Onward through Burkina Faso and into Ivory Coast, then Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Again, more contrasts: beautiful places and friendly people, interspersed with wrongs both historical and current, from slavers’ forts from which millions of Africans were sent to lives of bondage on the other side of the Atlantic, to current excesses like an empty cathedral bigger than Saint Peter’s and a presidential palace complete with crocodiles in a moat.
It was late December when we reached the Nigerian border, and time to move on to the next phase of our trip. We caught an Aeroflot flight out of Cotonou to Helsinki via Malta and Moscow. Marc then headed home to Montreal while the remaining three of us applied for our Chinese tourist visas at the local embassy while staying in a one-room apartment belonging to the aunt of our Finnish travel friend. We spent Christmas that year in Helsinki, but by New Year’s we were hurtling across the steppes on the Trans-Siberian Express.
It was another unforgettable experience, notwithstanding the appalling food and service aboard the train. The USSR, never known for either the appeal of its cuisine or the quality of its customer service, had been dead for a few years by then, yet the idea of satisfying consumer expectations obviously was still an alien concept.
The timing of our trip meant that the train was filled with Chinese students returning from Russian universities to celebrate their country’s New Year’s holiday. I spent much of the week enjoying the landscape, drawing sketches, and, appropriately, reading War and Peace. On New Year’s Eve, the train’s conductor, sensing an opportunity to practise his quite serviceable English, invited us to join him in consuming large amounts of vodka and discussing the state of the world. If the stories from his time of service with the Soviet army in Afghanistan were fascinating, his casual racism toward our fellow passengers was less so. When the sun rose on January first, 1995, I made a solemn promise—which I’ve kept—to never drink vodka again.
The trip ended with a ride on the branch line leading into Beijing, nine thousand kilometres from Moscow. From there we explored Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Bangkok, and points in between, wrapping up our itinerary on the beautiful Thai island of Ko Samui, where my father had taken my brothers and me a few years earlier. To commemorate the journey, I had a local artist tattoo an image of the earth on my left shoulder.
Finally, I made my way back home late that spring, first to Vancouver to visit my mother’s family, and then to Whistler, where Michel was living and working at the time. My return to Canada gave me much cause to reflect on my year away from the only country I could ever call my own.
No journey so extensive and all-encompassing can leave a traveller unchanged, and I was no exception. Like most Canadians who have been fortunate enough to travel abroad, I came back with a heightened appreciation for our country’s unique mix of blessings. I couldn’t articulate everything I experienced in the trip and catalogue all the ways it had influenced my point of view. The change was general and broadly based. It deepened my sense of our need for awareness and understanding of people from different backgrounds, and my conviction that if we choose to emphasize it, the common ground we share can dwarf any difference. I had also had plenty of opportunities to observe that communities where people are open to difference, to others, are happier and more dynamic than places that are more insular and closed off.
The incredible diversity I experienced while steadily travelling east for a year caused me to notice something that I had taken for granted at home. Wherever I went, there were locals. A clear majority. A mainstream. And any minorities, be they North Africans in Paris, European expats in Burkina Faso, Lebanese supermarket owners in Ivory Coast, Chinese students in Russia, Australians in Thailand, or even tribal or cultural minorities that made up a significant chunk of the country’s population, were always “others,” an exception to the rule, to the national identity.
In contrast, our modern Canadian identity is no longer based on ethnic, religious, historical, or geographic grounds. Canadians are of every possible colour, culture, and creed, and continue to celebrate and revel in our diversity. We have created instead a national identity that is based on shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity. And while many of the almost one hundred countries I’ve travelled through in my life aspire to those values, Canada is pretty much the only place that defines itself through them. Which is why we’re the only place on earth that is strong not in spite of our differences but because of them.
That summer and fall in Montreal with my dad, I got to know my four-year-old half-sister, Sarah, a bit better. Her mother, Deborah Coyne, was a constitutional lawyer who was a good friend of my father’s.
