Looking for votes on the bocce court
Trudeau courts seniors
As most of downtown Toronto settled in to work Monday morning, Canada’s most youthful and virile political leader went into a treeshaded park to play bocce.
His companions at Fred Hamilton Park in the city’s west end included a man in the retiree uniform of a polo shirt and zip-up track jacket, another man in a Canadian tuxedo (denim jacket and pants), and a woman who took to the 23 C heat in a thick sweater and scarf.
Two brave cameramen positioned themselves on the ground at the end of the court, confident the Liberal leader wouldn’t accidentally send a 920-gram ball into their lenses.
“Intense focus on the bocce court this morning,” Trudeau wrote on his Twitter feed.
The 43-year-old is normally photographed doing young-people things: punching Patrick Brazeau, posing for selfies at gay pride parades or, as he did last Friday, donning shorts to climb North Vancouver’s demanding Grouse Grind in an impressive 55 minutes.
But, of course, all Canadian politicians must serve their time with the country’s most electorally important demographic: seniors vote in significant numbers.
Woe betide the would-be prime minister who can’t play snooker or pretend to be a Wayne and Shuster fan.
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper plays crib with Calgary seniors and promises to stop the “socialists” from taking over, while Tom Mulcair drinks tea with Montreal pensioners and vows to bring back home delivery of their mail.
But the experience can be uniquely uncomfortable for Trudeau as nostalgic septuagenarians grab his arm to reminisce about his father’s heyday back in the 1970s.
As Mulcair quipped lately, all the Liberals hanging around Trudeau seem to be blue-hairs.
“I’ll let Justin Trudeau continue with his golden oldies tour,” the NDP leader said after a week that saw Trudeau campaigning with former Liberal prime ministers Paul Martin (born 1938) and Jean Chretien (born 1934).
Trudeau quickly admonished Mulcair for picking on the elderly — even if he has been guilty of elder bashing on occasion.
Twelve months ago, after a group of aging former Liberal MPs penned a public letter decrying Trudeau’s stance on abortion, the Liberal leader quipped the days “when old men get to decide what a woman does with her body are long gone.”
The occasion for Trudeau’s bocce playing Monday was a speech to the Canadian Association of Retired People, the advocacy group headed by media mogul Moses Znaimer.
To a crowd at Znaimer’s Zoomerplex — many of whom likely had a secret crush on Trudeau’s father — the younger Trudeau outlined his party’s generous plan for the country’s 5.5 million seniors: more Canada Pension Plan money, the retirement age returned to 65 and $20 billion in new seniors’ infrastructure, including, presumably, a few bocce ball courts.
Then, almost to prove the strength and agility of youth, Trudeau grabbed a trio of weighted bocce balls and briefly juggled them for the cameras.