Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  I knew full well that a boxing match is a far cry from the real business of politics. No ridings were won and no policies were made that night in suburban Ottawa. But political parties are teams. They are groups of like-minded, competitive human beings. They need victories to build and maintain their spirits, especially after a string of losses. That boxing match was the first clear victory we Liberals had enjoyed over the Conservatives in a long, long time. It felt pretty good.

  As is almost always the case, lots of people were quick to read too much into that admittedly dramatic event. Some in the national media even wrote that it was the unofficial launch of my leadership campaign! The truth is, I was still a long way from making a final decision. And if I was beginning to lean more in that direction, other events were far more consequential than my knocking out a Conservative senator.

  Soon after our party’s successful policy convention, the NDP gathered in Toronto to plot the direction of their own party. They faced the daunting task of choosing Jack Layton’s successor. Mr. Layton’s tragic death had come just after he led his party to the best election result in its history. For the first time, the NDP would select the leader of the official opposition and, they fervently hoped, the next prime minister of Canada. I was much less interested in the personalities involved than in what the ultimate choice would say about the party’s future.

  At the time, the idea that we should merge the Liberal Party with the NDP was being discussed in some surprising quarters. Even former leaders of both parties were talking about it openly in the press. For reasons I’ll go into in more detail later, I always had my doubts, but at this point I was doing all I could to keep an open mind. Some NDP leadership candidates were warm to it, most notably Nathan Cullen. He campaigned on an explicit platform of electoral co-operation with the Liberal Party. I like and respect Nathan, and I was interested to see where his campaign would go.

  I have a lot of friends who have voted NDP in the past. I respect the party’s history a great deal and the constructive role it has played in Canadian public life over the years. The choice the New Democrats had to make was whether they wanted to stay true to their roots or try to make the transition into the status of “government-in-waiting.” In concrete terms, they had to choose whether to shed their idealism for a more conventional path to power. They seemed ruled by a desire to find a leader who seemed hard enough to stand up to Stephen Harper.

  In their enthusiasm to oppose Mr. Harper and the Conservatives, I think they’ve been getting the big things wrong about this country. For example, Canada’s prosperity depends upon our ability to develop our natural resources and get them to world markets. Every prime minister in our history would agree with that. Today, that means we have to create more environmentally sustainable ways of getting this job done, but it serves nobody to suggest that western Canada’s resource wealth is a “Dutch disease” that weighs down the rest of the economy. My party learned that painful lesson under my father’s leadership. Using western resource wealth to buy eastern votes is a strategy that, ultimately, impoverishes all Canadians.

  In the same vein, I was wary of the NDP’s willingness to play footsie with sovereigntists in my home province of Quebec. Such a strategy had ended in division and rancour for the Conservatives under Prime Minister Mulroney, not to mention near disaster for the country. The Canadian Constitution is not a plaything, nor is the Clarity Act. The first defines the common ground upon which we agree to build this country together, while the second sets out the conditions (established by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling) under which we might choose to dissolve it. These are big issues. They are fundamental questions, not to be trifled with. The NDP’s blithe commitment to open the Constitution on the one hand, and to repeal the Clarity Act on the other, is a very dangerous combination. They’re the kind of promises that politicians make when they don’t think they’ll ever have to implement them.

  There’s an old saying in politics that if you want to replace a government, you have to provide a choice, not an echo. As I watched their convention unfold, I couldn’t help but think that New Democrats had been cowed by Mr. Harper, that they were somehow overwhelmed by his way of doing politics. It seemed to me that they had decided the only way to defeat the Conservatives was to create their mirror image, only on the left.

  I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that’s the kind of politics Canadians want. I know it’s not the kind of politics that Canada needs.

  Which brings me to the critical point. At the thirty-thousand-foot level, I had excellent positive reasons to run for leader at some point in the future. There was my desire to serve Canada, my sense that my unique upbringing meant I had a responsibility to give back to the country. After becoming a father, I gained a deeper, more concrete appreciation for why it is so important to work hard to hand to our kids a stronger country than the one we inherited from our parents. I felt the Liberal Party was finally getting to a place where it was willing to undertake serious reform, and to do the work required to earn back the confidence of Canadians. I had two successful elections under my belt, in which I fought very difficult national headwinds, giving me confidence in my own political instincts and abilities. All these things played a role in my decision to enter the leadership race. But one more consideration was driving my thinking.

  After all, this was not “at some point in the future.” This was now. And in 2012 in Canadian politics, the dominant force was Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party.

  Many people speculated that, after finally achieving their much-coveted majority government, Mr. Harper’s Conservatives would moderate their views and approach. Minority Parliaments mean the government is constantly on a campaign footing, because an election can happen any time it loses the confidence of a House of Commons in which it is outnumbered. Everything is coloured by a heightened sense of partisanship in these circumstances, the argument went, but with the comfort of his majority, Mr. Harper could afford to look longer term and plot a more thoughtful strategy for the country.

