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October 19, 2014

Den Tandt: Justin Trudeau’s strengths and flaws on full display in memoir

just trudeau Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground will hit book shelves this week. Photo: (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson)

Justin Trudeau’s memoir, Common Ground, will not pave his way to 24 Sussex Dr., or quell the baying of his critics. Nor will it do him any harm.

Let’s dispense first with the claim, already making the rounds this weekend, that the book is meaningless, or even fraudulent, because “Trudeau didn’t write it himself.” His process, as he has told several interviewers, was to dictate to editors, who compiled anecdotes into a narrative, which then came back to him for a re-write and final draft.

It would of course have been morally better, far more satisfying really, if Trudeau had sweated the thing entirely alone, by the light of a coal-oil lantern, on a battered manual typewriter. But it is 2014 and, sadly, one is allowed to make concessions to modernity in the crafting of books. Having studied Trudeau’s life, career, thinking and speeches more than most, I can say that not a line in the 289 pages of the main account rings false. He wrote it.

That is both good and bad. Much of the description of his early years will be familiar to Canadian readers. Less expected, perhaps, is his frank treatment of his parents’ breakup. It was, and remains, the most public divorce in Canadian history. Told from the point of view of a child caught in the midst, it makes for poignant reading. The account is never maudlin or self-pitying, which it could easily have become.

There are funny bits also, such as the story of the day when the boy Trudeau and a buddy awkwardly stood at attention, star-struck, as a resplendent and haughty Princess Diana swished past them in the driveway at 24 Sussex Dr., on her way to swim a few quiet laps in the PM’s pool.

Trudeau is candid about his uneven academic record in high school, at the elite College Jean de Brebeuf in Montreal — a failure to excel that set him at odds with his father.

Though exposed to the classics almost from birth, young Justin was interested in more populist fare; his list of favourite authors — J.R.R. Tolkien, science fiction masters Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen King — was a quite typical reading list for an ordinary, imaginative Canadian teenager in the 1980s. Pierre, a lover of Racine, Corneille and Shakespeare, thought this was, to use Trudeau’s word, “crap.”

The younger Trudeau’s critics will of course say that his interest in popular literature — as opposed to, say, weighty works of economic theory, which presumably both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NDP leader Tom Mulcair were paging through avidly while in high school — is symptomatic of an undisciplined mind.

What’s unusual in this, again, is that Trudeau doesn’t shy from the subject. He acknowledges it, along with his later fits and starts in university, which resulted in his eventually earning degrees in literature and education, but none of the academic garlands that a more conventional future prime minister might be expected to acquire, or that his father achieved. There is no benefit for him in writing about this, since it highlights again the thinness of his resume, before politics; one is left to conclude that he says it simply because it is true.

The book is strongest where Trudeau talks about his childhood, and the values — expressed mainly through devotion to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and a kind of old-fashioned sense of noblesse oblige, or honour — that grew from it. His sense of Quebec within the country, of the fundamental place of immigrants in Canadian society, and of the need to balance pro-growth economic policies with compassion, are the most powerful political themes he strikes.

The book is weakest, unsurprisingly, where Trudeau is weakest; he offers no specifics, despite reprising his analysis that the middle class is under siege, of how he intends to address this. We are again asked to trust that, in the fullness of time, the elixir will be revealed. Meantime the New Democrats and Conservatives both are wallpapering their offices with policy, from child care to tax cuts to foreign affairs, and in so doing sparking debate that is shouldering the Liberals aside.

The gap in the book, politically, is just this: Trudeau is not under scrutiny now for any perceived lack of patriotism or good intent; he is under scrutiny for a perceived lack of policy depth, and his tendency to put his foot in his mouth. His book is thoughtful and illuminating, and in that sense can only help him, as far as it goes. By the standards of recent political autobiographies, it could have been much worse.

But it leaves one with the impression, as Trudeau’s speeches and other writings to date have done, that he remains a broad canvas, still mostly untested, with details of a path forward lacking, and with his moment of truth still ahead.

There is great risk for the Liberals in leaving so much still unsaid and unknown, in an election year. It is an opening Trudeau’s foes have already exploited handily. Common Ground has not widened the opening; nor has it closed it. On balance, therefore, it must be counted a draw.

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