Michel’s death had been sudden and shocking. My father’s passing happened gradually, week by week, with Sach and me by his side. By the end of September, on a quiet Friday afternoon, it was time, and he let go.
Amidst our grief, I knew we would have to deal with a significant level of media attention as soon as his death was announced. The family home on Avenue des Pins would be surrounded by journalists, as it had been a few weeks earlier when his condition became known. We would not be able to come and go at this private time without the glare of cameras in our faces. Sach chose to stay in the house and hunker down, but I reached for the phone.
I called my old pal Terry DiMonte, a Montreal radio host, and told him I was coming over to crash at his house for the weekend. I liked the idea of hiding from the press in a place where they would never bother me: with one of their own. For the next few days, undisturbed except for the downtown meetings to work through the details of the state funeral with my brother, the government protocol office, and a few of my dad’s old confidants, I was able to work through my grief in peace, surrounded by a handful of my closest friends.
It was also over that weekend that I wrote the eulogy. I knew that the newspapers and television tributes would be filled with my father’s political accomplishments, so I wanted to share that side of him that people saw but didn’t really know: how great he was as a father. My friends helped me recall a few stories that anchored the speech, I put in a few references to the values and vision for Canada that had shaped not just a generation but his own sons, and I tried to offer a little closure to wrap up the outpouring of support from across the country with one last good cry.
The Tuesday morning of the service, as I was getting ready to head to Notre-Dame Basilica, I had Shakespeare on my mind. I thought about the “honourable men” who were my father’s political foes, I thought about “praising” versus “burying,” and I decided, impulsively, to start the eulogy with a bit of an edge. Perhaps something of a shot across the bow, I can concede now, but at the time, I have to say that I didn’t overthink it; it just felt right.
As for the ending, well, I could end only one way: by reminding him, and the world, that I loved him.
And always will.
Canada lost Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the autumn of 2000. Sacha, Sarah, and I lost our dad. He prepared us well for that eventuality, but you’re never really ready to lose a parent. Nobody is. It’s one of the biggest changes life presents. Parents are the centre of a person’s solar system, even as an adult. My dad had a stronger gravitational pull than most, so his absence was bound to leave a deep and lasting void.
Canadians were overwhelmingly supportive of me and my family. I’ll never forget how kind and warm everyone was, almost without exception. Not many people get to lean on more than 30 million others when their dad passes away. At the same time, the change was immediate and overwhelming. When my dad left public life, I was thirteen years old. I went through my teen years and into adulthood in relative anonymity. After my dad’s funeral, I was suddenly recognizable to people I passed on the street.
I felt my father’s absence acutely. It was sad and profound, but freeing at the same time. I said in my eulogy for him that it was “up to us, all of us” to embody the values he stood for, now that he was no longer with us. Looking back, that advice was for myself as much as for anyone else.
People often ask me if I regret the fact that my father is no longer around to give me advice, especially now that I have followed in his footsteps as leader of the Liberal Party. Like everyone else who has lost a parent, I miss my dad a lot, but not in this regard. We had a close, deep relationship. For my entire life, he had shared with me his values, his perspective, and his passion, while teaching me to be rational, responsible, and rigorous. Because of that, I feel I need only listen deep within myself to hear his voice in almost any situation.
He’s always there in spirit, and his spirit is always encouraging.
Chapter Five
Two Life-Changing Decisions
Politics was the last thing on my mind after my father’s death. I wanted to get back to Vancouver, back to my career as a teacher, and come to grips with the fact that my dad, who had taken up so much space in my life, was no longer around.
In the days after the funeral, I vaguely recall being approached to run for the Liberals, but I made it perfectly clear that I had no interest in doing so. I had a teaching career that I valued, that I was good at, and in which I knew I was making a difference. Entering politics was something that I thought might be a possibility one day, but only if it was on my terms. I had always stayed away from the traditional political world, acutely aware that my name would have far more weight than any of my words or deeds: I was never a Young Liberal, and I never went to conventions or other Liberal events. That world simply did not appeal to me.
I returned to teaching, trading the private system for the public. I threw the weight of my new-found public image behind causes I believed in, such as avalanche safety, but mostly tried to stay under the radar.
My father’s old friend Jacques Hébert, who had started Katimavik in the late 1970s as Canada’s national youth service program, offered me a position on its board of directors. Frankly, I was a little surprised the program still existed; I remembered the hunger strike Jacques had launched when he was a senator to protest the Mulroney government’s axing of it. But I recognized that youth service could fill a void that I had seen in our high schools: opportunities to contribute to and connect with the community at large, giving young people a sense that changing the world in meaningful ways wasn’t something they had to grow up first to do but instead could do right now.
In Katimavik, young volunteers worked for not-for-profit organizations and followed an educational curriculum that involved using their second official language, learning about environmental stewardship and Canadian culture, and developing leadership skills. Each year more than a thousand young Canadians, residing in Katimavik houses across the country, contributed to the work of over five hundred partner organizations. Over the life of the program, more than thirty-five thousand young Canadians have participated in Katimavik initiatives set in more than two thousand communities. It had an enormous impact on this country, one that shouldn’t be understated. Along with learning the value of volunteerism and civic engagement, participants discovered much about Canada by spending the better part of a year in three different regions with youth from other parts of the country. Fundamentally, Katimavik was about young Canadians building a better country, one community at a time.
