After Pierre Trudeau’s retirement from politics in 1984, he and his boys moved back to Montreal and civilian life. Justin attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, just as his father had, then took undergraduate degrees in English from McGill and education from UBC. As a young man, he taught snowboarding, did some barroom bouncing, and ended up teaching English and math at two B.C. private schools. He studied engineering and environmental geography at McGill but did not complete degrees in either. As Justin noted in his 2014 memoir, Common Ground, he was never academically gifted in the manner of Pierre. After flunking an exam in experimental psychology, he had a “serious heart-to-heart” with his father. It was an epiphany of sorts. “I realized, and announced to him, that I was not like him,” Justin recalled. “All my childhood, my father had been my hero, my model, my guide, my instruction booklet to life. But when, trying to be helpful, he showed me his report cards dating from his time at Brébeuf in the 1930s, featuring a straight line of As stretching from top to bottom, I knew we were fundamentally different people, with different approaches to life.”1
Pierre Trudeau died on September 28, 2000, less than two years after the tragic death of his youngest son, Michel, in an avalanche at B.C.’s Kokanee Glacier Park. Justin’s dramatic reappearance on the national stage was one of the many unanticipated by-products of his father’s state funeral that October. Against the backdrop of a massive outpouring of popular affection for Pierre, and in front of millions of Canadians watching the funeral on television, Justin gave an extraordinary eulogy. It concluded with a haunting farewell that many Canadians will remember: “Je t’aime, Papa.”2
Following the eulogy, Justin became a celebrity. Wherever he appeared, Canadians sought autographs and pictures with him. “It makes me a bit uncomfortable, but who am I to argue?” he said of all the fuss. “My dad always taught me to be polite, get their name, write a little message if that’s what they’re looking for. People want the personal connection.”3 Rumours persisted that Justin might enter Canadian politics. He was flattered but genuinely noncommittal—attracting criticisms that, like his father before him, he was playing hard-to-get. “I’m far from a finished product,” he joked. “I’m a moderately engaging, reasonably intelligent 30-year-old, who’s had an interesting life—like someone who was raised by wolves, or the person that cultivated an extremely large pumpkin.”4 Yet when he was challenged to define his core conception of Canada in twenty-five words or less, his answer was pure, undiluted Pierre. “The nation is no longer a legitimate basis for the state,” he said, “and the rights of the individual are never secondary to the rights of the collective.”5 When Justin criticized Michael Ignatieff’s willingness to recognize Quebec as a nation, he invoked his father’s idea of nationalism as retrograde. And when he lauded the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was often, he would say that he was the child of Pierre but that all Canadians were “children of that Charter.”
Justin was active within the Liberal Party on and off for most of his adult life, lending his name to this or that candidate but restricting his appearances to cameos. In November 2006, however, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion experience when he attended the Liberal leadership convention and threw himself headlong into Gerard Kennedy’s campaign. Until then, Trudeau had never been able to come to grips with his father’s larger-than-life legacy. “The association with my father was never a reason for me to get into politics,” he later wrote. “It was, rather, a reason for me to avoid entering the political arena.”6 Asked in 2012 whether it had been difficult entering federal politics as Pierre Trudeau’s son, Justin was forthright. “Listen,” he replied, “it was difficult showing up in Grade One as Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son, it was difficult becoming a high-school teacher as Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son. That’s something that I’ve lived with all my life.”7
But at that 2006 convention, held at Montreal’s Palais des congrès, Justin got the political bug. More important, he discovered gifts and aptitudes that were uniquely his own. “From the beginning of his political career, my father assumed an intellectual approach to all his political activities, including campaigning,” he later recalled. “Busying myself on the convention floor revealed to me that where political campaigning was involved, I wasn’t at all my father’s son—I was Jimmy Sinclair’s grandson. Grandpa Jimmy had perhaps been the ultimate retail politician, a man who loved mixing with people, shaking hands, listening, and, yes, when the opportunity arose, kissing babies. The contrast between the two men is dramatic, and the more it became clear to me, the more it eased my concern about being compared with my father.”8 (Grandpa Jimmy was prominent B.C. Liberal James Sinclair, Margaret’s father.)
