Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  It had been a somewhat tense exchange. Reporters love stories about party infighting, and my party had been only too happy, for too long, to oblige them. Nothing would have pleased them more than to hear young Trudeau take a shot at the leader of a diminished Liberal caucus. I refused to do that. Mr. Dion is an extremely smart, decent man who had served the party—and Canada—in critical roles for well over a decade. He deserved better than to have his future influenced by idle chatter on a disappointing election night.

  Besides, I had other things to focus on. I had spent almost two years on the streets of Papineau, convincing people that I was in this for the right reasons. That I was in this for them. I now couldn’t wait to get to Ottawa to represent the people whose trust I’d worked so hard to earn. I hoped, perhaps naively, that the success of this grassroots approach to politics would serve as a modest example for my party.

  My most strongly held hope for the Liberal Party on election night 2008 was that our defeat would teach us a valuable lesson: our connection to Canadians had grown very weak and needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, through hard work.

  Chapter Seven

  Life as a Rookie MP

  In February of 2007, as I was preparing for the nomination run in Papineau, Sophie sat me down and said: “What you are doing this year in Papineau is going to change our life. But here’s something that’s going to change it even more.”

  She showed me a home pregnancy test (she later admitted it was the fifth she had taken that afternoon), clearly displaying a little blue plus sign. I was ecstatic. All my life I had wanted more than anything to become a dad. I was inspired by the extraordinary father I’d had, the example he set for me to follow. Sophie and I had wanted kids almost since the day we got married. I felt pure excitement and anticipation.

  Everything was coming together. I’d found in Sophie the partner with whom I would share my life. I’d found my calling in public service through politics. Now we were starting a family, which would serve as the reason and the motivation for everything else.

  Xavier James Trudeau was born October 18, 2007, the day my dad would have turned eighty-eight. His middle name was a nod to my Grampa Sinclair. He was a fat, happy baby with his mother’s green eyes and open-hearted disposition. He would grow strong and athletic, fearless on the field and in the water, but shy in new situations with new people.

  Sixteen months later, on the fifth of February, 2009, Ella-Grace Margaret Trudeau followed suit. Ella was luminous and peaceful, but with a will, determination, and quick mind that soon had her running circles around the rest of the household. And her father? Well, no big surprise: she has me wrapped around her little finger.

  When Xavier was born, I was a Liberal candidate for an election that was almost a year away. I took a few weeks off, and for the first few months I was home helping out almost the whole time. When Ella-Grace arrived, I was a rookie MP. She was born on a Thursday, we came home from the hospital on Saturday, and on Tuesday afternoon, I was driving back to Ottawa for votes, my paternity leave having lasted all of four and a half days, two of them on a weekend.

  I had sought Sophie’s blessing before running for elected office because I knew from my childhood how tough politics can be on families and relationships. But it was a different matter living it as a father and husband.

  A normal week meant setting off from Montreal Monday morning for four days of Parliament in Ottawa, and returning to Montreal Thursday evening, usually for a riding event. Friday I’d spend in the constituency office in meetings and consultations. Saturday was filled with events in the riding, and Sunday was mostly, but not always, reserved for family.

  The first year I was an MP, Sophie and I had rented a furnished two-bedroom apartment a fifteen-minute walk from Parliament Hill, thinking that some weeks the family would come to Ottawa together. That ended up happening not at all, since my workdays were long and unpredictable because of votes, and Sophie’s entire support system, family and friends, were in Montreal. My second year, I switched to just staying in hotels when in Ottawa.

  Being away from my wife and young family so much was very tough, but I also found it useful in giving me perspective. Every week, on the drive home from Ottawa, I’d ask myself a few simple questions: Was the time I spent away from my family worth it? Was I building a better future for them, focused on serving the world they would grow up in, or was I just playing the game of politics, scoring cheap points, trying to win? I can’t pretend I was always able to answer the questions the right way, but just the habit of asking them was a way to keep foremost in my mind what really mattered.

  To be honest, the answers came more easily than you might think. Parliament is filled with good people. They’re focused on serving Canadians well, on tackling difficult issues, on trying to figure out the best ways forward for our country. Very little of that makes it into the headlines or the nightly news. My goal for my first year was to figure out a simple trick: keep my head down while holding my head high.

  Alex Lanthier, who was by this time running my Hill office, helped me immeasurably. Backbench parliamentarian office budgets don’t go very far, allowing for just one full- and one part-time staff member in Ottawa and two full- and one part-time in the constituency office. Alex’s years of experience in Liberal ministers’ offices helped us punch above our weight. He drew on some semi-retired old hands to help set things up right, and brought in bright, hard-working young people who rapidly learned the ropes.

