BALANCING ACT
guarded in private. Where does the performance end and the real Trudeau begin?
Even though they hadn’t actually met me, people would come up to me and like me or not like me because of my father. That’s something I’m comfortable with, I’m used to that. I know I have to dispel those notions with my own actions, my own identity.
It’s just after 7 a.m. in a downtown Saskatoon office cubicle, and Trudeau starts to let his guard down.
He’s standing outside the city’s CBC Radio studio, a few feet away from his advisers and the sternlooking bodyguards that they’ve kept in tow since the outset of the campaign.
Trudeau spent most of his 36 hours in Saskatchewan visiting First Nations and remote communities, hoping to tap into a voter base that’s grown tired of the Harper Government’s firm approach to aboriginal issues.
Just like New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair, and just like the premiers of every province in the country, Trudeau supports a public inquiry into Canada’s high rate of missing and murdered aboriginal women. Asked if he’s seen anything that made him feel a sense of shame, that shocked him into grasping the enormity of the problem, Trudeau pauses.
“Rinelle Harper,” he says, referring to the Winnipeg teen who crawled out of the frozen Assiniboine River after she was savagely beaten and left for dead. “I had a chance to sit down with her about six months ago and that just struck me, as a dad, as a person, to my core.”
The brutality of the assault on Rinelle only fuelled pressure on the Conservative government to call a public inquiry into the violence so many indigenous women face. But the Conservatives maintain that such an inquiry is unnecessary.
“She was surrounded by family and she was very quiet and unassuming, almost apologetic about all the fuss that had been caused around her, as any teenager might be,” says Trudeau. “This horrific thing had happened to her and she was kind of embarrassed about the whole thing, when it should be us who are embarrassed and ashamed that such a situation could unfold in a country like Canada.”
He stops talking for a moment and, without being prompted, alludes to the death of his brother Michel. Nearly 17 years ago, Michel was skiing in British Columbia when an avalanche swept him into Kokanee Lake. After an extensive search, authorities weren’t able to recover the body of Trudeau’s youngest brother.
“One of the things I learned from losing my brother is that you have to try to take something that is devastating and tragic and look for a positive step forward,” Trudeau says. “It will never compensate for the loss, but you can actually say, ‘Okay, this is what good came out of the terrible things.’ That’s why I got involved in avalanche safety.
“With Rinelle, I felt this sense of responsibility,” he says. “Like this need to recognize the poverty, the loss, the violence and the framework that exists behind too many people.”
In just a few moments, Trudeau will put his game face back on. There won’t be any personal disclosures, no evident sense of vulnerability. Trudeau will accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of leading Canada into another recession, he will beat the “middle class” drum, propose his tax hike for millionaires, and promise to lift 315,000 children out of poverty with an overhaul of the Canadian Child Benefit policy.
Then he will stumble a bit while trying to spell out the CCB policy on live radio.
For about 30 seconds, Trudeau will labour through a mangled sequence of numbers and corrections before finally conceding, “I’m not going to get bogged down in the numbers here.”
Then he’ll step out of the studio, hang his head, look to Butts and calmly say, “I got bogged down in the numbers, didn’t I?" Is Justin Trudeau ready? As Stephen Harper stood outside Rideau Hall on a sweltering Aug. 2 morning and signalled the start of an election campaign that will last until the brisk days of mid- October, the answer to that question was unclear.
These past 12 months have seen Trudeau’s fortunes sink dramatically. Last summer, his party was polling in majority territory, and now he’s trailing both the Tories and New Democrats in a three-way race.
There have been highly publicized gaffes — some ill-advised jokes about Stephen Harper, fighter jets and male genitalia come to mind — and a tendency for Trudeau to try his hand at being all things to all people. His views on Canada’s role in the war against the Islamic State have evolved, in contrast with the steadfastness of Harper and Mulcair’s positions. He voted in favour of the Conservatives’ controversial terror bill, but says it needs a series of revisions.
But isn’t this what the Tories have been telling us all along? After all, what did Trudeau accomplish before politics?
He was a snowboarding instructor at Blackcomb — where he taught a group of kids known as “The Ride Tribe” — and worked the door at a Whistler nightclub called The Rogue Wolf.
When he moved on from the slopes, Trudeau became a highschool teacher, and later made thousands charging speaking fees to charities. It’s tough not to be underwhelmed when you put that resumé next to his predecessor Michael Ignatieff’s — a former Harvard University professor and award-winning journalist.
And so, at the outset of Trudeau’s first electoral contest, it seemed the Conservative prophecy that Justin was “Just not Ready” was finally going to materialize.