Gerard Kennedy lost his leadership bid to Stéphane Dion. But the fight was fair, allowing the Liberals to put the acrimony of the Chrétien‒Martin years behind them. Trudeau threw his support to Dion on the second ballot. He was rewarded with Dion’s blessing to contest the party nomination in the Montreal riding of Papineau—for decades a Liberal stronghold but, after 2006, a Bloc Québécois seat. In April 2007, Trudeau won the Liberal nomination easily. He campaigned full out in the months leading up to the October 2008 federal election, only narrowly defeating Bloc incumbent Vivian Barbot. When he arrived in Ottawa for his first parliamentary session in the fall of 2008, he was one of the seventy-seven Liberal MPs who formed the Official Opposition. Dion named him “associate critic for human resources and skills development (youth)” and promptly assigned him a seat in the back row of the Opposition benches. In stark contrast with his father’s expedited ascent in federal politics, Justin’s rise to power was proving to be anything but meteoric.
Once he entered Parliament, comparisons with his father became incessant. Justin was far more gracious about them than ever Pierre would have been. “I am aware that there’s an image that goes with me,” he said. “And I’m satisfied that that image, every day that goes by, it becomes a little more me and a little less my father. The proportion can be debated, but I know that I’m taking the givens that my father’s legacy gave me and I’m building onto it my own identity.”9 Like Pierre, Justin was dogged by the suggestion that he was a dilettante. “I’m willing to work extremely hard,” he insisted. “The idea that my father raised sons that expected anything to be handed to them, to not roll up their sleeves and work harder than anyone around them, is to not know my dad.”10 Above all, Justin had to deal with Canadian conservatives’ ad hominem attacks on his late father and with the now-familiar charge that Pierre had inherited a perfectly idyllic Canada in 1968 and proceeded to destroy it out of arrogance and spite.11
One of those critics was Stephen Harper, who, as president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), penned a screed against Pierre just a week after his death that included the line “only a liberal intellectual could believe the assignment of benefits and ‘rights’ would not become an arbitrary, politicized game.”12 Gerry Nicholls, Harper’s colleague at the NCC, would later state what all Canadians could see plainly. “To lose to Justin Trudeau would be devastating to Stephen Harper on a real personal level,” he said. “Harper wanted to undo all of the things that Pierre Trudeau did and now he’s facing his son who wants to bring back all of those Trudeau values and traditions to Canada.”13 Justin has tried to be philosophical about being a scapegoat for his father’s enemies, but it cannot be easy. “I’ve really thought about this, about how it’s going to be harder for me to dismiss all the haters from now on,” he said when he entered politics. “Up until now, it’s been about how they hated my father, and therefore hated the son, for superficial, silly reasons. Now I’m going to start bringing forward ideas and positions and representing a level of threat to certain people. It’s going to lead to people disliking me. But at least it will be for real, substantial reasons, not because of my hair.”14
Revenge, of course, is best served cold. Justin Trudeau answered conservatives’ critique of his ostensibly effete liberal style by beating the daylights out of tough-
guy Senator Patrick Brazeau in a March 2011 charity boxing match. It was Pierre Trudeau who had taught Justin to box—and also to leave nothing to chance when the opportunity to best an opponent presented itself. “Patrick never stood a chance against me,” Justin said after the bout. “He wasn’t in very good shape. I had trained against bruisers like him for the previous three months and I learned, thank God, that I could take whatever they dished out and still punch back.” For Canadians who remembered Pierre’s pugilistic spirit fondly, it was a sweet moment—the more so because conservative commentator Ezra Levant had camped out ringside to savour Trudeau’s humiliation. More than any other flashpoint in Justin’s political ascent, the boxing match cemented his claim to his father’s toughness and marked his own coming of age in the era of the brawling Harper Conservatives.
