As October ushers in the first anniversary of the Trudeau government, a clear pattern has emerged. The public's love affair with Justin Trudeau remains undiminished, intense and glowing. But the media's attitude toward the Prime Minister and his government has palpably turned sour and frustrated.

According to recent polls, as of August Liberal popularity stood at 48 per cent, with the Conservatives way behind at 29 per cent and the NDP trailing badly with 13 per cent. The Prime Minister's personal popularity remains sky-high, especially when he's pitted against no one leading the other two main parties.

In trying to rally his dispirited troops the other day, interim NDP leader Tom Mulcair made the following somewhat surprising statement: The party's "core values," so he told his applauding caucus, are "environmentalism, pacifism, feminism, socialism."

I join the applause, or at least three-quarters of it. I can march behind the banner of socialism, feminism and environmentalism with pride and conviction. But pacifism, not so much. In fact pacifism has never been an NDP value, assuming that words have any meaning.

If I were a betting man, I'd say Judge Robin Camp will not be dumped from the Alberta bench by the Canadian Judicial Council panel in Calgary which is hearing his case. The case is based on the 2014 trial in which he acquitted a man accused of assaulting a 19-year-old woman while verbally assaulting the alleged victim with a whole series of wildly inappropriate comments. Yet some witnesses before the appeal panel have done an impressive job of minimizing the judge's transgressions. 

In principle, all Canadian politicians forthrightly favour human rights and make it a central tenet, an overriding principle, of their foreign policy platforms.

No one, for example, wants to defend selling arms to Saudi Arabia, not even those opposition Conservative MPs who actually did the deal when they were in government. Or the new Liberal government that is supporting the Conservative deal they once loudly opposed in opposition.

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Jane Philpott is exactly the kind of citizen we should want in Parliament: a doctor of medicine, with a master's degree in public health; doctored in Niger, one of the world's very poorest countries, for a full decade; chief of the department of family medicine at her hospital; central to a Canada-Ethiopia collaboration to develop a training program for family medicine in Ethiopia.

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For those of you who already think the world is going to hell in a handbasket these days, I have lamentable news: You don't know the half of it. As Danny Glenwright, dynamic executive director of Action Against Hunger Canada (ACF, for the French name), informed his supporters the other day:

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Leave it to the Green Party to have a convention in the heart of an Ottawa summer. And on the very weekend that the Rio Olympics began. Such dedication, such self-sacrifice, such anonymity. Who even knew it was taking place? This is a political party that actively strives for obscurity. And with much success. Do you know a Green Party supporter?

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"And us in Afghanistan," Craig Scott reminded me pointedly, responding to my recent column calling George W. Bush and Tony Blair war criminals. Don't forget Canada's shameful actions in Afghanistan, he was saying, when our own troops turned over captured Afghans to be tortured by others.

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Did my eyes deceive me or was that really George W. Bush bebopping alongside the Obamas in Texas the other day?

The occasion was an attempt to bring some racial peace to a roiling America. The dancing was weird, especially for a solemn occasion, but I'm pretty sure it was Mr. Bush.

Funny, because I was convinced that he was actually in prison doing hard time for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Wishful fantasizing, I guess.