Thanks to their efforts where we were concerned, my brothers and I never felt homesick, no matter which house we were in. Mind you, our definition of “home” began with wherever we happened to be at the time. The three of us moved as a pack, each providing the others with companionship. Along with our parents’ efforts to smooth things for us, given the situation, we managed to grow up free of much of the emotional trauma that divorce can inflict on children. For that, I will always be grateful.
My mother began dating a real estate developer named Fried Kemper, and they married in 1984, the same year my father quit politics and we moved to Montreal. On their way to the courthouse on their wedding day, Mom and Fried were intercepted by my father’s chauffeur bearing a large bouquet of flowers, a gesture that my mother greatly appreciated.
(The courthouse had been my father’s one request: he didn’t want my mom to get remarried in a church. The irony was that despite having modernized Canada’s divorce laws in the 1960s, his personal faith held that “what God has joined, let no man tear asunder.” He even apologized to me once, years later, for not ever being able to provide his teenage sons with a maternal presence in our lives in Montreal: he simply felt that he could never remarry. I of course reassured him that it was of no matter to us, but the lesson he taught me about the distinction between private faith and public responsibility was one that would later guide my own thinking about leadership.)
Mom and Fried had two children, Kyle and Alicia. We three Trudeau boys played older brothers to them as they grew, having great fun in my mother’s little red brick house on Victoria Street and especially at the Kemper family cottage on Newboro Lake, where life felt like one long waterfront party. Tubing along the lake, crowding around the campfire for singalongs, and hide-and-seek with flashlights in the woods were just part of the fun. As the oldest of the kids, I assumed the role of camp counsellor, organizing activities and keeping an eye on everyone, especially in the water.
As informal as it might have been, the experience was my first taste of assuming leadership and the great satisfaction of passing along knowledge and skills to others. I trace my interest in teaching and, to a degree, in politics back to those very happy, very sunny, and very memorable days.
It helped that Fried shared my father’s love of the outdoors, and that he was a younger man much more in tune with my mother’s fun-loving character. Dad was the guy to take us on long canoe trips, teaching us the J-stroke by urging us to practise until we got it right. Fried, on the other hand, owned a Chevrolet El Camino, a combination sports coupe and pickup truck that, as once described, you’d use for a hot date at the drive-in on the weekend and then to carry two-by-fours to the job site on Monday. My father could never relate to a vehicle like that, but it was the first car I ever drove, at fifteen, on the farm roads near the cottage. And Fried owned a speedboat, not a canoe, and a shotgun that he would use to control porcupines and other unwanted critters around the garden.
The contrast between the two men wasn’t a problem for us. In fact, it was probably a blessing. With such opposite personalities and lifestyles, there was no competition between the two men. When at my mother and Fried’s house, my brothers and I could unwind by watching television, playing video games, and indulging in a whole raft of other activities our father disliked. Life at the cottage and in the little house on Victoria Street was much different from living at 24 Sussex but just as wonderful. We played in the lane beside the house with neighbourhood kids and slept in bunk beds crowded into a single room. We missed our father, but we didn’t miss the large bedrooms and other amenities of the prime minister’s residence. On weekday mornings the school bus would arrive to pick us up and we would crowd in with the other kids. I enjoyed every minute of our visits with our mother, especially riding in the noisy school bus. Everything was totally normal—so long as you didn’t look out the back window to see the RCMP security detail following us.
I remember those years fondly now. Looking back, though, I realize that I was angry. After all, most children of divorce spend more than a little time angry. But at the time, we had no clear idea what my mother was going through. The words bipolar and depression didn’t mean anything to me then, and even many adults in our family were confused by the situation. My grandmother Sinclair discouraged her daughter from seeking psychological counselling because, she believed, “they always blame the patient’s mother.” My anger arose because it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t enough to keep my mother near me and happy.
In recent years, as my mother has gained awareness about her own mental health challenges, we have bonded through her loving presence as grandmother to my children, and have gained closure. We talk together. We laugh together. We eat together. I take my family for weekends at her apartment in Montreal, and she comes to visit us in Ottawa. It’s the relationship with her that I always wanted. I’ll never be able to fix the things that went wrong with my childhood. But when it comes to spending time with the only mother I will ever have, better late than never.
The truth is, my mother was very ill. Had her illness been of the physical kind, everybody—including her family and friends—would have been more sympathetic to her and understanding of her condition. She suffered a severe mental illness at a time when such things were, at best, very poorly understood. At worst, mental illness was stigmatized and seen by many as a source of shame.
Things have changed, but not enough and not fast enough. I know, for example, what my political opponents are trying to do when they say that I am my “mother’s son” more than my father’s. They are appealing to those old misunderstandings and prejudices about mental illness. Like everyone, I take after each of my parents in different ways, and I am immensely proud of them both. I’m used to kind people sharing their stories with me about how my father touched or inspired them in some way, but lately more and more people approach me to say similar things about my mother. I know that her work has helped many people come to terms with their own illness or that of a loved one, friend, or co-worker. We still have a long way to go, but my mom has done a lot to ensure that people suffering from mental illness are a lot better understood than she was.