In May 2011, Trudeau was re-elected in his Papineau riding. He was one of the few Quebec Liberals to survive the “orange wave” that put Jack Layton’s NDP on the Opposition benches for the first time in history and nearly obliterated the Bloc Québécois. The Harper Conservatives won their first (and only) majority government, winning 166 seats of 308, with 39.6 per cent of the popular vote. The Liberals’ seat count fell from 77 to a dismal 34, and their share of the popular vote dropped to just under 19 per cent. It became more obvious than ever that the Liberals’ leadership woes had become chronic.
One week after the election, a Toronto Star poll revealed that if Justin Trudeau were Liberal leader, the party would attract 42 per cent of decided voters. In August 2012, after testing the waters among Liberals everywhere in Canada, Trudeau took the bait. He instructed Gerry Butts, his old McGill friend and one-time principal secretary to Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, to put together an organization. “My father’s values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals,” he said in his announcement speech. “But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me.”15 By then he had put his misgivings about living up to Pierre’s legacy behind him. “My father was incredibly focused, incredibly linear,” he said.
All his life, he basically wrote and thought and read and prepared on a very intellectual level. He was a complete package, to a large degree, before he stepped up as minister of justice. I’m not at all the same way. I am very strong in my core values, my ideology, my beliefs, my sense of what is right and wrong and what is good and just in the world and in Canada. But I’m open to discussion. I’m a high school teacher. I’m someone who stumbles my way through, leads with my chin in some cases, leads with my heart in all cases. It leaves me way open for all sorts of criticisms left, right and centre. You know what? I was raised with pretty thick skin. And I think people are hungry for politicians who aren’t afraid to say what they think and mean it.16
The Canadian press knew how to sex up the story of Justin’s Liberal leadership bid. “Will the 40-year-old with the fantastic hair, piercing eyes and same crooked smile as Pierre replicate the Trudeaumania that carried his dad to 24 Sussex Dr. back in 1968, three years before he was born?” asked Maclean’s correspondent Jonathon Gatehouse sardonically. “Should anyone even bother to run against such a media darling?”17
On April 14, 2013, to no one’s surprise, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership on the first ballot.
By the time the October 19, 2015, federal election rolled around, Canadians had enjoyed (or endured) nearly a decade of Conservative rule, most of it under minority government, all of it under a mandate that had never exceeded 40 per cent of the popular vote. Superficially at least, Canada’s fifteenth decade thus appeared much like its tenth, 1957 to 1967, which meant that Justin Trudeau entered the election contest with some of the advantages that had accrued to his father in 1968: a tired Parliament, a Canadian electorate ready for change, the advent of a new generation of politically active young Canadians.
The Liberal campaign in 2015 made the most of the party’s youthful, telegenic, and fluently bilingual leader, of course. But Trudeau and his advisers perceived, correctly, that they could defeat Stephen Harper only by playing the game his way—that is, by promising competent managerial-style government. The Liberal platform focused on reviving the beleaguered middle-class Canadian family, with promises of tax cuts, child tax credits, flexible parental benefits, and new spending on youth. There would be massive new infrastructure spending requiring deficits in the first three years of a Liberal mandate. Government scientists, diplomats, and other experts would be unmuzzled, and the long-form census restored. Climate change would be confronted, the green economy nurtured. The government’s relationship with First Nations would be renewed, starting with a public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women. Marijuana would be legalized. The purchase of the F-35 stealth fighter-bomber would be cancelled, and Canada’s combat mission in Iraq terminated. Twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees would be given safe haven in Canada.
