I benefited greatly from the rigour and demands of the curriculum at Brébeuf and from the environment I was raised in. But despite the fine education, like many teenage boys, I applied myself unevenly. I worked hard at the classes I liked, and went through the motions with the subjects that didn’t appeal to me. When I was bored, I would open a novel in my lap and escape the tedium of the classroom. I was always confident that I would be able to score a decent mark at exam time, and usually I did. But I was coasting through school. My teachers and I knew it.
One day, my math teacher decided enough was enough. After watching me drift through a half-hearted performance on a series of assignments, she called me into her office and sat me down for a serious talk. “Justin,” she said, “I have watched you slide your way through every class at this school. You’re smart enough to pull it off. But you’re not putting enough work into your studies.”
I began to tune out. I had heard variations on this speech several times, so the words didn’t make much of an impression on me. Then she dropped the bomb.
“Do you know what I think?” She paused, knowing her next words would bite. “I think maybe you believe that you don’t need to work hard because of who your father is.”
I was fifteen years old and in Grade 9, and this was the first time anyone had said such a thing to me. I’m sure some teachers had thought it, dancing around the issue when they were calling me out for being lazy. But no one had flat out accused me of trying to coast through school on my family name. Angrily, I blurted out, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Our father had always been careful to ingrain in us the principle that the Trudeau name was not a currency to be spent but a badge of responsibility to be worn. If the teacher had accused me of doing discredit to the Trudeau name, I might have accepted it as a reasonable claim. My father himself had told me several times that he was disappointed with my average academic performance at Brébeuf. But to suggest that I expected special treatment because of who my father was, well, that was simply wrong.
Yet the more I thought about her comment, the more I realized that her words were significant, even if I deeply disagreed with their premise. They made me understand that even if I wasn’t trying to trade on my family name, it wasn’t unnatural for people to suspect me of doing so. She had voiced a presumption that I knew I couldn’t ignore if I didn’t at least try to rise to my potential.
I went on to graduate from Brébeuf and earn two university degrees. During much of this period, my academic inconsistency was a source of concern not just to my teachers but to me as well. Eventually I came to understand that the problem was rooted in something more serious than a temporary bout of adolescent laziness. When I fairly deliberately flunked Experimental Psychology (the course’s emphasis seemed almost entirely to be on how to produce properly standardized lab reports, which annoyed me), it was a wake-up call that I had issues I needed to deal with.
It wasn’t an attention deficit, because I was more than capable of sustained focus on a subject when I felt like it. In fact, I could become so enthused about courses I enjoyed that I often became a sort of informal teacher’s assistant, helping other students with their problems.
Failing the Experimental Psych class led to a serious heart-to-heart with my father in his study at Avenue des Pins, where something extraordinary happened: I realized, and announced to him, that I was not like him. 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.
He was proud of the approval, the recognition; he was driven to show how smart he was, and he worked diligently at it. In contrast, I had always told myself that if I worked hard, it would be for a greater purpose than just a grade on a paper or plaudits from authority. I rebelled against jumping through hoops for their own sake and resented artificial competition.
But at the same time, I knew that I did face a real challenge: I was stuck with a mildly crippling form of perfectionism, as in the phrase “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” A light panic gripped me whenever I sat staring at a blank page, preparing to start an assignment. Embarking on an essay that I knew would never match others’ (let alone my own) expectations filled me with anxiety. Which, in turn, created a sort of subconscious defence mechanism that worked like this: if I choose not to give a project all of my effort, I cannot be judged negatively on the basis of the result. My father strove for and succeeded in reaching tremendous heights of achievement. I chose not to try nearly as hard, so why should anyone be surprised when my marks failed to match his?
Flunking Experimental Psych effectively killed any hope I had of going to McGill Law straight from CEGEP, which was what the best and the brightest did. I had sabotaged that path, perhaps as a way of forcing myself, and my father, to come to grips with the fact that I would never be the academic high achiever he was. That path was not mine.
I knew I was more than capable. Whenever I took a high-stakes one-off standardized test, such as the ones administered by Brébeuf to new applicants, the results were top-notch. On the SATs I took in my last year of high school, I scored 1400, putting me in the top 5 percent. This was good enough to get me into arts at McGill, despite my erratic grades. A few years later, when, mostly on a lark, I sat for the Law School Admission Test, I cleared the ninety-eighth percentile. So I knew I was smart: I just needed to find my own path. Which is why I chose to study literature. I would apply my intellect to something I was truly passionate about—reading—and give myself some time and some tools to understand myself better.
When I started at McGill University in the fall of 1991, my friends from Brébeuf remained at the centre of my social life, but I managed to make some new friends on campus, one of whom remains particularly important to this day.
