Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  No one objected to my presence or to my efforts to engage them in conversation. Indeed, over the year and a half I spent campaigning in Papineau, I never once encountered hostility when I took advantage of situations where I could introduce myself to people. As cynical as today’s voters might be about politics, most people welcome the opportunity to take the measure of a politician with a handshake and a quick chat.

  After months of campaigning, it’s natural for a politician to believe that everyone must know who they are. You need to keep reminding yourself that many people don’t. In fact, many Canadians can’t even name their sitting MP, let alone their would-be MPs. And, as I discovered, having a familiar last name doesn’t help as much as you might expect.

  Alex Lanthier, my campaign manager, had an effective way of making his point about improving my campaigning style. One day, I was strolling through a crowd at an event, shaking hands as I went and giving everyone a quick “Hi!,” “Hello!,” or “Nice to meet you!” as I passed them. Alex watched me for a few minutes before pulling me aside and saying to me slowly, “Hello. I’m Alex Lanthier. And who might you be?”

  I replied, “I’m Justin Trudeau.”

  Alex smiled. “Good. Now tell that to everyone when you meet them. Everybody. Let them hear your name. If they don’t learn who you are, you’ll just be some friendly oddball who randomly shook their hand.”

  Genuine communication with people has always been important to me, even as a novice politician. If you’re going to meet voters, you have to be patient enough to spend time learning their names and asking them what’s on their minds—and then listening to what they tell you. Otherwise it’s just not worth it.

  That said, no matter how much you reach out to people, a hard lesson to learn is that you can’t persuade everyone to vote for you. I received the most negative reactions from certain older voters who, for whatever reason, retained bitter feelings toward my father. Many of them were downright angry at me for having the gall to knock on their door. There was no way of making headway with them, no matter how long I tried looking for issues we might be able to agree on.

  This was the flip side of the criticism I faced that I would try to ride the coattails of the Trudeau name. When a former politician’s very name inspires red-faced indignation in a voter, you can’t expect the voter to feel well inclined toward the politician’s son. Whenever I would encounter these situations, I would say, “I’m pleased to meet you, even if you do not think you will vote for me,” and move on to the next door.

  Finally, when you’re campaigning as a candidate for a major political party, it’s important to remember that every syllable you speak in public will be scrutinized for mistakes, inconsistencies, political incorrectness, and ideological heresies. No matter how good your intentions may be, your opponents will be ruthless in searching for any snippet they can take out of context to discredit you. For instance, the Conservatives’ first attack ad against me, in 2013, featured a completely out-of-context quote from an interview I had done about my father back in the 1990s. The only thing you can do in the face of such attacks is have faith that Canadians are smart enough to see them for what they are, and will separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes time to make a choice.

  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t (or can’t) defend yourself. Many people enter politics thinking that all they have to do is be respectful of others and speak from the heart. But that is not enough. It is never enough. Every sentence you utter will be misinterpreted when stripped from its context and posted on Twitter.

  But you can also get yourself in trouble needlessly, by making it too easy for your critics. This often happens when I try to be too clever or witty. During my outreach campaign in Papineau, a student asked a question on my website: “If an extraterrestrial came to Canada and became a citizen, would he or she—or it—be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?” I thought it was a great question, partly because it tapped into my love of science fiction, but mostly because I appreciated the thought and imagination that the kid had put into it. Ignoring advice not to answer the question, I wrote a fairly detailed tongue-in-cheek reply that underscored our commitment to diversity by saying, in effect, yes, any extraterrestrial who became a Canadian citizen could claim protection under the Charter. (For what it’s worth, a past president of the Ontario Bar Association blogged that my response “was legally quite correct” and “does raise the interesting issue of civil rights for non humans.”)

  A few days later, La Presse featured a cartoon showing me telling E.T. that he had Charter rights while E.T., looking oddly like Stéphane Dion, made an obscene gesture with his famous finger!

  As much as I went door-to-door and appeared at various events throughout the riding, my primary focus was getting to know the different organizations and community groups that served Papineau residents. It was a natural choice for me. My earlier involvement with civic action and volunteerism came through Katimavik, avalanche safety awareness, sexual-assault prevention, and other campaigns promoting specific issues and causes. Papineau was home to an assortment of grassroots groups whose different mandates touched on virtually every aspect of people’s lives, especially new immigrants who lacked the means or connections to secure proper housing, child care, and job opportunities.

  La Maison de Quartier Villeray, located in the heart of the Villeray neighbourhood, is one such organization. Its mission is to help people who are economically and socially isolated gain the skills and confidence they need to become productive members of the community. Volunteers from La Maison de Quartier bring meals to local residents, help people get to medical appointments, hold educational workshops for parents, and generally reach out to residents who risk falling through society’s cracks. Relatively well-off Canadians who don’t need help putting food on the table or getting to the doctor are often unfamiliar with organizations like this, but in Villeray and similar places all over Canada, they are the glue that holds the community together.

