Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  I offered Sophie the ring, in front of the fireplace, in an antique Russian lacquer box Sacha had given me for this occasion. It was a nice gesture, my brother’s way of welcoming my choice to ask Sophie to join our family. I’ll never forget that moment, in which time was suspended while I waited for her answer. And waited. She was smiling and kind of nodding, with the tears in her eyes matching the ones in mine, and finally, I had to prompt her for an actual answer. Less than a year later, on May 28, 2005, we were married at Église Sainte-Madeleine d’Outremont. We pledged to stand by one another through thick and thin, through bad times and good.

  Our marriage isn’t perfect, and we have had difficult ups and downs, yet Sophie remains my best friend, my partner, my love. We are honest with each other, even when it hurts. She grounds and inspires me, challenges and supports me. On some days she provides the strength I need to fight; on others she provides the grace I need to stand down. We are blessed to journey together through this life. Given the changing fortunes of time, our love is what reminds us of what really matters.

  After a couple of years at Polytechnique, I recognized my studies for the intellectual indulgence they were. I never intended to become a professional engineer, and I realized that my other involvements were not just taking up more of my time but were more consistent with my primary skills and interests.

  I was by this time chairing the Katimavik board, a position that included successfully encouraging the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien to increase and stabilize funding to $20 million a year, and cross-country speeches to high schools on the value of community service and volunteerism.

  I was also on the board of the Canadian Avalanche Foundation, where I promoted avalanche safety through events at ski resorts across the West, pressured provincial governments in B.C. and Alberta to help fund the Canadian Avalanche Centre and its public advisories, and helped with private fundraising for the organization. Indeed, it afforded me my first opportunities to understand how philanthropically minded westerners are, as our annual fundraisers at the Calgary Zoo were extremely well attended by leading figures of the Alberta oil patch wanting to contribute to a worthwhile cause.

  For a year I had a weekly segment on French radio with CKAC, covering current events (and being their official 2004 Olympics correspondent from Athens), which gave me the chance to get to know the Quebec media and cultural scene from the inside. It also taught me how powerful radio can be as a means of connecting with people. You can’t be phony on radio: your voice and tone will give you away. And people don’t care what your name is after the first ten seconds. All that matters is what you have to say, how you say it, and that you’re speaking to people, not at them. Which is partly why to this day my favourite interviews to give are on the radio, in studio, engaging live with my interviewer.

  As well, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society brought me in to head up their Nahanni Forever campaign, to protect and expand the Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories. After a canoe trip down the Nahanni River with various environmentalists and journalists, I embarked upon a national speaking tour to promote the CPAWS campaign.

  In fact, I was getting called upon more and more often to speak at conferences and various events on youth or the environment, and although my teaching background and work with Katimavik gave me expertise on the former, I recognized that I needed a deeper understanding of environmental issues. And so in the fall of 2005 I decided yet again to continue my education, this time at the graduate level in environmental geography at McGill.

  It was also that fall that I approached a speaking agency to help me manage the requests I was getting. I had so far resisted the idea of charging speaking fees, but I needed help with arrangements and logistics. I also began to understand the market forces around public speaking, especially in regard to fundraising. The right speaker helps to fill a room and sell out tickets for a charity event, sponsors are more than happy to help in exchange for visibility at a successful community event, and a good speaker helps set the tone and frame the success of a professional conference. For many conferences, hiring a speaker is part of the budget, just like renting a hall, catering, or booking musical entertainment.

  Of course, I continued to speak pro bono for a number of causes I was engaged in, from Katimavik to winter sports safety to protecting the Nahanni. And whenever possible as I travelled across the country, I got in touch with local schools and offered to do a free event with them during the day, since I was in town in any case for a paid event.

  The more I spoke with young people all over the country, the more I began to gravitate toward a life of advocacy. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the issues youth cared about—education, the environment, their generation’s economic prospects—needed a stronger voice in the public sphere. I also began to feel that a generational change was approaching, one that might open up new possibilities. It was against this backdrop that I made my first steps into politics.

  Following the Liberals’ January 2006 election loss, Paul Martin stepped down as leader, and by that spring an eleven-person leadership race was well under way. I chose to stay away from it, but I did wonder whether, given my growing experience as a public speaker on youth and the environment with a message about citizen engagement, I might have something to offer a Liberal Party in renewal. I talked it over with Sophie, because it would be a big step with possible far-reaching consequences, but we both agreed I had something to contribute and therefore I should at least offer my help.

  I didn’t know where to begin, but I had heard that Tom Axworthy, whom I had come to known slightly over the years because he had been one of my father’s advisors, was heading up the party’s Renewal Commission. I called him up and offered to help out with youth issues. The commission was hoping that while much of the party was wrapped up in leadership strategies, a number of people would hunker down and build a tool kit of fresh ideas, policies, and principles that the next leader would be able to draw on to rebuild and renew the party.