  It was a nice theory, but it proved utterly wrong. If anything, the government came back more virulently partisan than ever. Their majority provided the prime minister and his people insulation from democratic accountability. Lacking the check of an empowered Parliament, their worst instincts rose to the fore. Rather than focus on the major challenges facing the country—stalled middle-class incomes, climate change, the erosion of our democracy—they seemed to focus on petty issues and on settling scores with political opponents. Worse, when they did identify major problems that needed tackling—like getting our natural resources to global markets—their “my way or the highway” approach made the problems worse instead of solving them.

  In short, my conviction deepened that Mr. Harper’s government was taking Canada in the wrong direction, one in which most Canadians didn’t want their country to go. These Conservatives are not interested in building on the common ground where we have always solved our toughest problems. Their approach is to exploit divisions rather than bridge them. Perhaps that’s an effective political strategy, but it’s lousy way to govern a country, especially one as diverse as ours. Once you’ve divided people against one another—East against West, urban against rural, Quebec against the rest of Canada—so you can win an election, it’s very hard to pull them back together again to solve our shared problems.

  This is the context in which, late in the spring of 2012, I started to think much more seriously about contesting the leadership. I was leaning toward it, but I still had a way to go. My first task was to get through the remainder of the parliamentary session in Ottawa so that I could spend serious time over the summer with Sophie and the kids, making sure we were up for it. I knew from painful personal experience that politicians’ families shoulder a heavy burden. Sometimes, as it was with my parents, it’s too much to bear.

  I had directed Gerry Butts and Katie Telford to put a team together to hash out a battle pla
n and to think about what a successful campaign could look like, but I always knew the decision would come down to a deeply personal, private discussion between Sophie and me. We had many long, honest talks that summer. The core strength of our marriage is that we never stop talking, and we are always open with one another, even when those conversations are difficult. I wanted to be sure she knew, from my own experience, just how rough that life can be. I recalled for Sophie that my father had once told me I should never feel compelled to run for office. “Our family has done enough,” he said.

  My dad said this despite having never experienced the incessant, base vitriol of twenty-first-century politics. It has never been my style to engage in down-and-dirty personal tactics in any endeavour. I welcome a good tussle, and my skin is thick, but I had grown up in the reality of public life. Sophie had not, and our decision would affect our kids, in some ways, more than either of us.

  With all this reflection as a backdrop, Katie and Gerry set up a three-day retreat to debate campaign strategy and plan how to execute it. I made it clear that, if I was to run for the leadership, we would run a new kind of campaign, one that engaged unprecedented numbers of Canadians. We needed to throw the doors of the Liberal Party wide open. If the party was to have a future, we would need to figure out a way to give it back to Canadians.

  We got together at the end of July in Mont Tremblant. My family sat with a team of people from across the country, whom we had carefully selected for their talent, energy, and experience, to decide whether this thing could be done, and whether we could do it.

  We brought together a terrific group of friends new and old. Many had extensive experience in politics, and others came from the business world and the charity sector. We had a good balance of women and men, grizzled veterans and talented newcomers, professional associates and close personal friends. Most important to me, we brought our families. Sophie was there, of course, as was my brother Sacha. But I also encouraged my team to bring their partners and kids. I knew that if we were to go through with it, and be successful, every member of the team would need their loved ones’ support. Every late-night strategy session, every extended tour stop I might make, every time I had to craft a speech or talk through an issue would mean that many other people besides myself would spend hours or even days away from their families. We needed, all of us, to be aware of this fact of political life from the beginning. But the gathering would also serve to remind us that we believed political life could be reformed to respond to families with two working parents.

  So, like many Canadian adventures, my leadership campaign began around a campfire.

  People were on couches and in sleeping bags, tucked away in corners of the cottages we rented for the weekend. Tom Pitfield, who would go on to design the innovative data strategy we used in the campaign, had brought up a brisket of smoked meat from Montreal. We built a fire in the pit out back as people began to show up and the sun began to set. When we were all gathered, I said a few words about what I hoped we would accomplish over the course of the weekend. I talked about how it was very important that we come out of our gathering with a shared sense of purpose. I joked that if we were to win the leadership campaign, multitudes would claim to have been here at this retreat, but if we went down in flames, Sophie and I would have spent a quiet weekend alone.

  In closing, I asked everyone to answer a simple but important question: “Why are you here?”