I had seen Sarah a few times when she was a baby, and was glad to see her a few more times as a precocious little girl. Truthfully, it was a delight to see my father, approaching eighty, carrying Sarah around on his shoulders as he had done with my brothers and me when we were her age.
In September 2000, a few days before Dad passed away and after Sarah and Deborah’s final visit with him, I would take Sarah out rock climbing—an activity that I know my dad would have loved to have seen us do together.
After the funeral, with Dad gone, we lost touch. I remain proud of my half-sister and look forward to connecting again in the future.
My first year back at McGill went well, with new courses and new friends, but in my second year I became unmotivated. I loved the classes and the teaching experiences, but after some honest reflection, I realized my life was in a bit of a rut. I was still living at home with my father, and as much as I loved him, I needed to move out on my own. Which, I rapidly concluded, also meant leaving Montreal.
My trip had had a deeper effect on me than I’d thought. When you travel away from a place where you have spent many years of your life, you leave behind a negative space, an empty contour of the person who left. When you return from your travels, you expect—and are expected—to occupy that same space again, but it never quite fits you, because you’ve changed. It’s not only uncomfortable for you but mildly disconcerting to those who know you well.
I had, I knew, returned from that journey different from the guy who left. Now Christmas 1996 was approaching. It would mark my twenty-fifth birthday, as good a time as any to step outside the comfortable space that my friends, my family, and my personal experiences had created for me in Montreal.
Never less than realistic and honest about life, my father understood and agreed with me. Sacha was still living with him in the house on Avenue des Pins, so Dad wouldn’t lack for company when I left. But where to go?
The answer came easily.
Through all the family trips to British Columbia we had taken over the years, I had dreamed of living on the West Coast. The scale of the West had been both intriguing and a little intimidating to me as a young boy, exemplified by the coast and the mountains and by those massive trees—the giant Douglas firs of Stanley Park that the three young Trudeau boys, arms outstretched and connected at fingertips, could not even half encircle. But what really drew me out west was family. My Sinclair roots, and my brother Michel, who was by then living in the Interior. In January 1997 I headed for Vancouver on my way up to Whistler. My plan was to find work as a snowboarding instructor.
Skiing was in our family’s blood. Every one of us was a solid skier, and each had an individual style. My father’s was strong, aggressive, and very clean. My mother had learned to ski at Whistler as a child, and she had beautiful form. She prided herself on never falling, and I cannot recall ever seeing her take a spill. Sacha, Michel, and I all learned how to ski when we were barely out of our toddler years. Of the three of us, I have to confess that Michel was the best, perhaps because, while trying hard to keep up with his older brothers, he developed skills that we didn’t need. Sacha hewed closest to our dad’s tracks in all things, including skiing, and developed the most elegant technique. My approach was more basic. I never quite got the ae
sthetic rhythm of turning. My goal was always to get down to the bottom of the hill as fast as possible, which generated a steady stream of spectacular wipeouts.
When it became obvious that I would never distinguish myself within the Trudeau family with my skiing ability, I decided to pursue something new. When I was fourteen, I was inspired by the opening sequence of A View to a Kill, in which James Bond rips a ski from the front of a snowmobile and rides it as a snowboard. I promptly mail-ordered a board from Vermont and taught myself how to use it at Mont Tremblant. And so, when relocating to British Columbia in my twenties, I intended to resume snowboarding in the interests of both fun and profit.
Before becoming an instructor I would have to obtain level one certification in the sport, which would take some time. To cover my room and board (not so much room as a mattress in a friend’s loft, and not so much board as a few daily slices of Misty Mountain Pizza), I managed to get myself hired as a doorman at a popular nightclub called the Rogue Wolf. I enjoyed the work, so I kept the nightclub job even after I earned my certificate and began working at the snowboarding school. My schedule was practically non-stop. For six days a week I was at the snowboarding school, starting early in the morning and working until five. And four nights a week, after a few hours of rest, I did a shift at the Rogue Wolf, where I usually worked until two or three in the morning.
