Another incident involving Jeff occurred around the same time. He and I and a few friends were riding our bicycles through the neighbourhood, and as usual, an officer in an RCMP car trailed behind us at a safe distance. I thought nothing of it, but when one of my friends decided it would be fun to shake our security shadow, we took a sudden sharp turn through a park, went down some back streets, and looped through a meandering route back to Jeff’s house—where, of course, the RCMP officer, who had guessed what we were doing, was waiting. When my friends and I finished playing, the officer escorted me home and, as he had to, submitted a report of the “incident.”
My friends and I thought our efforts to lose the officer were fun. My father thought differently. In a word, he was furious. “Do you think these guys like having to follow around an eleven-year-old kid?” he demanded. “Their job is to keep you safe so I can do my job. And here you are deliberately trying to make their job difficult . . . for fun?” Then he added, in that stern tone I knew all too well: “This was a total lack of respect for them. I raised you better than that.”
Disappointing my father was just about the worst thing I could do as a child. I yearned, as most kids do, for his attention and approval. While he gave both often, his disapproval was a wrenching experience for me.
There were times, however, when we slipped across the line in brattiness. I don’t know if Sacha, Michel, and I were less or more “bratty” than other rambunctious boys our age. I only know that both our parents, and especially our father, had zero tolerance for anything other than respectful behaviour. We may have lived in a privileged environment, but when it came to expectations and discipline we were not pampered. On the contrary.
My mother always emphasized the importance of good manners. A breach of protocol or etiquette resulted in a stern rebuke from her. “Good manners will open doors for you,” she lectured, “and once a door is open, you can demonstrate your good character.” She also insisted that our attitude toward and interest in other people be genuine. “Don’t be phony,” she said. “People can always tell if you’re being phony, and when they do, they’ll never fully trust you again.”
The importance of being both honest and respectful of others was a pillar of the teachings my brothers and I received from both parents. When I was eight years old, my father took me to Parliament Hill, where we had lunch in the restaurant there. Looking up from my meal, I spotted Joe Clark, the leader of the Progressive Conservative opposition. Thinking to please my father, I repeated a silly joke about Joe that I had heard in the schoolyard. It failed to amuse him. In fact, it appalled him, and I received a stern lecture about how it was fair to attack an opponent’s position, but I was never to make a personal attack on the individual. To drive his point home he marched me over to Mr. Clark’s table, where he was sitting with his daughter, Catherine, and introduced us.
I often have wondered how my father would react to the wider use of personal attacks by some on the current political scene in lieu of any serious discussion of issues. I have no doubt he would be disgusted and, yes, disappointed in us all, and that he would find a way to express his opinions with the weight of a falling ton of bricks, but without the need to resort to the same personal attacks he was decrying.
This emphasis on respecting others, whatever their position or title, was among the most important lessons drilled into my brothers and me as children. Sometimes our parents took the initiative in drawing our attention to another’s qualities and the high regard they deserved. Our housekeeper Hildegarde West, known simply as Hilda to us, was one of those people. It’s difficult to describe precisely what it was about Hilda that generated so much affection toward her in the family, except to say that she radiated warmth in every direction.
One day, sparked perhaps by a comment from me or a gracious gesture by Hilda, my mother took me aside and said, “Justin, during your life you are going to meet kings, queens, presidents, all kinds of people with power and prestige. But whatever their titles, many of them will never have the worth, as human beings, that Hilda has.”
Dad, if anything, was even more strict about the need for respect when dealing with others. Once, when I referred to an RCMP agent assigned to us as Baldy, the agent took it in good humour. My father, however, overhearing my comment, insisted that I formally apologize to the man then and there. The agent might have been amused by a young kid using that term in a casual manner. Dad wasn’t. And he ensured that I knew and remembered it.
Beyond the world of 24 Sussex was the spirited western branch of the family. Visiting the Sinclairs in British Columbia was always a good escape from Ottawa and its restrictions. This is the half of my family tree that too many people overlook. Everyone knows me as the son of a former prime minister, but many forget that I am also the grandson of another extraordinary politician, Jimmy Sinclair, who, as I mentioned, had been born in Scotland and arrived in B.C. as a toddler. He provided me with one of my two middle names plus a lot of wonderful memories.
After serving as an RCAF squadron leader in Sicily, Malta, and North Africa during the war, Jimmy became a fixture in Parliament, representing the ridings of Vancouver North and Coast-Capilano and serving as fisheries minister under Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. When his political career ended, he became president and chairman of Lafarge Cement North America, capping a remarkable career.
Jimmy was very much “a man’s man,” with all the charisma and outsized personality of a true old-school retail politician. As we know, my father could handle crowds and people very well, but it wasn’t a natural thing for him; he had to train himself to overcome his innate shyness. For Grampa, it was all about people. Election campaigns for James Sinclair were a cottage-industry family operation, with everyone including the children pitching in to ensure success at the polls. Heather, my mother’s eldest sister, remembers answering the home telephone line as a six-year-old singing, “Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate? Jimmy Sinclair!” Many years later, when I was running as the Liberal candidate in the Montreal riding of Papineau, it was Jimmy’s door-to-door campaign style, not my dad’s, that I took as my model because, among other things, it suited my personality.
