Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  There were good arguments on both sides, but in the end I concluded that my disagreement with the NDP over some critically important substantive matters was simply too profound for a merger ever to work, at least for me. First, I could never support their policy to repeal the Clarity Act, a move that would effectively make it easier to break up the country. This was a non-starter for me. Moreover, there were fundamental economic policy areas (trade, foreign investment, resource development) about which I thought the NDP was deeply wrong. In fact, I think that the NDP’s predisposition is to be suspicious of growth and economic success, and that their policy orientation reveals this, no matter how they try to hide it rhetorically. Liberals understand that economic growth is the foundation for all else we want to achieve in areas of social policy.

  I summarized my point of view by saying that we couldn’t allow political strategy, a desire for power, to trump policy and principle. That is what had gotten us into trouble in the first place. Canada needs a better government, not just a different government. We definitively put to rest the idea of a merger.

  The other major discussion we had that weekend was about what kind of leadership campaign we would run. We considered a campaign heavy on specifics and detail. The idea was that we would publish a white paper on a big policy area every thirty to ninety days during the campaign. We ultimately rejected this strategy because we felt it grated against the spirit of openness to new ideas that we were trying to inject into the party. You can’t believably commit to a new, more open way of doing policy, then publish a full platform before you have had a chance to get people’s input!

  We decided instead to lay out major policy markers during the campaign. We would make it clear that a party led by me would be pro-growth, that it would favour free trade, practise fiscal discipline, and support foreign direct investment. We had a long discussion about how Liberals had earned credibility on the economy through the 1990s, but hadn’t focused enough on it in the past decade. As in so many areas, we had taken our hard-won success for granted, and it slipped away. Specifically, we would build our economic policy on the obvious (but too often forgotten) premise that a strong economy was one that created the largest number of good-quality jobs for the largest number of people possible. We had a detailed presentation on what had happened to the Canadian middle class over the past thirty years. People’s debts were growing, but their incomes weren’t. We felt that nobody in Canada was speaking to the big structural changes that were happening in the economy, which were making life harder and harder for the people who were Canada’s bedrock.

  We had a structured discussion about Quebec and why we felt Liberal fortunes had declined so precipitously in my home province. My own view, then as now, is that we got focused on existential issues that only a narrow band of people cared about. When the sponsorship scandal dealt the party’s integrity a body blow, we had nothing of substance to fall back on. In the intervening years, Quebecers had seen one scandal after another come to light, at all levels of government. Their faith in public officials generally had been badly shaken—and this was before the Charbonneau Commission started revealing its daily horrors. The way back for the Liberal Party in Quebec was to get back to its roots, to focus on meat-and-potatoes issues like people’s jobs, their pensions, their kids’ economic prospects. In short, I wanted to take the way we did politics in Papineau and make it the party’s calling card all over the province.

  This brings me to the final, and most important, decision we made that weekend about the kind of campaign we wanted to run. Our group had a lot in common. We shared values, convictions, and plenty of experience in politics and life. Many of us had young children. We also shared a misgiving about my potential candidacy. There were lots of Liberals for whom the primary positive attribute of my candidacy was nostalgia. My last name reminded them of the party’s glory days, not to mention their own. There was no way I was going to run if my campaign was going to be the political equivalent of a reunion tour for an aging rock band. We could all find something more productive to do than engage in that kind of politics.

  I made it clear that I wanted to run a campaign focused on the future, not the past. I wanted to build a new kind of political movement by recruiting hundreds of thousands of people into the process. We would, of course, welcome people who had been involved in the past, but the future would belong to those who could win the hearts and minds of people who would never join a traditional political party. We would build an inclusive, positive vision for the country, and have faith that Canadians would want to take part in it.

  We knew there would be naysayers. We knew that for Conservatives and the right wing more generally, the very idea of a Trudeau campaign would be loathsome. They would attack us with an intensity that would make their campaigns against the last few Liberal leaders seem like a friendly spat. Their attacks would be nasty, negative, and personal. They had millions of dollars to spend, and they would spend them attacking us. They would observe no boundaries in their efforts to destroy us. I looked around the room and asked everyone another simple question: Are you up for that?

  One by one, the group said yes. They were in, and they were in for the right reasons. I would make it official a couple of months later, but Sophie and I decided then and there that we were in, too. We would try to overwhelm the politics of fear and negativity with a new kind of politics. One that sought to bring people together to build on common ground, rather than divide them into camps and exploit their differences for our political gain. One that built a common vision, staked on the many things that bring us together, and keep us together, as Canadians. One that sought to foster the very best of this wonderful country.

  One that was built from the ground up, on hope and hard work.