  One by one, people told stories that any Canadian would recognize. Some talked about their personal histories. Navdeep Bains, a promising young Mississauga MP who lost narrowly in the 2011 election, talked about how Canada had given his family opportunities that, he worried, wouldn’t be granted to the generations coming up after us. Others had specific policy issues. People talked about economic opportunity and education, natural resources and climate change, immigration and diversity. Still others had more basic reasons for being there. My Papineau riding president, Luc Cousineau, who would become the chief financial officer for my leadership campaign, said that he thought Canada was becoming a much less fair country under the Conservatives. Several Quebecers in the group expressed deep regret that their province had lost its voice in Canada’s national conversation. Richard Maksymetz, a brilliant organizer who was then the B.C. finance minister’s chief of staff, expressed a perspective common to the westerners in our group: that the party never really walked its talk when it came to putting that dynamic part of Canada at the heart of our political movement.

  It was a heartening conversation.

  When it was my turn to answer the question, I concluded very simply that I believed this country was better than its current government. Canadians are broad minded and big hearted, fair and honest, hard working, hopeful, and kind. I said Canada had some big issues to tackle, but none bigger than those we had successfully wrestled in the past. I told people that for me, the greatest of all this country’s many blessings is our diversity, and that this meant the people who lead Canada need to be open-minded and generous of spirit toward all, not just toward those who agree with them and support them. Too many people were being left out and left behind in Mr. Harper’s vision. I said I believed that the Conservative government’s basic flaw was its smallness, its meanness, its inability to relate to or work with people who do not share its ideological predisposition. I said that Mr. Harper’s extreme rigidity, his belief that disagreement and dissent are signs of weaknesses to be stamped out, would have a corrosive effect on Canadian public life over time.

  In short, I said that I was there because the government needed to be replaced. I wanted to find out whether we and our party were up to doing that job.

  We had many important discussions and debates that weekend, about the kind of campaign we wanted to run, the issues we wanted to promote, the problems we wanted to solve. Some of it was pretty technical; I’ll spare you having to indulge my inner geek by not running on about data, GOTV (get out the vote) techniques, small-gift fundraising, and the fine points of our social media strategy. There were, however, a few sessions that deserve mentioning.

  When I say we had some fundamental discussions, I mean really fundamental. The first topic of the weekend will illustrate this point. It was, Should the Liberal Party continue to exist? Should we join forces with the NDP to form a united alternative to the Conservatives? Or maybe we ought to form a new political party entirely, one that was centrist in its viewpoint and values but free of the legacy infrastructure and baggage the Liberal designation carried with it.

  I’m sure it will alarm some partisan Liberals to read this, but the debate was serious. After all, it was undertaken at a time when the party had been consigned to third place for the first time in history. The patient had been stabilized under Bob Rae’s exemplary interim leadership, but was nowhere near out of critical condition. Lots of Canadians still called themselves liberal, but fewer and fewer were voting Liberal. We owed it to ourselves and to our country to ask the questions directly and seriously: Was the Liberal Party in the way? Did our continued existence perpetuate Conservative rule, and therefore imperil much of what our party had fought for over the years?

  These were serious existential questions. In the end, the scale tipped toward a wholehearted effort to reform and rebuild the Liberal Party, for a couple of reasons.

  First, there were practical concerns with forming a new party. How could we build the infrastructure in time to be a serious option in the next election? If defeating the Conservative government was an urgent priority, a new party wasn’t realistic. Moreover, I’m a pragmatic realist at heart, and I knew that any party led by somebody named Trudeau would be seen as the Liberal Party no matter what we called it.

  We took the merger option out for a much longer test drive. The discussion was, after all, very much alive in the public realm. Lots of thoughtful people had given it their full-out endorsement, including former prime minister Jean Chrétien and former NDP leader Ed Br
oadbent. These were people of substance, whom I know and respect. Their views carried weight and were worth considering seriously. That said, I always felt the merger argument was based on faulty practical premises, the greatest of which is an overly simplified approach to the basic math. As the Ontario and western members of our group pointed out, many Liberal voters would vote Conservative before they voted New Democrat, largely on economic grounds. Gerry and Katie both argued convincingly that this was, in fact, exactly what had happened in Ontario during the 2011 federal election. When our vote collapsed in the final week, voters in the Greater Toronto Area opted for the Tories because they did not trust the NDP on the economy. Other speakers pointed out that the two parties had very different cultures, and in regions like Atlantic Canada tended to be one another’s main competition. Burying the hatchet would not be straightforward.

  The arguments in favour all came down to expediency of one kind or another. There were those who argued that the Conservatives would do irreparable damage to the country if they were to stay in power too long, and a merger would present the best chance to beat them in the next election. Others contended that the NDP and Liberals agree on important matters of policy, and that liberally minded Canadians were growing impatient with our unwillingness to work together to defeat the Conservatives. There was something to this latter point. It appealed to my sense that the party had become too self-centred and concerned with its own success, rather than focusing on the needs of the people we expected to vote for us.