  I have grown more and more familiar with many of these groups and their work. One of the biggest problems they have is that the staff has to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising. These people got into the social-work field because they wanted to help people, not continually ask for money in order to keep operating.

  The funding model for such groups typically requires that they reapply for money every year, which means the survival of these community organizations relies on the shifting priorities of politicians. Whenever these groups need money, they often have to develop some new program that resonates with the local MP, provincial legislator, or city councillor. These groups are forced to reinvent the wheel every twelve months. I told these groups that as MP for Papineau, I would champion a model that would provide regular and predictable funding streams, freeing up the staff to focus on helping people.

  Part of the problem is that many of the people who work at these organizations are volunteers, a word that conveys to some the impression that the work is optional. But that description is incorrect. Volunteer work has become essential to communities like Villeray. Much activity in this country would grind to a halt if the volunteers at various service organizations stopped showing up.

  When it comes to volunteerism, I believe politicians should lead by example. In 2008, when a volunteer group called Coalition des Amis du Parc Jarry staged their annual spring cleanup of the biggest park in the riding, I arrived in jeans and a T-shirt to do my part, along with a few of my volunteers. The borough mayor was there, along with the MP and some city councillors, all dressed in suits. We put on our gloves, picked up some shovels, listened to a speech delivered to the volunteers, and posed for a group picture. When the photo op was over, the organizers turned to the elected officials and said, “Thank you for coming.” Mme Barbot, the mayor, and the councillors took this as their signal to head for their cars. But to everyone’s amazement, my team headed into the park and spent the next three
hours helping the volunteers clean up.

  The following year, when the date for the annual cleanup arrived, all the politicians showed up in jeans and T-shirts, prepared to work instead of just posing for pictures. Our example proved contagious.

  I’m convinced that we need to go beyond the established view of volunteerism and adopt something we might call committed volunteerism: volunteer activities managed by organizations staffed and supported through a combination of private donations and long-term government funding commitments. This was the position I took at Katimavik, and I am convinced the same model can be extended to a wide range of other groups.

  Papineau also taught me a lot about the problem of income and wealth inequality in Western society. At its western perimeter, the riding of Papineau borders Mount Royal and Outremont, two federal ridings that include some of the country’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. La Maison de Quartier Villeray is just a ten-minute drive from the sprawling multi-bedroom homes of Hampstead and Outremont, but where Papineau’s community needs are concerned, they might as well be on different planets.

  In Papineau I represent too many parents who are so poor they routinely send their children to school without breakfast. Some children barely old enough to walk to school themselves escort younger siblings to kindergarten, because their parents work shifts that prevent them from being home when their children leave for school. Many people working in local food banks are one paycheque away from needing free food themselves, people with virtually no equity and no retirement plan.

  Canada’s rich and poor seldom interact. This is the self-reinforcing dynamic of income inequality. A generation ago it was more common for doctors and lawyers, bricklayers and teachers, shop owners and shop workers to live in the same neighbourhood. The size of their homes and cars might be different, but they tended to shop at the same stores, stroll through the same parks, and attend the same churches. All of this gave policy-makers and legislators an opportunity to understand the problems faced by the middle class and the poor, because in many cases these people were their friends and neighbours. This is no longer the case in many Canadian cities. In some areas of Papineau you can walk for blocks without meeting someone who graduated from university or earns a six-figure income; in Outremont and Westmount it’s a challenge to find a homeowner who doesn’t have at least one college degree.

  In some cases, the adage about being born on the wrong side of the tracks is more literal than metaphorical. Parc-Extension, the hardscrabble western neighbourhood of Papineau, is enclosed on three sides by a highway and two railway tracks. The fourth side, to the west, is marked by a chain-link fence. A few feet beyond the fence is the leafy and prosperous Town of Mount Royal. The fence is considered a necessity for residents of the Town of Mount Royal and despised in Parc-Ex, where it symbolizes a widening economic rift in our society.

  When discussing problems of wealth and income inequality with friends who share my privileged upbringing, I sometimes feel like taking them to my riding and showing them first-hand the challenges many of my constituents face. Serious inequality isn’t a myth, as some conservative commentators claim, nor is it a slogan for promoting class warfare. It is a stark reality sitting in plain sight for anyone who is willing to observe it.

  Inequality is corrosive over time. It reinforces itself in hundreds of unseen and sometimes unconscious ways. Unless you have to face it, in communities like Saint-Michel and Parc-Ex, it is too easy to pretend that it isn’t there. We need to become open to shared prosperity just as we are open to diversity. Our response to inequality, to the problems that ordinary people are having all over this country, will go a long way toward determining our success as a country. I learn anew every day on the streets of Papineau that we need to do more—a lot more—to make sure that all Canadians have a real and fair chance to succeed.

