The timing of the announcement was a surprise, the move really wasn’t. Conrad Black made it pretty clear that he wanted to get out of the Canadian news business when he started dumping his papers here. But selling his “baby”, the National Post, to the Liberal Asper’s does not bode well for the future of the conservative paper. Either it will be remodeled into a national equivalent of The Toronto Star or it will die as a full-on competitor to The Globe and Mail. Let the speculation begin.