Justin Trudeau shows off his Movember moustache in Ottawa in November 2011. Photo: Jean Levac/Ottawa Citizen/Files MONTREAL – Justin Trudeau learned the maxim at the feet of a master: Never trust a man who wants a job too much. His entire career, consequently, has been an exercise in studied ambivalence, as if politics were something he is cursed with rather than drawn to. Never has that been truer than now, six weeks into his hermetic summer retreat from the world, as he mulls whether he will seek the federal Liberal crown. Here’s a tip: Expect that answer to be yes. Hamlet is a facade.
Through the national media, which hangs on his every word with an innate, insane compulsion, Justin Trudeau allows that his political avocation is conflicted – that he is, like his father before him, a reluctant draftee to the world of power. Meantime he toils, with a zeal bordering on ferocity, at the thankless political work many politicians quietly hate. This may be because he understands resilience in the trenches is the last thing anyone expects of a princeling. Or, it may be because he just loves shaking hands and kissing babies. Either way he’s a natural, more Bill Clinton than Lester Pearson – or even Pierre Trudeau.
Photos: Justin Trudeau’s greatest moments
6 PhotosThis is no philosopher prince, nor an aimless dabbler. This is a dyed-in-the-wool professional politician doggedly, skilfully pursuing power. If he is approaching his moment of truth with anything like the methodical calculation he has shown in the past, Justin Trudeau already has a plan in place. He already has policy, or the people who can craft it. He already has the horses, and the chariots, or is lining them up. He knows what he will say and do and when. Because he’s already made up his mind.
Trudeau declined to be interviewed for this story other than to reiterate that he will not reveal his leadership intentions, one way or another, at least until early September. He added: “I’m having a fantastic summer with my family.”
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Trudeau’s eulogy for his father, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, delivered Oct. 3, 2000 from Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal, catapulted him into the public eye for the first time as an adult. He was then 28, with degrees in literature and education from McGill and University of British Columbia, respectively. He was teaching drama and French at Vancouver’s West Point Grey Academy.
It was a riveting speech, delivered with studied, theatrical poise.
The public response was instant and overwhelming – mainly positive. The political speculation was immediate as well.
Re-examining the eulogy now, one can see, hidden in plain view, the spine of a driving motivation. Justin cites his father’s passionate belief in the rights of the individual and tells poignant stories about his childhood. But he also speaks, not in so many words, about guilt. “We knew we were the luckiest kids in the world. And we hadn’t done anything to actually deserve it. It was instead something that we would have to spend the rest of our lives to work very hard to live up to.”
“We were taught to take nothing for granted. He doted on us but didn’t indulge.”
In the eulogy, Pierre Trudeau emerges as godlike, unsurprising under the circumstances. But Justin also offers hints that the elder Trudeau had relationships with his sons that were different from his typical interactions with others.
Says a family friend who spent time around the Trudeau household when the boys were in their early 20s: “Pierre was an introvert. He was incredibly engaging in small groups of people … he was always interested in what you were studying and learning and who you were talking to.” But the great man was not a backslapper. “He was almost a speaking monolith.”
Not so when it came to his boys. “He loved us with a passion and a devotion that encompassed his life,” Justin said in the eulogy.
After Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s tumultuous, high-profile separation in 1977 – she would later write about her marital difficulties and her depression – the prime minister became primary caregiver of Justin, aged six, Alexandre (Sacha) aged four, and Michel, aged two. By all accounts, Pierre took to the role with a will – blocking out 90 minutes each evening for the boys during which he could not be disturbed. When his father retired from politics in 1984, Justin was 13. Through the teen years, Pierre was a full-time dad.
There’s a story, retold in the Toronto Star in 2010, about how, in the spring of 1984, the soon-to-retire prime minister required a new car. Pierre, with Justin riding shotgun, drove the Chevy Suburban onto the Governor general’s estate and began ramming the big SUV through snowdrifts, to see what it could do. The elder Trudeau bought the car – but only after ensuring it had a stick shift and no air-conditioning. He wanted absolute simplicity. Love amid privilege – but tied to a Spartan ethic that deemed even the simplest luxuries suspect.
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By 2002, Justin Trudeau was popping up regularly in the media, whether promoting avalanche awareness (brother Michel died in an avalanche accident in B.C. in 1998) or the Katimavik youth program. One of his first speeches was for Dr. Avis Glaze, a former Ontario education commissioner and president of Edu-Quest International, a consultancy. “It was shortly after the eulogy he gave for his dad,” she recalls. “We had watched him on television. We were enamoured of this young man who spoke so well.” Trudeau addressed a room of about 1,000 people. “It was electrifying,” Glaze says.
Asked to recall the theme or point of the speech, Glaze hesitates. “It was about some of the things we needed to do in education – directions we should be taking, social justice and educational excellence.”