  From late 2007 through the first half of 2008, I continued to campaign enthusiastically in Papineau, even as the Liberal Party was enduring serious stress and strain. Stéphane Dion was an earnest, intelligent, and well-meaning leader, but when he assumed the leadership he entered a shark tank, surrounded by people still loyal to other factions and potential leaders. A more ruthless leader might have fired everyone connected with the contenders for his job and brought in his own people. But that wasn’t Mr. Dion’s style, and in any case, I don’t know that it would have saved him.

  Jean Chrétien had won the last of his three majority governments in 2000. Under Paul Martin’s leadership in the 2004 election, the Liberals were reduced to minority status, and in 2006 they found themselves out of power for the first time since Kim Campbell’s brief tenure in 1993. We were facing serious problems, yet some Liberal Party faithful assumed that the 2006 result had been merely a weird glitch, and the country would come to its senses in time for the next election. It had yet to sink in with them that the sponsorship scandal had alienated many voters, especially in my home province. Added to this this were hangovers from the lengthy feud between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, the party’s lazy approach to grassroots outreach, its neglect of youth and ethnic voters, and its general sense of hubris and entitlement. It was clear to me and to many other Canadians that the Liberal Party had forgotten much that it once knew about the hard work required to earn and keep people’s trust.

  On September 7, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited the governor general’s official residence and asked Michaëlle Jean to call a general election, launching the busiest thirty-seven days of my life. “Kiss your wife goodbye,” I was told. “You’re not going to see her much for the next five weeks.”

  My days began at seven, when I stood outside one of the nine metro stations in the riding handing leaflets to commuters rushing to catch their morning trains. When morning rush hour ended I began mainstreeting at stores and restaurants throughout the riding. Many businesses were empty when I walked in, but it didn’t matter. I would spend time talking with the owner and cashiers, important people who might be persuaded to put up my election signs and perhaps speak well of me to their customers.

  I tried to speak with as many groups as possible, including, for example, the Association Professionnelle des Chauffeurs de Taxi du Québec, unsurprisingly an influential group of people. (How many times have you found yourself talking politics with your taxi driver?) Lunch was usually shared with volunteers in the campaign office to help keep them motivated. Afternoons were a good time to visit seniors’ community centres before heading back to a metro station, greeting passengers returning home at the end of their work day. Evenings were filled making telephone calls to community leaders, encouraging them to attend the next day’s events. After a few hours’ sleep, I would get up to do it all over again.

  It was hard work, but I loved every minute of it: the routine, the discipline, the learning. But most of all, the interaction with the people of Papineau. So much of politics is fleeting and ephemeral. And much of it is, well, merde. The connections you make with the people who invest their hope and trust in you, that’s what gets you through all of the rest. That’s what makes it worth doing.

  The results on election night produced a wide range of emotions. I had experienced pure joy when I won the Liberal nomination eighteen months earlier, and I was elated to win Papineau by a narrow margin, tallying 17,724 votes to Vivian Barbot’s 16,535. But I, like other Liberals, wasn’t in a particularly celebratory mood. The party as a whole got walloped, winning just 26 percent of the popular vote nationally while the Conservatives increased their minority government representation from 127 to 143 seats. I gave an upbeat speech to thank my volunteers for all their efforts, but the overall result was disappointing.

  I had been so focused on my community that the contrast between the national and local results was surprising and jarring. I was one of only a couple of new Liberal MPs to gain a seat we hadn’t held at dissolution. Almost immediately, I was pulled out of the real, community-level work I had enjoyed so much and into t
he meaningless intrigue of political brinksmanship.

  That night, the prominent Quebec news anchor Bern­ard Derome interviewed me as part of Radio-Canada’s election-night coverage. I appeared by video feed from my campaign headquarters wearing an audio headset, with a room full of joyous volunteers in the background. After congratulating me, Derome got to the juicy question that many were asking: Should Mr. Dion stay on as party leader?

  The arithmetic was awkward: the party’s decline from 95 to 77 seats was disappointing, but not so disastrous that it made Mr. Dion’s fate obvious. Many Liberals, including me, believed he had been dealt a bad hand, and that it would have been impossible for any leader to overcome in one election cycle the serious structural problems that had built up within the party.

  “Mr. Dion is a man of intelligence and integrity,” I answered Derome, “who has a deep and wise vision for this country, and I have a lot to learn from him.”

  Derome countered by saying, “So you’re telling me that you’re going to defend his leadership and you’re willing to give him a second chance?”

  “We’re not talking about leadership,” I said. “The Liberal Party has a leader, and I’m very content to serve him.”

  “Oh, I see that you’ve learned your trade well,” Derome scoffed, “because that’s not a very clear response.”

  “So give me a clear question,” I said.

  Derome laughed. “You remind me of your father!” he said, then added, “Should Mr. Dion remain leader of this party?”

  I told him that Stéphane Dion should remain Liberal leader.

  “Good. Well, that’s clear. Bravo!” Derome said with a flourish before signing off.