  Chapter Nine

  Hope and Hard Work

  The middle of 2012 was a season of speculation. For an allegedly spent political force, the Liberal Party attracted a lot of interest in its leadership. Behind the scenes, Bob Rae was seriously considering a run at the job, as was Dalton McGuinty, one of his successors as Ontario premier. There were rumours that operatives were trying to recruit Mark Carney, the talented and accomplished Bank of Canada governor, while perennial names like Frank McKenna and John Manley were tossed about in the press. As well, present and former caucus colleagues Marc Garneau and Martha Hall Findlay had dropped heavy hints that they were putting together teams to vie for the job.

  Soon after I made up my mind to run, I decided that I wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my fellow contestants, whoever they turned out to be. I know and respect all of these people, and all the others who ended up running, but there were more important issues at stake than the competitive internal dynamic of the party. I wanted instead to focus on the kind of campaign we would run, to think carefully about the agenda we wanted to promote, both in the leadership campaign and afterwards. Out of necessity, our definition of success could not end with winning the leadership of the Liberal Party as it then existed. If we were to have any reasonable chance in a general election, I knew we had to begin a substantial rebuilding effort while seeking the leadership itself. It wasn’t enough to just figure out what we needed to do to win the leadership; we had to focus on what we needed to build so that the party could win the federal election in 2015. The leadership was just a step along the way.

  It would be a complex effort, we knew. Most leadership campaigns are internal contests over who is going to conduct a train that is already built, you’re all on, and—if you’re lucky—is moving in the right direction at a decent clip. This campaign would be very different, perhaps even unique in the history of my party. We would have to draw in the passengers, build the train as we rode it, and lay most of the track at the same time. This is where the idea of hope and hard work started to take shape. We needed both a solid work plan and the positive outlook to build the numbers and momentum that would draw in the kinds of people required to get the job d
one.

  Through years of teaching and through my campaigning in Papineau, I had learned that I have a knack for engaging people of exceptional talent who share a positive worldview, the right values, and a level of energy similar to my own, and I knew that that’s what I’d do as the Liberal leader.

  Like all solid plans, ours could be summarized simply: ideas and people, team and plan, hope and hard work. We wanted, more than anything else, to reground the Liberal Party as a national political force with a solid, consistent perspective on the major issues facing Canada. This would take fresh ideas and unprecedented numbers of people, in every corner of the country. Fundamentally, we knew that this campaign would decide whether the eventual winner would have a party worth leading at all.

  Paradoxically, I would start by telling Liberals that our situation was more serious than they thought. The party was at a crossroads. But contrary to what members might have read, a vote for me meant a vote for no shortcuts. It meant they were willing to pitch in, hard. It was a fine balance. We didn’t want to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm or deflate their hopefulness; we would need those in spades to shoulder through the inevitable lows that attend political life. At the same time, we had to make it absolutely clear that hope wasn’t enough, and that we knew it wasn’t enough. It had to be backed up and made real by a strong work ethic, and the discipline to prove every day that we were in this for the right reasons.

  The Liberal Party had given Canadians too many reasons to believe that we were out of touch with their needs, let alone their hopes for their country. If we were going to win back their trust, we were going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way. In short, we had to prove that we were in it for them. So, at the age of forty, the stage of life that Victor Hugo aptly termed “the old age of youth,” I set out to deliver a sobering but optimistic message to my party. Success was possible, but it was far from certain. We needed a new mission, new ideas, and new people. The first step was to refocus the party’s mission where it belongs: on the needs, hopes, and dreams of ordinary Canadians. Crucially, if that message was to be something more than a slogan, we were going to need to recruit hundreds of thousands of those Canadians to our cause.

  So, on October 2, 2012, on what would have been my little brother Michel’s thirty-seventh birthday, in a packed room at the community centre that is Papineau’s beating heart, I launched my leadership campaign with Sophie and the kids at my side. I told the crowd that I was there because I believed Canada needed new leadership and Canadians needed a new plan. The hallmark of my campaign and—if I was successful—my leadership would be a plan for economic growth that works for middle-class Canadians. I said the current government had lost touch with the things that made our country great: fairness, diversity, the commitment to leave to our children a better country than we inherited from our parents. Most of all, the nasty divisiveness that had come to characterize the Harper government was bad for Canada, and it was up to us to put an end to it. Here, in the most diverse country the world has ever known, we need leadership that proactively seeks out common ground to build upon.

  From that critical perspective, our middle-class agenda is about a lot more than economics. It recognizes that the country’s strength has often been reflected in Ottawa, in our best moments of political leadership, but never has it been created there. This was another lesson that Liberals had to learn anew. I said in my speech that “it is the middle class, not the political class, that unites this country.” The common hopes of ordinary Canadians, be they recent immigrants living in Surrey, B.C., or tenth-generation Canadians living in Quebec City, are this country’s lifeblood. Canada needs political leaders who build on that broad sense of common purpose, not ones who emphasize the few things that divide us in order to advance their own narrow purposes.

  I wanted to remind Liberals that this common ground could be found all across Canada, independent of our national government and whoever might be leading it at any given time. It was out there for us to find and to build upon it a new kind of politics.