  That summer my colleagues and I travelled across the country, listening to young people’s views on politics and on the Liberal Party in particular. Our goal was to produce a report that would recommend how the party could prompt young Canadians to vote Liberal. But after hearing from hundreds of young people, I concluded that our most pressing challenge wasn’t persuading them to vote Liberal; it was getting them to vote at all, for anyone. In our report, my colleagues and I proposed that the party’s primary goal should be to overcome the apathetic attitude of young people and persuade them to participate in elections. Whether or not they would be motivated to choose the Liberal Party once they were in the voting booth was up to the party and the local candidates.

  There are plenty of passionate young activists in Canada. However, most of them focused their efforts on performing work with non-governmental organizations, rather than with political parties. “Youth prefer to take individual steps toward making a difference in society,” we reported, “but have less faith in the ability of collective efforts to make a difference such as participating in democratic or government initiatives.” We noted that young people were committed to environmental actions such as recycling their own garbage, but not nearly as committed to involving themselves in elections, even to the point of taking such basic steps as casting a vote. When you worked with community organizations, NGOs, or even big single-issue causes, it was easier to feel you were contributing in a small but meaningful way to changing the world. When you voted in an election or worked on an election campaign, you were participating in a system in a way that might, abstractly, one day lead to change, but it was far from certain—particularly given the cynicism about politics that was dominant at that time. “Continuing decline in voter turnout will only worsen unless young people are engaged,” we concluded.

  Among our recommendations, we suggested that politicians engage youth by focusing on issues of importance to young
er Canadians, including education, the environment, foreign policy, and the protection of individual rights. We also proposed promoting “a culture of responsible citizenship” by expanding our national commitment to youth volunteerism, and urged Elections Canada to work with high-school boards in conducting mock elections on the same day as real federal elections.

  I thought then, as I do now, that citizen engagement is both an end in itself and a necessary means to solve the problems we face as a country. We have some big issues to deal with, and I often worry that unless we reinvigorate our democracy, we will never find legitimate answers to them. Modern democracy shouldn’t just be about citizens endorsing a vision and a set of solutions with their votes, but about actively contributing to building that vision and those solutions in the first place. This is the heart of the matter when it comes to democratic reform. Too often reform gets depicted as an “inside the bubble” issue that only politicians and Ottawa people care about. That misses the point. The people who feel the consequences of our democracy’s failures most acutely are physically and metaphorically a long way from Ottawa.

  I was just beginning to understand the importance of this issue as we published our report in the autumn of 2006. I met with some contenders in the leadership race to hear their opinion of our recommendations and to gauge how seriously they were taking the problems that the party was facing with young voters. I also wanted to get a sense of who really understood the need for real renewal and the opportunity that an election loss gave for modernizing the style and approach of the party. Party members and journalists had been asking me for my view on the leadership contest for some time, and I wanted to better know the field of candidates before expressing any opinion. My own belief was that the party needed to make a break with the bad habits of the recent past and that it was crucial to move away from the sense of entitlement that came with thinking of the Liberals as the “natural governing party” of Canada.

  Ultimately, I chose to support Gerard Kennedy, the Ontario education minister. I was impressed with Gerard Kennedy’s long record of public service outside government, something many career politicians lack. For example, having run Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank for almost a decade, he understood poverty, income inequality, and unemployment, issues I was beginning to focus on in my own political thinking. I became enthusiastic about his beliefs and his achievements, his focus on grassroots renewal, and his obvious work ethic. I felt even then that the Liberal Party was in a deeper hole than many within the party realized, and it would take a leader from a new generation, someone from outside the federal party, to reinvigorate it.

  For those looking to breathe fresh life into the Liberal Party, the December 2006 leadership convention in Montreal was an inspiring event. Far from either a coronation or a duel between feuding party elders, it was a raucous, unpredictable nail-biter featuring four candidates—Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, Stéphane Dion, and Gerard Kennedy—with legitimate shots at victory. The others—Ken Dryden, Scott Brison, Joe Volpe, and Martha Hall Findlay—all brought enough support to the convention to have a bearing on the outcome.

  Looking back at my transition into political life, that weekend in Montreal really mattered. Until that point, although I had spent some time working at the margins of the Liberal Party, I was not yet convinced that I was interested in a career in politics. I loved the world of ideas, values, and policy-making that lay at its core, but my mother had warned me, with her words as much as by her example, of the incredible personal costs to a politician’s life. And there was of course another consideration: entering politics at the federal level would suggest I was following in my father’s footsteps, perhaps even harbouring the notion that as the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I somehow deserved a role based on that qualification alone.

  The association with my father was never a reason for me to get into politics. It was, rather, a reason for me to avoid entering the political arena. The battle to convince myself and others that I was my own person had challenged me all through high school and university. Why should I negate those efforts by making the one career choice that would guarantee I would be measured according to my father’s achievements? It made sense for me to stay out of that arena for at least another decade and reduce the inevitable comparisons. That was my state of mind as the convention approached.