So this, too, would soon emerge as a theme: That Justin Trudeau, for all his evident likability and impressive public profile (145,647 Twitter followers and counting now, compared with 237,516 for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and 18,521 for NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, as of early August), lacks intellectual heft. Should he declare himself, this will be the line of attack of the Conservatives and New Democrats: He has far too little gravitas to contend for the most important job in the country. They’ll point out that he has no track record as a policy thinker, and has made no important policy speeches.
Also they’ll argue that he has a way of stepping in it, as he did last winter by musing about supporting Quebec separatism in a Harper-led Canada.
Says one Conservative: “I think the media is going to gush over him. The Parliamentary press corps will be like a mob of teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert … but what will they see when the thrill and exhilaration of his leadership settles down, six months after he assumes command? What will be left? This is the question.”
Senior Liberals are already preparing for the onslaught with a narrative of their own, based on Trudeau’s track record since entering politics prior to the 2008 election. Searching for a constituency, Trudeau eventually settled on the downtown Montreal riding of Papineau – the smallest in Canada, and among the poorest. Nearly half the population is allophone – neither francophone nor anglophone. There is significant Bloc Quebecois support.
Trudeau entered this potential career ender, not to huzzahs and acclaim, but battling for the nomination against fellow Liberals. He won the nomination by knocking on doors and standing in metro stations, selling party membership cards, says Luc Cousineau, the riding association president. “Justin was organized. He worked hard.”
Come election time, he did the same. In 2011 he extended his margin of victory. “It’s being present at 7 in the morning and sometimes at 10 or 11 at night, for the whole of the campaign,” says Cousineau. “It’s going door-to-door, doing interviews, pressing the flesh. These are the things good politicians do. He does it. He’s very good at it.”
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How good? Justin Trudeau does not shake your hand; he inhabits it. The wrist cocks out and up, the fingertips down; the elbow shoots off to his right; the shoulder rises slightly. Then a friendly grin dawns as he delivers a firm but not crushing grip, looking you in the eye, with a twinkle in his own. The effect is of someone who is warm, slightly embarrassed by the fuss, almost goofy, and genuinely happy to meet you. It is likely that some of this is practised; he would have spent his early social years deflecting other peoples’ preconceived ideas about class and snobbery. Either way, it is effective. The man is genuinely, immensely likable.
Some women evince stronger emotions. “Oh My God, he’s good-looking,” said one female friend, seeing his photo for the first time splashed across the cover of a national magazine. Trudeau is of course aware of his physicality and plays it, often subtly, as a foil against his unassuming demeanour. The cumulative effect is devastating. He himself has said that in 2003, when he got reacquainted with his wife, Sophie Gregoire (she was a primary school friend of brother Michel), he was in a “socially active” phase of his life. “She sort of had my number as a bit of someone who was overly social at that moment,” Trudeau told Maclean’s in 2005.
Initially, after the two hit it off as co-hosts of a Starlight Children’s Foundation fundraiser, Gregoire sent him an email, to which he did not respond. It was only three months later, when they bumped into one another in the street, that he, as he later said, bowed to the inevitable. “I knew that the day I went out for coffee with her was the last day I would ever have as a single man,” Trudeau told CPAC’s Catherine Clark in 2009. On their first date, Justin declared to Sophie that they would spend the rest of their lives together.
By the time Trudeau first ran for office, in 2008, Gregoire, now Gregoire-Trudeau, was five months pregnant with their second child, daughter Ella Grace. Their first, son Xavier James, was born Oct. 18, 2007 – exactly 88 years after Pierre Trudeau’s birth on Oct. 18, 1919. Until last year, the perfectly bilingual Gregoire-Trudeau was a host for CTV’s celebrity profile and gossip show, e-Talk. She now works full-time as a mother and with various charities.
In weighing whether to seek the Liberal leadership, Trudeau has cited family as the only factor that would hold him back. He is all too aware, he has said, of the toll politics takes on families with young children.
Equally clear, though, is that he and Sophie are a political unit. They made the decision to enter politics jointly. In an appearance last spring on Quebec’s popular talk show, Tout le monde en parle, the two riffed off each other like professional comedians. Gregoire-Trudeau, who has degrees in commerce and communications, is not shy about offering her husband political advice. “Let’s just say she was unparliamentary in her language toward me for having slipped,” Trudeau told the Toronto Star after last winter’s famous outburst in the House of Commons, when he called Environment Minister Peter Kent a “piece of sh—.”
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Marcelle Bastien, director of the Centre Lajeunesse community centre in the heart of Papineau riding, says she’s never been a Liberal supporter. But she likes Trudeau. “I was surprised,” she says. “The federal government has always been pretty remote for us. But since he’s been here, we see him. He’s present.”
So he works hard. He’s also strategic – some would say devious – about revealing when he’s working hard. In the leadup to his famous March 29 charity boxing match with Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau, Trudeau let on to me that he was preparing in a desultory fashion. “I’m not tremendously diligent about training the way I should be,” he said a couple of weeks before the big night, “but I love it.” Going into the fight, consequently, Trudeau was framed as the underdog – until he won.