My greatest frustration with the program was that every year, about ten times as many young people applied to the program as we had funding for. Ten thousand young Canadians, often unsure about their next step after high school, would offer to serve their country with their energy and efforts, and we would turn away nine out of ten. Any Katimavik alum will tell you it was a life-changing experience. That a country as successful as Canada would not choose to offer young people more opportunities to become active, community-minded citizens while helping local organizations was something I wanted to fix. And still do.
After another year or so on the West Coast, I was ready to head back home to Quebec. I loved Vancouver, had a great group of friends, loved the mountains and the ocean, loved the lifestyle, but at thirty, I was starting to feel that it was time to settle down and possibly start a family. I couldn’t imagine that happening anywhere other than Montreal.
I missed living in French—teaching it just wasn’t enough—and it was hard for me to imagine spending the rest of my life with someone who didn’t share my language and culture. I also missed, and felt I could help, my mother, who was having an excruciatingly difficult time stabilizing her mental health after the deaths in the family. Living in Vancouver, thousands of kilometres away, I felt frustrated that I was unable to provide my surviving parent with the support she needed.
; Finding a teaching job in Montreal was more complicated than I expected. My B.C. teaching credentials would need an overhaul of sorts before I could be accredited in Quebec, and while I was looking into the process, I decided it was time for a change of pace. In the fall of 2002, I started at the University of Montreal’s École Polytechnique, to develop my scientific side by studying engineering. I’ve always loved engineering: the practical application of math and science to real-world situations appealed to me deeply. From a young age, logic puzzles and math problems had been a favourite pastime of mine, and I relished the opportunity to take on a fresh intellectual challenge.
I also liked that it was entirely unexpected—at least for those who didn’t know me well. Ever since the funeral, people had been watching for signs that I was headed into politics, and this unanticipated step was a way of thumbing my nose at them.
While I was a student at Polytechnique, I met Sophie.
In June of 2003, I was asked to help out with the Starlight Children’s Foundation gala. It was a major production. Tony Bennett supplied the musical entertainment, and Belinda Stronach arrived with Prince Andrew on her arm. I co-hosted the evening with media personality Thea Andrews and a charming Quebec TV and radio host whom I felt I had met before. Her name was Sophie Grégoire, and I caught myself staring at her thinking, Why do I know this woman?
When we finally got to chat, Sophie answered my question. She had gone to school with my brother Michel, and had met me a few times back then. There was a four-year age gap between us, a wide chasm when you’re in the teenage years. Still, I remembered her face. And now, of course, the age difference meant nothing.
Sophie had known Michel since the third grade, when they attended Mont-Jésus-Marie school in Montreal, and their paths crossed again at Brébeuf, where she dated one of Miche’s best friends. Sophie had regarded Michel as a soft-hearted rebel who loved the outdoors and hated cliques. Brébeuf, as I well knew, could be a snobby place, but Michel had carved out a reputation for himself as a sort of anti-snob.
Five years had passed since Michel died, and the emotional impact of his death had yet to fade for me. (I’m still waiting . . . ) But it had healed enough that I could laugh and reminisce with Sophie about Michel’s high-school antics without becoming morbid or maudlin.
Sophie and I had a great time that evening, despite difficulties getting some of the inebriated guests to quiet down during Tony Bennett’s performance. In fact we bonded over our shared ineffectualness. We spent much of the evening chatting and flirting, and by the time the gala was over I knew she was a very special woman. Then the night was over, and she was gone.
She sent me a quick email a few days later, saying how nice it had been to see me and wishing me the best. I was delighted to hear from her, but was way too chicken to reply. I had already sensed that this was no ordinary encounter and no ordinary woman, and even just meeting for coffee would likely quickly escalate into the rest of my life.
I told myself that if it was destiny, then it would happen, and there was no need to rush things. And sure enough, a few months later, at the end of August, I was walking up Boulevard Saint-Laurent when a voice passing in the other direction offered a cursory “Salut, Justin.”
Sophie! I wheeled and raced after her, and as she stood there, arms folded, I said the only thing that came to mind: “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your email!”
She raised an eyebrow, impressed despite herself that I knew I’d come across as a bit of a heel for ignoring her.
“I’ll make it up to you. Let me take you out for dinner,” I offered.
“Drop me a line sometime and we’ll see” was her casual reply, and she walked off.
It took a few weeks of chatting by email and phone, but I was persistent. Sophie finally agreed to a dinner date, on the condition that we go somewhere neither of us had ever been. To get outside my comfort zone, I called Sacha for advice, as his tastes have always been even more adventurous than mine. He suggested the Khyber Pass, on Duluth, for Afghan food. Sophie liked the idea, and we were on for the following week. She gave me directions to her apartment, “right in front of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Rose Garden,” she offered helpfully, no doubt with a bit of a wink. I never admitted this to her, but I had to look it up.