I loved the schedule. Responsible for kids all day, responsible for keeping the peace all night. And at no point did my last name come into play.
Of all the guys working the door at the Rogue Wolf on the busiest nights, I was the smallest. One of the others, Peter Roberts, who remains a good buddy to this day, had been with the Canadian Forces and had even trained my brother Sacha at CFB Gagetown when he was in the reserves. Pete imposed respect easily through his mere presence, but I had to come up with other ways of getting things done. Despite being less physically intimidating than the others, I was usually designated the first responder when situations at the club began turning sour. If a biker walked in without paying the five-dollar cover charge, I’d be sent to collect the cash. At first I suspect they were just hazing the rookie, but later I’d get sent in first because I usually got results without confrontation. Needless to say, during my time at the Rogue Wolf I learned a lot about human nature.
I discovered that the secret of an effective bouncer is to be diplomatic and unintimidatable. It’s also important, of course, to be sober in both the literal and abstract senses of the word. By keeping his wits about him, a good bouncer can almost always avoid having to engage in any sort of physical skirmish. In my case, my wits were my most important asset. The gigantic bouncers you see outside some popular nightclubs don’t care very much if things become physical; they can just bear-hug unwanted patrons, carry them through the club, and dump them outside. I couldn’t do that, and I wanted to avoid punches. Any time a punch was thrown my way, it meant I had screwed up by failing to resolve the situation firmly but peaceably.
My favourite trick when dealing with an intoxicated would-be brawler was to say, “Look, pal, you don’t want to take me on in here because these other bouncers will jump on you. So if you come outside with me, we’ll settle this between us.”
Eager for a fight, or at least for the appearance of a fight, the guy would immediately oblige and head for the parking lot, on the way bragging to everyone who cared to listen how he was going to whip my butt or clean my clock or some other description of the beating I could expect. I never gave him the chance. I would see him out the door, hand him his jacket, flash him a smile, and wish him good night before returning inside, which usually incited him to swear more loudly and call me a chicken.
“You’re right,” I would call to him. “I don’t want to fight. Now go home and sleep it off, and I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
The lessons learned at the Rogue Wolf were broad enough to have some practical applications in politics. Whether you are trying to assert your will in a barroom confrontation or a political altercation, the biggest obstacle to overcome is the human ego. Once a disagreement begins, no one wants to back down. The trick is to find a way for your opponent to save face, like leaving the aggressive drunk waving his fist in triumph, but in the rain. Meanwhile you’re inside, staying warm and dry and getting your job done.
Along with the chance to develop and practise some basic psychological tactics, working at the Rogue Wolf gave me a glimpse into the ways that young people can self-destruct through their use of alcohol and drugs. I watched too many people do too many stupid things simply because they were bored, and I saw too many testosterone-fuelled young men assume that the only way a night out can end successfully is in a fight. Being dependent on drugs and alcohol for your happiness is a trap that has ruined too many lives, and I resolved long ago that it wouldn’t ruin mine.
There were equally valuable tactics to be learned from my other job, teaching kids how to handle a snowboard. We instructors functioned as part of Blackcomb’s innovative “Ride Tribe” teen-training program, which hadn’t proved very popular in the beginning. The Ride Tribe was considered a holding bin for kids who didn’t have any snowboarding friends or were too old to be happy riding while their parents skied. My friend Sean Smillie changed this image with a program he developed from scratch. He started by choosing a handful of instructors who he knew loved to teach kids and found new ways for them to pass their knowledge on to their students. The success of Sean’s program taught me how innovative teaching methods and a high-energy teaching staff can motivate even the most jaded students.