Jimmy exhibited a special fondness for me. I had lots of opportunities to spend time with him, because my parents would rely on the Sinclairs to take care of my brothers and me whenever they travelled overseas for extended periods. Behind his home on Rockridge Road, in West Vancouver, Jimmy would take us through his amazing garden, which dropped behind the house all the way down the forested embankment to Cypress Creek. He transformed the embankment into an extension of the garden, creating landmarks named after my brothers and me. Here was Justin’s Path, over there was Sacha’s Rock, and farther along was Michel’s Lookout. We would spend entire days in those magical woods with him, helping him garden, playing hide-and-seek, exploring up and down the creek.
A railroad track bordered the property, and trains ran past regularly, including the historic steam-powered Royal Hudson, which carried tourists across West Vancouver, up to Squamish, and back. Whenever it passed we would wave it out, sometimes displaying a big sign that read “O Canada,” and when the engineer saw it he would blow the train’s special whistle that played the first four notes of our national anthem. Jimmy had an immigrant’s ardent love of his country. And he instilled it in those around him every day.
Looking back at those scenes from Rockridge Road, we were like poster children for 1970s-era Canadian patriotism. That’s why that part of the country has had a special significance to me, and drew me to it when I was in my mid-twenties, prepared to begin my career as an educator.
Jimmy would play cards with us, and we often played a game he called Bank. During the card games he would tell us that this or that hand would determine who would be the “Champ of the Western desert,” which I always thought of as some empty but neat-sounding phrase. Only when I was an adult and learned about Jimmy’s military past did I rea
lize that the “desert” was the Western Sahara, where he had served his country during some of the fiercest battles of the Second World War. It gave me a chill to realize that the offhand phrase he used during a family card game was from a real theatre of war. I often think of him when I meet with veterans across the country in my current job, and I grow touched by their devotion to service and duty and by all the untold stories that lie hidden.
When Grampa Jimmy passed away in 1984, it was the first death my brothers and I experienced as a real personal loss. Hearing the news at 24 Sussex, we blubbered so loudly that one of the staff, a woman from France, finding it somewhat unseemly, asked us to pull ourselves together. Needless to say, we chose not to.
On one trip west, my brothers and I journeyed to the Sunshine Coast, where we visited the home of our mother’s elderly grandmother, whom we called Gee. She had emigrated from Britain so many years before and lived a long and quiet life in Gibsons. It is a picturesque place, and Gee whiled away her years there with books from the local library. When my mother told me stories of spending so many happy times in her childhood on that same beach, I first became aware of the passage of time. Parents age.
I had also met my paternal grandmother, Grace Elliott, although I was far too young to recall it. Dementia had taken its toll by the time I was born, but when my mother placed me in her lap, Grace seemed to attain a moment of lucidity. “Pierre’s son?” she said with tears streaming down her face. “Pierre gave us a son?!” She died about a year later.
I developed a strong attachment to the entire Sinclair family. Mom’s mom, Kathleen, was an amazing woman, and I’m glad Xavier and Ella got to know her a bit before she passed away a few years ago. My aunt Janet was a strong labour activist in the airline industry, and even though she retired recently, the Vancouver airport is still the only place I get special treatment when I travel, because there I’m recognized as Jan’s nephew (that’s right, never any perks at PET in Montreal). My aunt Lin moved down to the States when I was little, and whenever she comes to visit with her wonderful husband, Fred, we have hilarious political conversations because Fred is really, really Republican. Betsy, the youngest, is a semi-retired RN who also runs the Brentwood Bay Nurseries on Vancouver Island with my British expat uncle Robin. My uncle Tom, who played for the BC Lions in his youth, is also my godfather, and is married to Heather, the eldest of the Sinclair daughters, who worked as a teacher and was my mentor when I travelled west to study education. From the time she served as Jimmy’s youngest campaign volunteer in the 1940s, Heather never really lost the political bug, and she still works actively in Liberal politics in Toronto, including during my leadership race. So in 2013, when I attended my first Question Period as leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, she was there waving to me from the public gallery. I saluted her and directed her attention to my chest. As she squinted, I saw a smile of recognition: to honour the day, I had worn my Sinclair tartan tie.
It seemed the fitting thing to do. While my relationship with my mother over the years had its ups, downs, and then ups again, the larger connections between Trudeau and Sinclair have remained gratifyingly solid.
Not all the memories of my time as the son of a prime minister are happy. There were sad times as well, most of them connected with the difficulties in my parents’ marriage.
Much has been written about their marriage and the way it ended. A lot of it is lurid and inaccurate. It’s also, as you can appreciate, intensely personal to me, and I hesitated before addressing it here. In the end, I decided that if I wanted to write a book explaining how I came to be the person I am, I had no choice. Both of my parents exerted wonderful influences on me, and much of who I am today can be directly attributed to the guidance and example they provided. But like every child of divorced parents, I was shaped by their breakup as well.