But in the face of such low expectations, Trudeau began mounting a comeback. Whereas Harper launched his campaign before an unenthusiastic crowd in Montreal’s Mount Royal riding, and Mulcair looked positively robotic in his opening address, Trudeau seemed to be having fun on Day 1 of the 11week contest.
The following week, after the Maclean’s Magazine leaders debate, many saw Trudeau coming away as the winner. For all his academic credentials, besting Harper in a televised argument is a feat Ignatieff never accomplished.
One party insider says the Liberals managed to leverage Trudeau’s debate performance into a fundraising bonanza — they raked in an estimated $1 million in the week following the debate.
“He won that debate because he looked into people’s living rooms and he told them what he was going to do for them,” said the party insider. “It was an energizing moment, and it shows that our message is resonating with Canadians.”
Trudeau’s latest campaign commercial — a direct response to the “Just not Ready” ads — is a feat of political judo. In it, he breaks the unwritten rule that you shouldn’t acknowledge your enemies’ criticism and opens the spot by admitting that he isn’t ready.
“Stephen Harper says I’m not ready,” Trudeau declares, walking across Parliament Hill in a button shirt with rolled-up sleeves. “I’ll tell you what I’m not ready for, I’m not ready to stand by as our economy slides into recession. Not ready to watch hard working Canadians lose jobs or fall further behind.”
The commercial has tested well in focus groups and seems to be helping Trudeau in the polls.
Questioning Trudeau’s preparedness has, to some degree, worn away at voter confidence. But maybe asking if Justin Trudeau is ready is the wrong question.
When he took over as party leader in 2013, there were only 32,000 registered Liberals across Canada. That number has increased tenfold under Trudeau. Along with Butts and veteran Liberal operative Katie Telford, the Liberal leader built a network of volunteers and donors the likes of which the party had never seen before.
“He has re-injected life into the party. Today you saw 100 people volunteering at an event in Saskatoon — in Saskatoon, think about that,” said one adviser, after an Aug. 13 rally. “That wasn’t happening before. Trudeau has worked obsessively on rebuilding the grassroots. … We’ve knocked on one million doors in the last twoand-half years. Our fundraising is more sophisticated than it’s ever been, and we believe we have the best volunteer network of any political party in Canada.”
People close to the leader say he’s fiercely self-critical and invites people like Butts, Telford, Reporter and other members of his inner circle to challenge him on policy. When confronted with hecklers or protesters during rallies, Trudeau lets them take the stage, say their piece and they often part on good terms. It’s actually a pretty effective way of disarming his critics.
“I don’t believe in surrounding myself with people who are afraid of me or worried about offending me with the wrong idea,” Trudeau says. “That approach of not telling me what you think is a quick way to lose my trust.”
So when it comes to the nuts and bolts of politics, there’s little doubt Trudeau may be more prepared than former leaders Ignatieff or Stéphane Dion ever were. The 43-year-old is attacking the campaign with glee, leaving his opponents, his security detail and even his young staffers struggling to keep pace.
Despite his boundless enthusiasm for glad-handing, despite a much-improved sense of discipline that’s minimized gaffes during the election, it often looks like Trudeau is feigning sincerity.
When he gets in front of a microphone, there’s a stiffness that overtakes him: every syllable is carefully enunciated, and nothing sounds conversational. It all seems so scripted.
After revving up a crowd of partisans in Saskatoon — where he effortlessly deflected criticism from a pro-gun heckler in the audience — Trudeau opens the floor to questions from the media. Asked about the latest development in the trial of disgraced Tory Senator Mike Duffy, the Liberal leader forcefully delivers his talking points.
“Canadians should be able to trust that their prime minister and his office tell the truth,” he says, tacking a hard dramatic emphasis onto the end of the sentence. “It’s become clear that the prime minister’s office engaged in an elaborate coverup. Canadians deserve better.”
Then, without being asked, he repeats the answer in French to give Radio-Canada its own soundbite. Trudeau speaks the language beautifully, but if there’s a pinch of overacting in his English delivery, his French is doused in high drama.
The bourgeois-sounding accent — which he attributes to learning the language in Ontario’s Frenchimmersion system rather than in the joual-tinged streets of Montreal — puts a certain distance between himself and voters.
This is perhaps Trudeau’s biggest challenge in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 19 election. At his best, he makes it look easy: the way he glides through an audience, the way he gently cradles a stranger’s baby or effortlessly remembers a volunteer’s name at a rally. This is Trudeau’s clearest path to victory, winning hearts and minds one handshake at a time.
But there are still far too many moments where it looks like politics, where Trudeau’s enthusiasm causes him to break the fourth wall, where it’s very clear he’s delivering a message that was focus-grouped with laser precision. And that may be the golden rule of the game: don’t make it look like you’re playing.