Trudeau on Trudeau
Liberal leader says he wants voters to know him a little better
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is going public with some deeply personal aspects of his life. The revelations are contained in a new memoir, Common Ground. We have coverage and an excerpt on
OTTAWA — Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is going public with some deeply personal aspects of his life — from his own “deep faith” in God, to the childhood pain caused by his parents’ divorce, to the “ups and downs” of his own marriage.
The revelations are contained in a new memoir, Common Ground, that Trudeau has written in advance of next year’s election so that Canadians have a fuller understanding of his background.
In an hour-long interview with Postmedia News, Trudeau described himself as a man whose past — growing up at 24 Sussex Drive, going to high school and university in Montreal, and later working as a teacher in Vancouver — gives him a “vision” for where he’d like to bring Canada.
“I wanted people to know a little more about where I come from, how I came to be the person that I am,” Trudeau told Postmedia.
Trudeau’s book covers his own accession to the Liberal leadership since his entry to politics in 2007. It also contains sharp criticism of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who he blames for introducing a “rabid form of partisanship” in Canada that has poisoned the political system.
And while he makes it clear throughout the book that his father was the “anchor” in his childhood and taught him much of what he now knows about life, Trudeau doesn’t shy away from criticizing him in two areas.
He writes that the National Energy Program his father’s government unveiled in 1980 was a mistake that caused national division, and it was under his father Pierre’s leadership that the Liberal party began losing touch with its own grassroots.
But perhaps the most illuminating parts of the book are personal in nature. Speaking to Postmedia, Trudeau candidly discussed the personal experiences that have shaped his character. Among them:
Faith in God
Trudeau was raised a Catholic as a child, saying prayers and reading the Bible with his father and two brothers.
By the time he was in his 20s, he had become a “lapsed Catholic.”
Then came the death of his younger brother, Michel, in a British Columbia avalanche in 1998. To help deal with his grief, he attended a course on Christianity.
“It came at exactly the right time. Trusting in God’s plan. For someone as rational and scientific and logical and rigorous as I am, to accept the unknowable and to re-anchor myself in faith was really, really important to me.”
“Since that moment, I still consider myself and have re-found myself of a deep faith and belief in God.”
Trudeau stresses he believes in the “separation of church and state” in his political thinking.
His parents’ marital
breakdown
Trudeau credits both his parents for being devoted to their children and for trying to “minimize” the effects of the divorce on them.
He writes that like “every child of divorced parents” he was shaped by the experience.
He was left with a “sense of diminished self-worth.” Sometimes when he heard his parents arguing he would “escape” by reading an Archie book and dream of growing up in the comic strip’s mythical neighbourhood of Riverdale, where no one got divorced.
Trudeau said he learned the “futility of trying to please everyone around you.”
“I sort of locked into the idea that if I could be the perfect son to both of my parents, well maybe that would be enough to keep them together.
“And ultimately, obviously, it wasn’t.”
His own marriage
Trudeau was married in 2005 to Sophie Gregoire, who he says “grounds” him.
Before he entered the party leadership race in 2012, he had a “deeply personal, private discussion” whether to do it.
“We had seen what the Conservative party did to anyone who was a threat,” he told Postmedia.
“Its attacks on past leaders of the Liberal party. I knew that for everything that I had experienced growing up (as the son of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau), it was going to be worse today.”
In his book, he writes: “Our marriage isn’t perfect, and we have had difficult ups and downs, yet Sophie remains my best friend, my partner, my love. We are honest with each other, even when it hurts.”
In the interview, Trudeau said he has a “true partnership” with his wife “in this job” — which he said was the “one thing that I saw as my father’s failing.”
Growing up at 24 Sussex Drive
He said his parents, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau, “drilled” into him the need to respect other people regardless of their social status. Trudeau was taught that it was a “privilege” to be living at the prime minister’s residence.
“We were in that house because my father was serving the country. And that we had a responsibility to live up to that service.”