  Over recent years, it had become difficult for Liberals to tell the difference between embodying values and creating them. This is what I meant when I said “the Liberal Party didn’t create Canada. Canada created the Liberal Party.” Historically, my party was so successful, for so long, because it was open to all Canadians, in touch with them. It was merely the vehicle for their aspirations, not the source. But with our successes, I think Liberals forgot that. That was a very large mistake, for which the party has paid a steep price.

  None of this is meant to downplay the economic aspect of the middle-class issue. That is vitally important. Canada is a harmonious country largely because of the self-perpetuating dynamic of progress. People from everywhere on earth, of every conceivable cultural background, who profess every faith, have been coming to Canada for generations. They often find greater acceptance here than in their countries of origin. Crucially, they also find greater economic opportunity. This in turn makes us more welcoming of newcomers, public-spirited about the country, and better able to appreciate and accommodate the views of people we disagree with. When we feel better off by sharing common ground, we seek it out, build on it, and expand it for others.

  There’s nothing preordained or God-given about Canada’s success, on the economic front or any other. It happened—and continues to happen—because Canadians made it happen. When shared prosperity begins to break down, short-sighted people always emerge to point out differences and take advantage of them for their own narrow interests. I am enormously proud that Quebecers recently stood up to and rejected what was perhaps the most blatant example in our country’s modern history of a narrow political movement promoting division for political gain. I always had faith that we would. That said, we need to recognize that some of the seeds of the Parti Québécois’s Charter of Values were sown by economic anxiety, especially in the regions outside our big cities. We need a more inclusive plan for economic growth and jobs, or we’ll see more and more of such politics.

  It is true that Canada has escaped, so far, the worst aspects of the middle-class decline being felt in the United States and in less diverse developed economies. Our abundant natural resources and small population all but guarantee that we will be cushioned from the worst. We have also seen, in part because of smart policies that support them, a generation of talented Canadian women enter the workforce and reach their peak earning years, which was a significant, but one-time, boost to economic growth. We should be thankful for these positive developments. We should do our best to understand and support them, but we shouldn’t allow them to hide the reality of the problem. The trend is unmistakable. The median income of Canadians has barely increased since 1980. That means your average, ordinary Canadian hasn’t had a real raise in thirty years. Over the same time, the economy has almost doubled in size. The struggle of the middle class in the twenty-first century is a major problem that won’t be solved easily. And it won’t be solved at all if we hide from it, pretend it doesn’t exist, or blame it on one group of people or region of the country or sector of the economy.

  Lots of people have told me this problem is too big to tackle, and I should choose smaller ones to put at the centre of our campaign. I shake my head at those in the government and on the right generally who say there’s no issue here, that we’re rabble-rousing and pandering for votes; or others who accept that the problem exists, but throw their hands in the air because they see it as a function of global forces that we can do nothing about here in Canada. That first argument shows how out of touch today’s Conservatives have become—after almost ten years in power—with what’s really happening in the lives of ordinary Canadians. The second argument reflects how unambitious they have become for the country. We have solved bigger problems with fewer resources in this country’s great history. We can solve this one too, with the right plan, and the right people to implement it, in the right way. That’s what building on common g
round is all about.

  Armed with this hopeful message, I set out to demonstrate the “hard work” side of the equation—by example. In the first week of the campaign, after launching in Quebec, I went to Alberta, B.C., Ontario, and the Maritimes. Before it was over I visited 154 different ridings and 155 different communities. Those places I could not get to, I used every imaginable contemporary technology to reach, from Skype to Google Hangouts to Twitter chats to SoapBox. My candidacy would attract attention, sure, but I knew that attention was nothing more than an open door. If Canadians didn’t like what they saw on their front porch, that door would close quickly.

  And, in some places, that door would open just a crack.

  I chose to make my first stop in Calgary for a reason. While I wanted my campaign to be relentlessly focused on Canada’s future, I also wanted Canadians to know that I wasn’t afraid to confront the ghosts of my party’s past. This was especially true of those ghosts closely associated with my father. The National Energy Program of more than thirty years before still looms large over the Liberals in Alberta, even more so over any Liberal named Trudeau. So I wanted to address that directly, to let people know that I recognized the negative consequences it had had. However well intentioned it might have been, the NEP ended up inciting precisely the kind of division my father had fought his whole life to bridge, in Quebec and elsewhere. I made a commitment that day in Alberta that a Liberal Party led by me would never use western resource wealth to buy eastern votes.

  The NEP was a real issue, but it was an even more potent symbol. It said to a whole generation of western Canadians that when gut-check time comes around, Liberal priorities are elsewhere. It abetted our political opponents, from Brian Mulroney to Stephen Harper, in their mission to vilify us, to foment suspicion among the next generation that our party is not for them, in both senses of the phrase: we would not be their advocates, and they would not be welcome among us. For more than three decades, the consequence has been that even people whose predisposition is liberal on issue after issue would never think of supporting—let alone joining—the Liberal Party of Canada.