has never had much truck with serial ruling clans. The closest we’ve come to a dynasty was Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, a dance band (not actually by appointment of Her Majesty the Queen; that self-conferred honorific was meant to charm impressionable Americans) made up of four brothers, and sometimes a sister, who ruled generation after generation wherever it is that dance bands rule. But packing an orchestra with that monogenerational cluster seemed less dynastic than incestuous.

There are no Kennedys or Bushes in Canadian politics, let alone anything like the successive Kims: Il-sung, Jong-il and Jong-un. We have no shortage of dimwits and blowhards in high office, but ours have never run in families. Maybe the idea of a dynasty is just too gaudy, too overreaching for a culture that can’t help sounding modest even when it tries to brag — which explains why Canadian show-offs are almost inevitably banished to the United States. And let it be borne in mind that dynasties are curiously often coupled with financial, political and moral corruption. This is an impossible trifecta in Canadian life. It’s against the law.

And yet. Enter Justin (at last, a politician with a movie star/pop idol/ski bum name!) Trudeau — the 41-year-old newly elected head of the Liberal Party and putative candidate for prime minister in the 2015 election. That is, if he can revive a party that has withered down to a political nub since the glory days of its most swashbuckling prime minister, Justin’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

A dynasty needs first of all to be founded by one larger-than-life superhero or supervillain, hungry for the power of command. That talent gets transmitted to the next generation and the next, though sometimes the genes get watered down and all that’s passed down is the title (I give you Bashar al-Assad, chinless nincompoop heir to his Syrian strongman daddy).