Sean recognized that snowboard instruction didn’t have to follow the old ski-school model of turn-stop-turn-stop-repeat. Snowboarding is an exciting sport, maybe the most exciting activity on snow. In the right milieu and with the right instruction, it offers a steeper learning curve than most sports. After just a week on the mountain, most beginning snowboarders are able to perform carving manoeuvres and simple tricks, which is why the sport grew so rapidly in the late nineties. Sean capitalized on this by recruiting teachers whose aggressive snowboarding techniques challenged their students.
And it worked. Kids who passed through our program began to tell their friends about it, and soon we heard of copycat programs starting up at places like Vale and Aspen. The Ride Tribe program had always been a barely break-even proposition at Blackcomb. Now, almost overnight, it turned into a money-maker. The magazine Teen People sent folks to do a feature on Ride Tribe, giving it the sort of promotional bonanza that my Ottawa colleagues in politics might refer to as “earned media.”
Any teacher will tell you that the most rewarding moments of their profession occur when the light bulb switches on—when they witness a student suddenly “getting it,” whatever it happens to be. In snowboarding, those light-bulb moments arrived several times a day for me, and each time they gave me a kick. Part of the reason for these sudden insights lies in the nature of snowboarding compared to skiing. Skiing instructors essentially communicate tips to their students, but teaching how to handle a snowboard involves revealing secrets. Tips are fine, but secrets are sensational. When the kids managed to turn a snowboarding secret into a new move, they could barely contain their excitement. For the teacher, it was the equivalent of watching an entire class suddenly understand trigonometry just by rotating their hips.
One of the biggest challenges I faced as a snowboarding instructor was to make my know-it-all teenagers aware of all that they didn’t know about the sport and about the alpine world generally. This illustrated another important distinction between skiing and snowboarding.
Skiing takes years to master, and the time gives everybody on skis a chance to become familiar with the risks and rhythms of traffic on a busy hill. The same isn’t true of snowboarders, some of whom might be rocketing down intermediate and advanced runs after only a few days. They don’t yet know the etiquette required when merging trails or the safest places to stop on a steep hill. This
is one reason skiers often complain about the bad manners of snowboarders. It’s not that boarders are inherently boorish; it’s just that they usually have less experience in alpine environments (and the blind spot created by travelling sideways doesn’t help, either). Each time I rode up on the chairlifts with students, I would ask them to look down and predict which skier or snowboarder on the hill would go where, who would stop to rest, and who appeared most likely to crash. It was akin to teaching defensive driving; I wanted my students to be aware of everything and everyone around them.
My experience at Blackcomb gave me insights into the art of controlling large groups of children. Parents started dropping their children with us before eight in the morning, but we wouldn’t head up the mountain until nine, leaving us an hour to spend with a gaggle of kids aged twelve to sixteen. As anyone who has been around teenagers knows, kids at that age tend to roll their eyes at authority figures before either wandering off or making trouble. So while I organized loads of activities for them, I knew my most important role was to project confidence and leadership. If I let it waver, even for a moment, there was a good chance I’d lose the group before we took a single snowboarding run. Before long, I realized I had a talent for engaging these kids.
The biggest effect my experience as a snowboard instructor had on me was to point me solidly back toward teaching. All the joy, all the satisfaction, all the fulfillment I felt at the end of each day with the snowboarding class convinced me that I had much to offer as a teacher and that teaching, in turn, had much to offer me. I had been a camp counsellor, a whitewater river guide, a snowboarding instructor, a bartender, and a bouncer. All these positions had left me wondering if I would ever be happy with a “real” job. Teaching was very much a real job, and I was eager to get started once again.
When I discussed my rekindled interest in teaching with my aunt Heather, she informed me that I could qualify for the University of British Columbia’s twelve-month education program. At that moment, everything became clear. At the end of the ski season I headed back to Montreal to pick up a few prerequisite courses at McGill, then said my goodbyes to friends and family, and returned to Vancouver with a new focus.
Common Ground Page 9