  My focus was Papineau. Among the many things I had to learn, representing the people of my constituency well was by far the most important. Not only was that my primary role as an MP, but I knew that the diverse challenges that people in my riding faced were representative of the challenges many Canadians were struggling with across the country. So serving my constituents happened on two levels: directly, through my Papineau office, on issues such as immigration and visa requests, employment insurance problems, pension delays, and other problems that people needed their federal representative’s help to solve. Then, while in Ottawa, I did my best to see the legislation and policy through the lens of their likely ramifications for the people who lived in my riding.

  I am sometimes asked how being a teacher has helped me to be a good parliamentarian. A good teacher is not one who has all the answers and gives them to the students. A good teacher is one who understands the needs of his or her students and creates the conditions for them to find the answers for themselves. The goal is to help them through moments of difficulty, while remaining focused on empowering them to become successful on their own. Similarly, I see the goal of a good MP as helping government create a framework for a society in which people will become engaged, successful citizens, while offering a little extra help and support to those who need it.

  And in my riding, those needs required an active, strong presence from the MP. When I walked the streets in Papineau, people would approach me with all sorts of problems, some of which had nothing to do with federal jurisdiction. I heard about garbagemen who woke up a baby by making too much noise when they collected the trash, of neighbours who played music too loudly or whose cooking spread aromas throughout the apartment building. I heard about street-parking rules that got someone a fifty-dollar ticket they couldn’t afford to pay as often as I heard from people confused about eligibility requirements for programs such as employment insurance and old age security. I tried, but obviously I couldn’t help all these people directly. When I couldn’t, I would always take care to connect them with someone who could offer assistance.

  The issue that continues to bring the greatest number of constituent inquiries in Papineau is citizenship and immigration. Anyone who cares to educate themselves about the real-life implications of Canadian policy in this area should talk to the people who visit an urban MP’s riding office. Many requests are about visitor visas or family reunification immigration applications. In a typical case, an immigrant has
had a baby and would like to bring a grandparent from the old country to help them with the newborn, maybe just for a few months. Our approach is to interview the couple to get a feel for the validity of their case before writing a letter of support to immigration officials.

  In cases where applications for permanent residency have already had been filed, there is little an MP’s office can do to advance the process. These cases can take years to wend their way through the bureaucracy, leaving applicants in limbo. The only help we can provide is to ask immigration officials for an update on the application, something private citizens often have difficulty obtaining.

  The many, many encounters I’ve had with frustrated constituents have convinced me that the Conservatives’ ballyhooed immigration reforms are much more admired in Ottawa than they are effective on the ground. We have begun to lose something vital about the country through Mr. Harper’s approach. Since the early 1890s, when Wilfrid Laurier implemented the most ambitious immigration expansion the country has ever seen, we have always understood that immigration is essentially an economic policy. The argument that this is a conservative innovation is frequently made by those don’t know the country’s history very well. The economic value of immigration has always been recognized. We wouldn’t have much growth without it. However, people are not simply widget makers, and I think the current policy has lost sight of immigration’s most critical role for Canada: it is a nation-building tool. From the short-sighted restriction of the family reunification policy to the mismanagement of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, we are eroding the unique Canadian insight that people come from abroad to find a new life, not just a better job. We should see the newly arrived as community builders and potential citizens, not just as employees.

  All of this diversity presents some interesting challenges for a newly minted MP in an urban riding, and some of the biggest involve the mistaken assumptions many constituents have about the power Canadian MPs can wield on their behalf. In many developing countries, politicians are able to skirt the system whenever they feel like it. They can erase someone’s tax bill or get a loved one out of jail or force immediate action on an immigration case, all with a single telephone call. The major problem in these countries is getting an appointment with the local politician. Because your problem is solved soon after you walk into their office, accessing those politicians often takes powerful friends, money, or both.

  This explains why immigrants from some countries were often amazed that they could walk into my office on almost any Friday and speak directly to me. Politicians in their home countries were often surrounded by bodyguards. Constituents would sometimes arrive in my office with their priest or imam or a retinue of prominent community leaders to vouch for them, obviously an unnecessary step in Canada.

  Interacting with constituents over the years has shown me what government looks like to the average citizen. The biggest complaint Canadians have with government is that they find its dealings with individuals to be impersonal and bureaucratic. To a certain extent, that’s inevitable. A federal government addressing the needs of 35 million people must rely on computerized processes, form letters, and touch-tone phone menus. But there should also be a role for direct personal contact between citizen and civil servant. Whenever we couldn’t help a constituent, she or he at least appreciated that someone in government was willing to discuss their situation face to face with them. Ottawa can do a better job of communicating with and assisting citizens. In fact, it must do better.

  That’s one of the reasons I took so seriously the respon­sibility of responding to correspondence sent to my office. Indeed, most MPs are quite diligent about that, but in my case it provided a little extra challenge. There is no need to put a stamp on a letter addressed to Parliament Hill, so Canadians will often send the same letter to their member of Parliament and then to the prime minister, to the leader of the opposition, and to any other MPs they think might be sympathetic or in a position to offer help or support. I guess it was a good sign, then, that from the very first day, my office received massive amounts of mail from across the country on an incredibly broad range of issues.