I didn’t exactly roll up to her front door in a horse-drawn carriage. I had driven a Volkswagen Jetta TDI for some years, a car that had faithfully carried me back and forth between Vancouver and Montreal when I was living in B.C. But the Jetta had been stolen that summer, and I hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. Instead, I was driving Michel’s old Ford Bronco, which had sentimental value but not much else going for it. After his death it had spent the entire winter buried under snow at the top of the Kokanee Glacier logging road, and no matter how I tried I couldn’t get rid of the musty smell it had acquired. Sophie didn’t complain, but she did tease me about it.
She and I talked about a hundred different things over dinner, and we always circled back to Michel, my father, and shared memories from the 1980s. Sophie had not only known Michel through their grade-school years; she also had crossed paths with Sacha through mutual friends, often on the ski hill.
It was as if we had lived parallel lives that were now being drawn together at last. It is one thing to be attracted to a woman, to find her witty or poised or smart or beautiful. Sophie was all these things, and both of us delighted in what she now refers to as “the beautiful discomfort” of flirtation. But if the object of your affection doesn’t understand what makes you tick, superficial attraction isn’t enough. Much of what made me tick was my family, including the father and brother I would never see again. So it’s no coincidence that I was strongly drawn to this incredible woman who had known my family in happier times.
The most durable kind of love is woven together from all the things rooted in an intertwined past, including shared values and culture. These are things you don’t have to explain, and probably couldn’t if you tried. It made meeting Sophie less about getting to know someone new and more like discovering someone you’d both known and dreamed of all your life. And it was why I began to understand over dinner that night that I had returned to Montreal for Sophie, even before I knew her name.
I didn’t want to ruin things by chasing her away with overly romantic statements, so I tried to stay generally cool. After dinner, while we were walking along Rue Prince-Arthur’s pedestrian promenade in search of ice cream, Sophie said, “Let’s go to karaoke! C’mon, it’ll be fun!”
The karaoke craze had peaked and most popular bars had sold their machines long ago. But I had seen an Asian place on Rue de la Montagne that still catered to amateur crooners, so we drove there in the Bronco, booked a private booth, and sat together singing the soundtrack from the film Moulin Rouge. Sophie’s singing voice was excellent; mine not so much. It didn’t matter. I was becoming thoroughly enchanted by her, could feel myself relaxing and trusting my feelings in a way that I rarely had allowed myself to before. I felt both vulnerable and safe at the same time, and the confluence of happy emotions had me off balance, so much so that I actually walked into a lamppost outside the bar. (It being a first date, I couldn’t convince Sophie that I wasn’t actually a klutz: it took years of my never again doing anything of the sort for her to understand the state I had been in that night.)
Back at my apartment, we sat on the couch and talked into the wee hours. The more we revealed about ourselves, the closer we became, and our conversation eventually moved into the realm of sad secrets. Sophie told me about her battle with bulimia as a high-school student and about the loneliness she had experienced as an only child. I in turn told her about my tumultuous childhood.
As our first date drew to a close, I felt a giddy sense that Sophie would be the last woman I ever dated, a feeling that was so strong I actually said, “I’m thirty-one years old, so I’ve been waiting for you for thirty-one years. Can we just skip the boyf
riend/girlfriend part and go straight to engaged, since we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together?” The powerful emotions had us both laughing and crying at the same time. The intensity and clarity of that moment left us both at a loss for further words. I drove her home in a loaded, but comfortable, silence.
As I’ve said a few times when I’ve told this story, it then took Sophie a few weeks to realize I was serious, and a few more to realize I was right. Yet for me this had been one of those moments of total clarity, in which I had a quiet, unshakable certainty about how things were going to unfold.
My friends and family adored Sophie; I fell in love with her parents as well. The following year Sophie and I bought an apartment together just off Avenue Van Horne, and for the first time in my life, I moved in with my girlfriend. We travelled together; challenged each other physically, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually; and discovered truths about ourselves through each other.
Sophie is the most colourful, articulate, passionate, and profound spirit I’ve ever met. Her complex personality is filled with contrasts. An extreme skier able to tackle the toughest pitches and drops, she’s also soft, graceful, and maternal. Artistic creativity and a great sense of humour mix well with her strong personal discipline and focus. She’s an only child, but has always been curious and drawn to others. Her vulnerability, intelligence, and intuitiveness are exhilarating, and with every passing day I can only love her more.
On October 18, 2004, I took her out to visit my father’s gravesite in Saint-Rémi, where I quietly asked for his blessing on what would have been his eighty-fifth birthday, and a few hours later in a beautiful candlelit Old Montreal hotel room filled with rose petals, I asked her to marry me so we could build a life together.
The weekend before, I had visited Sophie’s parents at their Sainte-Adèle home in the Laurentians north of the city. As a gesture of old-fashioned respect I actually got down on one knee in the damp fall leaves in front of her father while we were taking a walk through the woods, and asked permission to marry his only daughter. With the characteristic gruff humour Jean always uses to mask his sensitivity, he said, “Yes, of course, of course. Now get up! Your pants are getting wet.”
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