Chapter Two
Growing Up in Montreal
I spent my childhood in Ottawa but I grew up in Montreal. My father, my brothers, and I left the capital in 1984. It was a year of change. My father took his long walk in the snow and decided to retire from politics as soon as a new Liberal leader was chosen. I left the security of my friends and a familiar environment for a new city. My mother, who remained in Ottawa, was expecting a new baby. My brother Kyle would arrive in November.
It was also a period of intense activity by les souverainistes in Quebec, a back-and-forth swing between determination and despair. A few years earlier the Parti Québécois’s referendum on its sovereignty-association proposal had been roundly defeated. In his concession speech, PQ leader René Lévesque called on sovereigntists to persevere à la prochaine fois! (until next time), revealing that the issue remained with us. A year later the PQ won a mandate to govern Quebec with an increased share of the popular vote, confirming again that the sovereignty debate was very much alive. And in 1982, when my father succeeded in repatriating the Canadian Constitution, Mr. Lévesque called the achievement “the night of the long knives,” refusing to endorse it and declaring that Quebec had been betrayed by the other provinces and, of course, by my father. In reality, Mr. Lévesque was outmanoeuvred, not betrayed, but that’s not a story for this book. Meanwhile, anglophones continued to leave Quebec in droves, and language rights remained a raw issue for partisans on both sides.
In Ottawa, we had been steeped in these issues, influenced by our father’s values and deep convictions. Now we were arriving to live in Montreal, our father’s home, wide-eyed about the place. Throughout my life, I had spoken both languages interchangeably with my family, and almost exclusively French with my father. I was at e
ase with the fluidity of my French-and-English dual identity in Ottawa. With this grounding, I began my studies at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf. It had been my father’s school, known for high academic achievement, and I landed there in the midst of the political turmoil. Taken together, the abrupt new demands on my academic abilities and the strong linguistic and cultural undercurrents among students and faculty gave me a sudden new perspective on things.
My dad loved to tell the story of how he hosted his thirty-year class reunion in Ottawa shortly after he was elected prime minister of Canada. It was the height of Trudeaumania, and as the former students and teachers arrived, he was naturally proud to greet them at the door of 24 Sussex, no doubt feeling like the ultimate success story. Beaming at every old friend and teacher who walked through the door, he spotted his former science professor, who by this time was a wizened old Jesuit in the twilight of his teaching career. The professor approached my father, looked him up and down, then said matter-of-factly, “You know, Trudeau, I still think you would have had more success as a physicist.”
That’s the way things were at Brébeuf. Academics first, politics and everything else second. In the 1930s, the only judgment of students in the cours classique was where you placed in the class. Were you first? Tenth? Thirtieth? You had to be at the top if you wanted any chance at success in life. By the time I enrolled at the school as a thirteen-year-old, the culture may have become less severe, but it was still a place where parents sent their boys (no girls were permitted until the upper grades) to get a rigorous classical education. Even before you entered the main building, you knew this was a place for serious work. With its soaring Ionic columns and austere classical architecture rendered in stone, Brébeuf looked as much like a courthouse as a school. A massive stone crucifix above the main entrance signalled its Jesuit roots, although Brébeuf became non-denominational two years after my arrival.
I did well on the entrance exams. I did so well, in fact, that some school officials predicted I might match my father’s legendary record as a perennial top-of-class performer. This prediction, alas, proved off the mark. The only question was whether I would enter Brébeuf in 1re secondaire or 2e secondaire, which were the equivalents of Grade 7 and Grade 8. Given my date of birth, and incongruities between the Ontario and Quebec school systems, it wasn’t clear which would be the most appropriate choice.
Despite my father’s concerns that I might be bored by the 1re secondaire curriculum, I insisted on starting at that level for two reasons. First, enrolling in that class allowed me to enter the Latin stream, which would have been impossible if I came in at the higher level. Latin may not seem like a big draw to most people, but to me it was the language of history and adventure. Because of his own Brébeuf education, my father had been a fluent Latin speaker from his teenage years, and he used his fluency to navigate the far corners of the world on his epic backpacking expedition in the 1940s. In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Dad’s best strategy for getting information about where to eat or stay was to find the local Catholic church and speak—in Latin—with the priest.
The second, and more important, reason to start at Brébeuf in the younger grade was that I would be part of a fresh social milieu. Cliques and friendships would be established by second year, and I wasn’t anxious to start my experience in such an intimidating scholastic environment as the new guy, particularly given my last name. So I began in 1re secondaire, which explains why my brother Sacha and I were separated by just one grade despite being born exactly two years apart.
The students I met in my first few weeks at Brébeuf asked me a lot of questions that mystified me. Many of their questions revealed how unaware I was of Québécois slang, having grown up in Ontario French immersion and with the rather formal French spoken at home. One of the first things I was asked was, “Are you a bollé?” The word loosely translates as “brain.” And some, upon hearing my unaccented English, accused me of being a bloke, to which I simply shrugged, not realizing that they were trying hard to insult me. After a few days of such taunting, I suspect they decided that I was either impervious to insults or simply mocking them right back by not reacting. The truth is that their insults and swear words were for the most part entirely unintelligible to me, and I simply hadn’t the faintest idea how to respond to them.