His trainer, Matt Whitteker, told me recently that he’d never seen a so-called “white-collar” boxer train harder. Trudeau allowed the media to cast him as a lightweight – while secretly training all-out to win.
“Sometimes we’d meet at 10 at night and go run the stairs at Carleton,” Whitteker recalls. “His dedication once he committed was – wow.”
Trudeau’s seatmate in the House, Liberal MP Kirsty Duncan, herself a triathlete, as much as confirmed the boxing match was a deliberately strategic political act: “Quite frankly he [Trudeau] worked that plan extremely hard,” she said with a wry chuckle.
Whitteker, a lifelong Conservative, now hopes for a leadership bid. The match, and Trudeau’s approach to it, won him over. “Having to work really hard to accomplish a goal … it’s so parallel to politics. You have to fight your way through … after seeing the dedication and hard work he put in, I’d vote for that guy for sure.”
So, the Grits will say, Trudeau is a fighter. Completing the narrative, and as a direct answer to his lack of a policy resume, they’ll argue that he will gather bright people to him, to fill the gaps – that he listens and learns.
“He’s very good at choosing the right people,” says Gerry Butts, now head of the World Wildlife Fund (Canada), a former principal secretary to Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, and a close friend of Trudeau’s since their late teens.
Others point out that Jean Chretien himself was no policy innovator. Nor are many highly successful politicians. The inverse is also true. “Dion and Ignatieff both had policy skills,” said one veteran Tory strategist. “Both had PhDs. Both had written extensively. Both knew how to mount an intellectual argument. Yet the retail skills they had were lacking.”
Trudeau has given few clues as to where he’d take the party on policy – but reading these tea leaves is not rocket science. He’ll cast himself as a fiscal conservative and social progressive. He’ll argue that Thomas Mulcair has alienated the West while Harper has alienated Quebec. He’ll campaign hard everywhere, play the youth card, and try to revitalize the party base. He’ll make a direct appeal to Ontario, and especially Quebec, and try to lift the Grits back within range of contention for power – say, to 70 seats from the current 35.
Neither the New Democrats nor the Conservatives, in other words, can any longer dismiss a Trudeau candidacy as a frivolity, if they ever could. The NDP in particular appreciates that he has the potential to change the game in Quebec.
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Pierre Trudeau, who famously rode motorcycles and backpacked across Africa as a young man, passed on to his sons his appetite for risk. Alexandre, a filmmaker and journalist, was in Baghdad during the 2003 American invasion and made a documentary about his experience. Michel was an outdoor adventurer, until he died while back-country skiing. Justin is a climber and whitewater paddler.
Michel’s drowning death at 23, after he was swept by an avalanche into Kokanee Lake in B.C., hit the family hard. Yet there was no turning away from risk. “The Trudeaus have always been risk-takers,” Justin told the Globe and Mail in 2000. “My father regularly canoed the rapids of the Coppermine River. I’ve taught whitewater rafting. And we know that risks were part of Michel’s life.”
Justin freely acknowledges his own propensity for risk, whether physical or political: “I’m not afraid of saying things other people don’t say and pushing it. It gets me into trouble,” he told me not long after the controversy over his Quebec “separatist” remarks last winter.
His friend, Gerry Butts, recalls a canoe trip the two were on, a decade ago, on the Nahanni River. “There was this one moment where there was a log crossing a tributary of the Nahanni,” Butts said. “Everybody in camp was looking, saying, ‘Who’s going to try and walk across?’ This was a log maybe a foot in diameter. Justin just got up and walked right across the log. The fact we were 700 kilometres from the nearest medical assistance did not cross his mind. He just did it because it was a risk worth taking.”
But was it worth taking, really? Trudeau is part Sisyphus, driven by his nature and upbringing to push his political rock up the hill. And he is part Icarus, driven to prove himself in spectacular ways, whether by crossing rapids, speaking off the cuff about separatism or exposing himself to defeat and humiliation in the ring.
If he becomes Liberal leader, Canadians will rightly ask themselves: What risks would he take with the country, given power?
Justin Trudeau’s dominant traits – a powerful work ethic, likability, native intelligence, ambition and noblesse oblige (the flip-side of guilt) have made politics irresistible to him. But they have also made him a wild card. He would be something new.
In the unforgiving crucible of politics, Trudeau the Younger will establish, once and for all, whether he can transcend his birth to stand among the great on his own. Will Canadians choose to be part of this man’s experiment with destiny, however interesting it may be to watch? The Liberal Party at every level is betting – hoping, praying, incanting – that the answer is yes. But it is truly an unknown. It will depend on how often he falls. And how he picks himself up.
And of course on whether he embraces this risk, the greatest of his life so far, and runs.
mdentandt@postmedia.com
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