I had been at McGill for just a week when I ran into Jonathan Ablett. Jon and I had gone to the same elementary school back in Ottawa and we encountered each other on the steps of the Shatner Building, the heart of the campus where most of the big student groups gathered. After we caught up on each other’s lives, Jon asked me if I had made many new friends at McGill. I shrugged, and offered that since I was a Montrealer, I already had lots of friends around and hadn’t really looked for more. The truth was, I didn’t know how I was going to make new friends, and wasn’t sure I wanted to try. Jon glanced around, beckoned to a long-haired guy standing nearby, and introduced him as Gerry Butts, vice-president of the McGill Debating Union. Today, almost twenty-five years later, Gerald is not just still a best friend; he is my closest advisor as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
On Gerry’s invitation, I joined the Debating Union, where we became fast friends and I spent the next year honing my skills and travelling to tournaments. It was an education on its own, focusing my ability to think on my feet, to spot a weakness in an opponent’s argument and exploit it with the right combination of logic and turn of phrase.
I also learned that debating at the college level is as much about the quick-witted ability of a stand-up comic as it is about logic and fine rhetoric. This was especially true whenever the resolution being debated was some frivolous subject such as whether baths are better than showers or whether winter is better than summer. Given those kinds of topics, the most successful debaters are gifted comedians. It took me a while to fully appreciate this, because my sense of humour is more on the wry side than the kind that generates belly laughs. Eventually, though, I learned the ropes and adjusted my delivery.
Debating also provided me with an interesting window into some of the important issues reverberating around university campuses in the early 1990s. Many of the outstanding McGill debaters were women who were active feminists. I remember going toe-to-toe over beers with a few of them on t
he issue of whether a man could be a feminist. Some argued that by definition alone, feminism demanded a female perspective, while I suggested that the exclusion of men was antithetical to the egalitarian principle at the core of feminist thought.
As you might imagine, there was significant overlap between the women in debating and both the McGill Women’s Union and the Sexual Assault Centre of McGill’s Students’ Society. When, in my second year, the centre began recruiting male facilitators, one such friend, Mary-Margaret Jones, encouraged me to get involved. Women’s issues had come to the fore for me with the horrific massacre at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique a few years before, which happened a stone’s throw from my high school. I had also grown weary of debating on either side of any issue: I wanted to use my communications skills in the service of something meaningful.
In addition to its crisis hotline, the Sexual Assault Centre had created an outreach group to meet with students at fraternities and residences, and I was part of the first cadre of men trained to join the women activists in leading discussion groups on sexual assault and date rape. We used role-playing exercises and other interactive methods to start students thinking about sexual assault in a different way. This new perspective was important, because many people believed that rape was something that happened when a stranger jumped out of the bushes. We wanted everyone to understand that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by people known to the victim, and are as much about power as they are about sex. We suggested communications methods that women could use to handle situations before they became violent and coercive, and we taught men how to recognize the messages women were sending them. It isn’t just “No” that means no. “I’m not feeling comfortable with this” also means no, as does “Maybe we should go back to the party.”
I like to think that our work at the Sexual Assault Centre began to have results, at least for the students if not for the institution. When McGill’s administration made a somewhat controversial staffing choice for the newly created post of sexual-assault ombudsperson, another student and I spoke with the university’s president about our concerns. It was a lesson for me on how resistant to dealing with delicate issues institutions can be: we were thanked for voicing our perspective and politely ignored.
Not surprisingly, my years at McGill were a time of major social transformation for me. I became less gangly and I felt more confident about my appearance, banishing some of my lingering teenage insecurities. I was still living at home with my father, who gave me no small measure of freedom, and I immersed myself in the pleasures and perils of an adult social life.
Until I was eighteen, about the only alcohol I had sampled was the odd glass of wine during dinner. My choice not to drink during high school qualified me as the designated driver at Brébeuf parties, the guy who said, “I don’t need alcohol to have a good time,” prompting other kids to roll their eyes. But I meant it, and I still do. With a few rare exceptions, notably the months surrounding my father’s death, over-consumption of alcohol has never been an issue in my life. A nice cold beer from time to time, a glass of wine with a good meal: I simply don’t drink much.
That said, I did go through a brief partying phase while at university. Friends had rented a fabulous apartment on Rue Émery, just around the corner from Théâtre St-Denis, and we had some great parties there. One evening, I became tipsy enough to put on the costume of the mascot for the McGill Martlets, the name given to some of the university’s athletic teams, and run out into the street. (Don’t ask how it had ended up in that apartment.) The mascot looks like an angry red swallow, and I decided that the peak of hilarity would be for that giant angry swallow to smack itself into the windows lining the street, startling the Saint-Denis café-goers. Suffice to say, this did not go over well, so my friends caught up with me, promised we were all going to an even better party, gently removed the slightly battered layers of plush, hailed a cab, stuffed me alone into the back seat, and gave the driver my home address.
When I arrived home, my father was returning from a dinner, and he was most unimpressed with the state I was in. The next morning he gave me a stern talking-to about the perils of alcohol, which I sat through grimly, not bothering to explain that of his three sons I was the most strait-laced and he had nothing to worry about. But I was in no state to argue.