Liberal campaign advertising focused largely on Trudeau, positioning him as the country’s first Gen-X leader—an environmentally and socially conscious consensus-builder who could connect on a personal level with Canadians. Trudeau’s natural charm and affability took material form in the thousands of selfies for which he happily posed. “There’s a puppylike quality to him and that’s not Pierre,” observed Robert Bothwell, a Canadian historian who had been around for Trudeaumania in 1968. “His father was just not at ease with dealing with crowds or pressing the flesh, but looking at Justin, it comes really natural to him and that’s a big difference. Pierre had magnetism and was fascinating and beautiful to watch, but he didn’t want them to get close.”18 The Conservatives tried to paint Justin as immature and inexperienced, using the tag line “He’s Just Not Ready.” It proved to be a strategic blunder, allowing Trudeau to adopt the time-honoured strategy of being underestimated. In the home stretch of the campaign, polls showed that Conservative attack ads had actually increased voter sympathy for him.
In marked contrast to Pierre Trudeau’s massive lead throughout the 1968 campaign, the distinguishing feature of the 2015 contest was the virtual dead heat among the three major parties. Until Justin’s dark-horse sprint in the final weeks of the campaign, none of the party leaders were able to punch through the pollsters’ margin of error. Five public debates—two in French, one devoted entirely to foreign affairs, all of them posted online—meant abundant opportunities for Canadians to acquaint themselves with the leaders and their ideas. The long campaign also allowed voters to observe the candidates reacting to current events in real time—the Syrian refugee crisis, most notably, and the apparent slide of the Canadian economy into recession. Trudeau (and NDP leader Tom Mulcair) took every opportunity to stake out vastly divergent positions on such hot-button issues as the Conservatives’ Bill C-24, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, which allowed dual nationals to be stripped of citizenship if they were convicted of treason or terrorism. In one of the campaign’s oddest twists, the wearing of niqabs during citizenship ceremonies became a national preoccupation. Although the courts had struck down his niqab legislation, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended it with the blithe serenity of an old-school majoritarian. “I think the legislation is broadly reflective of the large, large majority of Canadians,” he said. This issue was one of many gifts to Trudeau, whose politics is multicultural, inclusive, and keenly attentive to minority rights.
There were very few explicit references in the 2015 election campaign to Pierre Trudeau—evidence of Justin’s determination to chart his own course. But when Justin invoked his father’s memory during the September 28 Munk Debate on Canadian foreign policy, the effect was powerful. Reacting to a barb from Tom Mulcair, Justin looked straight into the camera and reminded Canadians that it was the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death. “Let me say very clearly, I am incredibly proud to be Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son,” Justin affirmed. “I know he wouldn’t want us to be fighting the battles of the past. He’d want us squarely focused on t
he future and how we’re going to respond to Canadians’ needs, and that’s what we’re doing tonight.”19
By the end of the campaign, Justin Trudeau had emerged as his own man, very different indeed from his father but also very different from his recent Liberal predecessors. Canadians rewarded him and his party with their first majority government in fifteen years. The Liberals won 184 seats in the newly expanded Parliament of 338, with 39.5 per cent of the popular vote. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won 99 seats, with 31.9 per cent of the popular vote, becoming the Official Opposition. Tom Mulcair’s NDP won 44 seats, with 19.7 per cent of the popular vote.
In 1968, the mass adulation that was Trudeaumania peaked for the first time during the Liberal leadership race and again towards the end of the election campaign. Pierre Trudeau’s popularity among decided voters never fell below 45 per cent, which meant that, barring something utterly unforeseen, his triumph was practically a fait accompli. Even his opponents sensed this.
Not so Justin Trudeau in 2015, for whom victory was far from certain. There was no evidence of Trudeaumania when, early in the campaign, the Liberal leader was gamely pressing the flesh among indifferent shoppers in the suburban big-box stores of southern Ontario. Whenever the term Trudeaumania appeared in the media, it was tentative and self-referential, a nod to his father’s 1968 sweep rather than an affirmation that the phenomenon would, or could, be repeated.
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