  There was simply far more correspondence than we had staff for in the office on the Hill, and the Papineau office was already at full steam dealing only with riding issues, so Alex came up with a solution. We started to recruit volunteers and interns, young people, mostly students, who would each come in for a few hours a week and help respond to the piles of letters, in exchange for work experience in a parliamentary setting and an opportunity to see politics up close.

  At events I’d go to, if young people came up to me and said they were interested in politics, I’d tell them they were welcome to come into my office and help out. As a result, on some days every possible spot in my small three-room office was used by young volunteers stuffing envelopes or writing on a computer, including at my own desk. I loved it: having young idealists around also helped cut through the cynicism that was far too common on the Hill.

  One of the other extra challenges I had to deal with was a larger degree of media attention than my fellow rookie parliamentarians were subject to. Here, again, the work I had done on the ground in my riding over the year and a half before I was elected proved invaluable. First of all, the more I could talk about my desire to be a worthy voice for the folks in Papineau, the better I was when talking to the press. I knew the people in my riding well: their needs, their worries, their hopes and dreams. The more I spoke about them, the less I got drawn into the intrigue and speculation that reporters loved to expound upon in their “A new Trudeau on the Hill” interviews.

  But more than that, hard work in Papineau helped me immeasurably in my own mindset as a parliamentarian. I remember seeing an interview with a young, newly famous actor in which he was asked about his success, and he replied that he felt so amazingly lucky to be doing what he loved that he kept wondering when someone was going to knock on his door, tell him there’d been a mistake, and take it all away. I think we’ve all felt that way from time to time in our lives.

  But from the first day I stepped onto Parliament Hill as an MP, I have never felt that way. Not once. Given my last name, and what my opponents say about me, it might be understandable that I could feel that way. But I knew how hard I had worked to get elected, to gain the trust of my constituents. I had earned the right to sit in the House and no one could ever take that away from me. The tough contests I’d faced, first for the nomination, then for the election, meant that I knew, deeply, that I was where I was meant to be. And that perspective has helped me in many ways to smile and brush off the nasty negative attacks.

  When it comes to the media, perhaps my biggest challenge has been learning how to scrum. Scrums are those chaotic question-and-answer sessions in which a politician in the corridors of Parliament is mobbed by reporters. Being a polite human being who was raised well, my first instinct was to actually answer the questions asked of me. Being a teacher, I would often try to explain the reasoning and justification for my answers, providing helpful examples to aid in comprehension, and making sure as I went along that I was being understood.

  But a scrum is not an interview, or a speech. Reporters aren’t there for detailed explanations; they are mostly looking for a pithy quote they can drop into their story or a four-second clip to use in their newscast. And the more a politician rambles on, the greater the chance that the most interesting clip won’t be the most pertinent one. So the challenge is to cover the broad range of subjects reporters will ask about during a ten- to fifteen-minute scrum in a thoughtful, but concise, way.

  My problem is that I actually find conversations with most journalists interesting and enjoyable. And an interesting conversation is usually one that goes off on any number of tangents, so the best journalists (like my students before them) would often try to engage me in oblique lines of inquiry. Yet the more I strayed from the core message I needed to convey, the less likely it
was that that message would reach Canadians.

  Scrums do deliver the odd moment of poetry once in a while. Every adult Canadian knows my father’s famous line, “Just watch me.” That was delivered in a scrum of sorts. It was 1970, and he was responding to a reporter’s question about how far he would go to protect Canadians from the threat of the Front de Libération du Québec. The FLQ had murdered a provincial cabinet minister and kidnapped a British diplomat. CBC reporter Tim Ralfe had been waiting, microphone in hand, for my father’s car to arrive and intercepted him as he was entering the Parliament Buildings. In our current aggressively scripted era, the video of that exchange makes for amazing viewing (it’s available on YouTube). There is the prime minister of Canada engaging in a spontaneous debate about a serious national security issue with an aggressive reporter whose line of questioning indicates that he believes the PM is infringing on the civil liberties of Canadian citizens. It’s not just my father’s direct, unequivocal, and challenging response to the question that is so surprising; it’s the fact that Ralfe’s question was answered at all, and in detail.

  That open, free-form exchange between journalist and politician was the example I carried in my head when I arrived in Ottawa. But times have changed. In this age of Twitter, hyper-partisanship, and sound bites, few politicians—and certainly not our current prime minister—would permit themselves to be drawn into such a frank discussion with a reporter. Rather than provide direct and candid answers, today’s politicians typically use reporters’ questions as jumping-off points to reiterate their party’s message du jour. There is little place for my father’s scrum style in today’s Ottawa. For now, at least.

  One of my very first formal actions in Parliament was to present a private member’s motion on youth service. All backbench MPs get a turn, according to a random draw, to present a bill or a motion on the subject of their choosing for Parliament to vote on. A bill introduces or modifies legislation, whereas a motion usually leads to a study by committee that results in a report.