Trudeau memoir open and hollow
Common Ground, Justin Trudeau’s new memoir, is at its best when it chronicles Mr. Trudeau’s early life: his unusual childhood at 24 Sussex Drive, his parents’ disintegrating marriage and mother Margaret’s mental-health struggles, his brother Michel’s death and his father’s not too long afterwards. And he was at his best on Monday night discussing the same events with Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo, at the bookstore’s flagship midtown Toronto store before a rapturous audience of 200 or so. Indeed, he was as eloquent as I have ever heard him.
“Sometimes kids who are going through a divorce feel ... it was somehow their misbehaving ... that drove the divorce to happen,” he said.
“I had at least the aware- ness that the pressures on my family were so great, and the public life was so challenging, that I wasn’t the cause of that divorce — which already for an eight- or nine-year-old is a big deal to be reassured on.
“But at the same time,” he said, “I had a really difficult time accepting that I wasn’t enough of a reason for the divorce to not happen.”
It wasn’t the observation, which is hardly earth-shattering. I was struck by the way he took his time, chose his words carefully and ended up with complete, well-formed sentences. That’s rare in a politician, and if his goal is to make people see him as a real person, it’s not hard to see it working.
One of the most striking passages in the book concerns Margaret, post-divorce and with her bipolarity as yet untreated, showing up at Justin’s school wailing about a boyfriend leaving her. “I did my best to console her, giving her hugs and patting her back and telling her it was all right, that things would get better,” he writes. “I was 11 years old.”
I found the account of his early life compelling. But as a political prop, Common
Ground strikes me as a bit of an odd duck. “I want people to have a sense of who I am beyond the headlines of ‘ he was born at 24 Sussex and somehow he feels that justifies going back,’ ” Mr. Trudeau told Ms. Reisman. But the fact is, Mr. Trudeau has got where he is in the polls in large part simply by being who he is. I don’t see anything in the story he tells to win over many skeptics. The book is no heavier on policy than Mr. Trudeau unapologetically is in public.
Speaking on his feet, he does have his middle-class pitch down pat: Canadians haven’t had a “real raise” in 30 years; they’re too indebted; “people are worried about their ailing parents and the health-care system that’s going to support them,” he told a fawning Ms. Reisman. “We’re worried, for the first time ever in this country, about the fact that this next generation might not have the same opportunities and quality of life that the last generation received from its parents.”
Economists dispute just how acute Canada’s middleclass crisis is, and one suspects parents had significant doubts about their children’s quality of life during, say, the Cold War. But people seem to eat that stuff up.
Off the cuff, however, on perhaps less-practised subjects, he seems considerably less assured. The tones and the cadences are mostly right. He’s a gifted speaker, no question. But his tone gets showier, more theatrical, the vaguer he gets. Words show up unwelcome and unannounced. And he has a knack for composing smart-sounding clips that carry the stench of nonsense: “We are actually putting together an election platform as a vision for how to properly govern this country,” he told Ms. Reisman, who didn’t ask what the vision is.
All told, Mr. Trudeau’s memoir offers us an entirely mainstream, modern, centreleft Canadian politician with a famous name and no experience in government who’s waiting to unveil platform planks until he completes exhaustive consultations with his party and Canadians at large. That’s fair enough; it’s taken him this far. But it’s not difficult to imagine him coming somewhat a cropper on the campaign trail — if not in advertisements at the hands of Stephen Harper then in person at the hands of Thomas Mulcair, who has a pretty good BS detector, or at his own hands, thanks to his gift for the gaffe. An Abacus poll released Monday suggests he might be suffering for his confused, juvenile rhetoric with respect to the ISIS mission. Ultimately, Common Ground is unlikely to help or hurt Mr. Trudeau’s fortunes to any significant degree. To my eye, Team Trudeau’s task is to formulate a concrete plan he believes in, and deploy his considerable rhetorical skills to articulating it as well as he articulates the lessons of his early life and his political awakening. Key to that task, obviously, will be that he understands implicitly and believes passionately in the policies he’s supporting.