I was dating my first serious girlfriend around this time. We had started going out back at Brébeuf, and the two of us were still hanging out with our old crowd. With all the new people I was meeting, it was a relief to sometimes not have to think about my last name and the effect it had on people when I first met them. I’ll admit that sometimes in those initial meetings I deliberately left out my last name. Ideally, I didn’t want them to hear “Trudeau” until I’d first had time to make a strong impression with my personality.
Sometimes this demanded a little improvisation on my part. My girlfriend was at Concordia, and I accompanied her to their debating club’s recruiting night even though I attended McGill. We were arguing a resolution that the city’s Olympic Stadium should be torn down and the materials used to build a bridge from Quebec to Newfoundland. When it was my turn to get up to contribute, I gave my name as Jason Tremblay. I felt a bit of a thrill: no one knew me, there were no consequences because I wasn’t joining the Concordia team in any case, and I got to speak without any expectations from anyone of how good I should be. For everyone in the room, I was a completely blank slate. Perhaps because of that absence of pressure, I argued quite well, suggesting light-heartedly that the bridge was a great idea, since blocking the current through the Strait of Belle Isle would surely divert the North Atlantic Gulf Stream toward Canada, resulting in a more Mediterranean climate on our east coast. “Just think about it,” I declaimed. “Olive oil from Nova Scotia!”
At the end of the meeting, the organizers asked me to join the squad. I shook my head ruefully: “I don’t go to Concordia,” I admitted, “and by the way, my name’s not Jason Tremblay.” I never wanted to hide my identity, but for a moment it was nice to step away from it.
The only other time I have ever given a false name was a few years later, when I started boxing at the east-end Club de Boxe Champion. It’s a bit intimidating at the best of times to walk into a real boxing gym and sign up, and this gym was a tough place, where being a former prime minister’s son wouldn’t have made me very popular, except perhaps as a punching bag. So I made it slightly easier for myself by signing in with a twist on my mother’s maiden name, Justin St-Clair. I wanted to be known first by my work ethic and skill, not by my parentage.
After about a year, my coach, Sylvain Gagnon, told me he’d figured out my real name, but by then I was established as a serious member of the gym community and it no longer mattered. And that was how I liked it: have people get to know me first, then my last name didn’t matter so much later.
Sometimes people were simply fascinated by the cachet of my last name and they would try to attach themselves to my social circle for the wrong reasons. I became attuned to that sort of thing over the years and developed a social sixth sense that continues to serve me today.
Whether the reaction of others to my name was good or bad, I didn’t like the idea that people would have preconceived expectations of me before they heard what I had to say in a debate or saw what I could deliver in a boxing ring. In either location, some of my opponents would either pull their punches or go out of their way to pummel me. I’d also learned that my natural caution was useful in all situations. With people I met in social situations, my instinct was to broadcast a strength of personality that would either define me before they knew my last name, or override (or at least mitigate) any preconceptions they had if they already knew it.
Of course I wasn’t the only one dealing with the challenge of what it meant to be “a Trudeau.” It affected my brothers as much as it affected me, and because each of our attitudes toward our last name tended to reflect our
relationship with our father, it brought out the personality differences between us. Sacha, who most faithfully strove to emulate our father’s example as an intellectual and ascetic, strengthened his defences and protected his privacy. Michel, in contrast, rebelled against my father’s influence and did his best to live life in almost complete anonymity, first going by Mike at summer camp, heading east to Dalhousie for his undergrad, and ultimately choosing the West as his home. I occupied the middle ground. My Trudeau identity was a source of great pride to me, but I also wanted to be judged on my own merits, as someone whose emotional temperament and intellectual attitudes stood apart from my father’s.
On occasion, my background and family name have led to incidents that were comic and surreal. Like the day, during a trip to Paris, I struck up a conversation on Boulevard Saint-Michel with a retired American professor who had made a name for himself translating Robert Frost’s poetry into French. He was an interesting and eminent character who, when I mentioned I was from Canada, began rhapsodizing about “that wonderful prime minister you had in the seventies, the one with the beautiful wife who ran away.”
I couldn’t resist. I said, “You mean Mom?”
An even more hilarious incident took place in 1992, when my father and I went on an eight-day rafting trip down the Tatshenshini River in Yukon and northern B.C. Our purpose for the journey was to help raise awareness of the potential environmental dangers to the region posed by a copper mine.
Dad and I were to meet in Whitehorse. I arrived a few days ahead, planning to do a little sightseeing on my own. By sheer social happenstance I met and made fast friends with a group of bikers in town for a summer motorcycle rally. They were all good guys, although they had the appearance you would expect of rough-and-ready bikers willing to ride thousands of kilometres on two wheels in the open air just for the joy of it. I grew closest to a biker named Big John, who owned a Harley-Davidson dealership near Pittsburgh. I didn’t tell Big John and his buddies my last name. As Americans, I thought, they likely wouldn’t have known it or cared anyway.
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