In recent years, I developed a clearer understanding of the stresses that existed in my parents’ marriage. One was the difference in their ages that I mentioned earlier, something that is easy to identify and blame for the problems that occurred. It’s important to also remember, however, that they were two people who were very much in love with each other at the beginning of their marriage and, to a large degree, through the rest of their lives.
The element in the matter that is too rarely discussed, even after my mother’s openness about it, is her lifelong struggle with bipolarity. Living your life in the public eye is a greater burden than most people can imagine. Its effect is neither insurmountable nor necessarily traumatic, but it demands that you maintain a state of mind that enables you to handle the steady pressure and periodic hassles. My father could usually revel in the hardships, taking them as a personal test or challenge to be surpassed with focus and discipline. For my mother, the experience was quite different, made difficult, even intolerable, by her condition.
Bipolar disorder is not exceptionally rare. Studies suggest that about three percent of the world’s population suffers from it, equally shared by men and women and cutting across ethnic, racial, and social identities. Have a hundred Facebook friends? Chances are three of them will exhibit symptoms of bipolarity. Many mental conditions fail to receive the recognition and treatment they need and deserve. That’s unfortunate. Break an arm, develop a rash, or suffer a chronic cough and you’ll probably deal with it directly by seeking professional help and garnering a lot of sympathy from others. It’s not the same with mental health issues. Unfortunately, even in our relatively enlightened age, illnesses associated with a mental state are not addressed as openly as they should be. Sufferers assume they will “get over it” (advice often dispensed by friends and relatives), or fear that some unexplained stigma will be attached to their condition.
My mother always had a brilliant mind waiting to shine through, and when she finally came to terms with her illness, she became an activist in the field of dealing openly with mental illness. She has spoken about it and about her personal experiences in confronting it on many occasions, sometimes with me by her side at the podium. In 2010 she wrote an exceptional memoir, Changing My Mind, that reflected her hard-won state of self-awareness about her illness.
One of the messages that comes through in that book is the need for people to discuss mental health issues in a candid and constructive way. It’s an enlightened attitude that unfortunately was unheard of in the 1970s, when my mother began to wrestle with her bipolar condition. Had it been prevalent at the time, her years as a young mother and wife would surely not have been so agonizing.
But there was still that matter of the thirty years’ difference in ages for them to contend with. Even in the absence of my mother’s underlying medical issues, it would have remained a difficult barrier to overcome. My mother may have been smitten by her first glimpse of my father on the beaches of Tahiti in 1967, and he may have been equally entranced by her charm and beauty when they met again a few years later, but reality always has a way of elbowing its way into our lives. The truth was that my mother considered Pierre something of a “fuddy duddy” at times. He had become almost an icon of social liberalism by the time he married my mother, but throughout that marriage he could not escape the traditionalist mindset that had been drummed into him as a child.
My mother, on the other hand, was ahead of the social curve. The most common portrayal of her was as a “flower child,” breaking free of the kind of restrictions that her husband had considered customary. Her sense of confinement, of being a well-tended bird in the gilded cage of 24 Sussex, was something she couldn’t bear. “Pierre was widely seen by the rest of the world as a man who did pirouettes,” Margaret wrote in Changing My Mind. “But what he really did was work—hour after hour. Unless it was an official occasion, we never went to the ballet or theatre. For him, this life was perfect . . . For me, it wasn’t enough; I wanted, I needed, to play.”
There were other complications, including religious differences. My father was a devout Catholic while my m
other, though raised Anglican, has very little religious identity aside from some 1960s-era flirtation with Buddhism. She could never understand the pervasive attitude of guilt that seemed to hang over my father whenever he felt he had lapsed in some way, and she was offended by the degree of intrusion that the church practised. “Even your thoughts can become the subject of sin and confession,” she commented to me at one point. This invasion of the private sphere of one’s mind in search of “thought crimes,” she said, borrowing a term from Orwell, was especially disturbing to her.
From my perspective today, the commonly held story of my parents’ marital breakdown is nothing but a caricature, because my father was not just the tradition-bound diehard he appeared and my mother was not entirely the totally free spirit that her actions suggest. Things are never that simple, especially with a couple as complex as my parents, and I remain amused by and exasperated with those who view their relationship—all the passion, triumph, achievements, and tragedy—in black and white, seeing it merely as a flawed union between a cool and aloof man and an exuberant and uninhibited younger woman. It was that, but also much more.
My mother frequently referred to Dad as Mr. Spock. Whenever they had an argument, my father’s utterly rational approach, she claimed, was overly Vulcan. When she grew emotional and fervent, Dad would respond with logic and rhetoric in a manner that struck her as patronizing and bloodless. He, of course, would consider her behaviour exasperating when it was actually a plea for help.
Common Ground Page 3