I finally understood that although Ottawa was less than a two-hour drive from Montreal, the culture gap between the two cities was closer in distance to a light year.
The issues that inflamed many of the students were the same ones I had followed with my family from Ottawa. But this was the first time I was surrounded by people who had been living with the weight of these issues every day, and it took me a while to fully appreciate the attitudes they generated.
Sometimes things at school got personal. A few students would try to get a rise out of me by bringing up dirty laundry about my parents’ separation, which had long been a staple of the tabloids. I had been somewhat insulated from this in Ottawa, both because I was well surrounded by a great group of friends who had known me since kindergarten, and because elementary-school children tend not to be as cruel and vulgar as older kids. In the Hobbesian world of high school, some kids regard anything and anyone as fair game. One day an older kid came up and thrust into my hands a notorious picture of my mother that had appeared in an adult magazine.
Hard as this may be to believe, I had never before seen that picture—never even knew of its existence. And obviously it set me reeling. But I knew this was a critical moment. If I acted shocked or hurt, it would be open season on me for the rest of high school. Everyone would know they could get a rise out of me by shoving the latest bit of gossip in my face. So I simply waved it off, leaving the bully unsatisfied, and he went off to find an easier mark.
I learned at Brébeuf not to give people the emotional response they are looking for when they attack personally. Needless to say, that skill has served me well over the years.
When most Canadian parents think about private schools, they tend to picture small, intimate classes overseen by highly attentive instructors versed in the latest pedagogical techniques. Brébeuf wasn’t like that. We students were taught in classes of thirty-six, with desks packed in a six-by-six grid, and the prevailing instructional method might be described as “sage on the stage,” where the professor lectured and we wrote down what he said.
My high-school years predated the “self-esteem” movement that has swept the educational profession in recent years, in which a great deal of effort is made to help students feel good about themselves. Again, not at Brébeuf. In fact, several of the teachers seemed intent on knocking our self-esteem down a peg or two. In 4e secondaire, or Grade 10, our French teacher, M. Daigneault, complained that students these days had no culture—and culture was like marmalade: the less you have, the more thinly you need to spread it.
M. Daigneault’s course went beyond the standard curriculum to incorporate close study of thirteen works that met his high standard of classic literary excellence, including David Copperfield, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Les Misérables, and Don Quixote. In our first week of class, he barked at us: “Who were the Thermopylae? Come on, who can tell me? You know-nothings! Who can tell me who the Thermopylae were? I dare you!” Warily, I looked around the class. Everyone was uncomfortably staring at their desks, the floor, at anything but him. I sighed. I was going to be that guy. I slowly put up my hand.
“The Thermopylae were not a who,” I said. “Thermopylae is a what. It was the mountain pass where King Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans held off the entire Persian army.” M. Daigneault nodded, pursed his lips, and resumed his rant. I managed to get some grudging praise from him that day, but really, I had an unfair advantage where that sort of knowledge was concerned because my father had engaged us in the classics from a very young age.
Years later, while a teacher in B.C., I returned to Brébeuf to visit some of my former teachers, including M. Da
igneault. We had a fascinating conversation about a late-career conversion he’d had away from the rigid, intellectual, teacher-driven pedagogy he’d excelled at and imposed on us toward something much more like the more modern, student-centred approach that I had been trained in on the West Coast. Oddly, I found myself reassuring him that the rigour and excellence he had demanded and imposed had made him one of the best teachers I’d ever had, and that his demanding approach was one of the things that I strove to inject into my somewhat different teaching environment.
But however grounded I had been in the classics as a boy, I found myself tripped up on M. Daigneault’s final quiz, which required each student to pick a card at random to determine which book he would be tested on. My card got me Robinson Crusoe. This, I remember thinking, will be a breeze. I had read Defoe’s novel years earlier, like most of the books on the list, and figured I knew it well enough that I didn’t need to reread it for the course. So I didn’t, and, sure enough, my youthful laziness was unmasked by the professor’s pointed questioning. But I did scrape through.
As we grew older as students, we chose courses that would shepherd us into streams of either arts or science. Though I had imagined myself going to law school straight from CEGEP, I wanted to keep my options open, and so I took both history and physics, which was an unusual mix. Physics in particular fascinated me, and still does, because the idea of a fundamental, primary understanding of energy and matter and how they interact appealed to me greatly.
Some assignments at Brébeuf were closely aligned with the politics of the day. One semester we held a debate on the topic of Quebec’s future. The resolution set sovereignty against federalism, and the teacher thought it would be hilarious to stick young Trudeau on the separatist side. Similarly, the federalist case would be made by Christian, the class’s smartest hard-core Péquiste. I cobbled together a debating position drawing from arguments I had heard over time from others, but I knew it would be difficult to argue against my own convictions. I did my best, but ultimately I felt the exercise was a success only in that it illustrated for me a truth about myself: if my heart isn’t in it, I can’t argue something convincingly. And my heart has always been in Canada.
Common Ground Page 5