  Things changed soon after the gavel was struck in the Palais des congrès. As I mixed with hundreds of other Liberals all intent on the future of the party and the country, I began reassessing my fear about comparisons with my father. Perhaps, I thought, I had underestimated the very real differences between myself and my father when it came to politics.

  From the beginning of his political career, my father assumed an intellectual approach to all his political activities, including campaigning. He felt somewhat unsuited for the baby-kissing aspect of electioneering and avoided so-called retail politics whenever possible. Busying myself on the convention floor revealed to me that where political campaigning was involved, I wasn’t at all my father’s son—I was Jimmy Sinclair’s grandson. Grampa Jimmy had perhaps been the ultimate retail politician, a man who loved mixing with people, shaking hands, listening, and, yes, when the opportunity arose, kissing babies. The contrast between the two men is dramatic, and the more it became clear to me, the more it eased my concern about being compared with my father.

  I was surprised and enthused by the response I got from party members on the convention floor. Kennedy organizers had to create an advance team for me, to ensure I could move smoothly through the crowd. I genuinely enjoyed working the room for Gerard, discussing issues with delegates and bonding with fellow Liberals. I made a brief introductory speech on his behalf, helped him with his own address to the delegates, and then settled back to watch the outcome of the race.

  The vote count on the first ballot saw Mr. Ignatieff cruise to first place, with 1,412 votes. Just 123 votes separated the next three: Mr. Rae with 977, Mr. Dion with 856, and Gerard two behind with 854. Mr. Brison, Mr. Volpe, and Ms. Hall Findlay dropped out of the race, leaving about five hundred votes to spread around in the second ballot and ensuring that the top four contenders were still very much in the race.

  The second ballot proved disastrous for Gerard. He remained stuck in fourth place, having picked up just 30 new votes. When Mr. Dryden, in fifth place, was forced to withdraw, he announced he was supporting Bob Rae and freed his own delegates to vote their choice. Gerard voluntarily withdrew and moved his support to Stéphane Dion. I had already decided that should Gerard not be the winner, I wanted it to be Mr. Dion, so I went to him as well. He was a Quebecer who was a strong and thoughtful federalist. Moreover, he had built his campaign around environmental policy, which aligned with so much of what I had heard from young people as chair of the youth task force. Most of all, he was a serious guy. He thought things through deeply and addressed complex issues earnestly. I still find that enormously appealing about Stéphane Dion.

  On the third ballot, Mr. Dion almost doubled his votes, leaping ahead of both Mr. Rae and Mr. Ignatieff. When Mr. Rae was forced to withdraw, he released his delegates to vote as they chose, and the result was dramatically revealing. The chasm of support between Mr. Rae and Mr. Ignatieff was so wide that the vast majority of Rae delegates moved to Mr. Dion, who took the leadership on the next ballot.

  The day after the convention ended, I phoned Stéphane and congratulated him on his victory. I let him know how happy I was to have contributed to the start of the party’s rebuilding. “But now I’m going to step away for a bit, try to get back into private life,” I told him. And Stéphane replied, “Don’t go too far, because I’m going to want your help in getting rid of this Harper government.”

  For him it may have just been a polite remark, but after I hung up the phone I looked across at Sophie and told her what he’d said. We realized we had a big decision to make.

  The experience of the convention had taught me somethi
ng: I had political skills independent of my last name. I’ll not pretend the name didn’t make a difference, but it wasn’t all I had. Not by a long shot.

  The next few weeks I spent in deep discussion with Sophie about the challenges, sacrifices, and opportunities that were part of political life. I consulted with friends and family to get their advice, and I thought long and hard about the effect it would have on all of our lives. But I sensed that the timing was right for me.

  I had finished the coursework for my master’s in environmental geography, and only writing my thesis remained. If my foray into politics didn’t work out, I would be able to pick up where I left off.

  Jean Lapierre, Paul Martin’s former Quebec lieutenant and MP for Outremont, had announced after the convention that he would not run again. Encompassing the north and east flank of the mountain that marks the centre of Montreal, Outremont held the Trudeau family roots and my seven years at Brébeuf, and it’s where Sophie and I bought first a condo and subsequently the house we were then living in. The riding was a natural fit.

  On top of that, I knew that it was no longer the easy riding that it had always been. So I would have to work hard to win it, after winning over all those Liberals who didn’t bother to hide their opinion that I hadn’t yet paid my dues to the party. And I knew that it would be through that hard work that I would demonstrate to all that I was more than just a last name.

  So a few days before Christmas, I called Stéphane again and told him I was interested in running for him, and that I thought Outremont would be a good fit. He thanked me and told me he’d get back to me.