A glimpse into how COVID has aged Justin Trudeau

For nearly 20 years, Justin Trudeau has been turning up annually at a Montreal radio studio to talk about life and music with host Terry DiMonte.

COVID-19 messed with that tradition this week in two ways: For the first time, the prime minister did the interview at long distance and, this year, he had no music to recommend.

“I’m enjoying a lot of silence these days,” Trudeau said.

It was just a fleeting reference, and neither he nor his old friend DiMonte dwelt on it.

But the interview, which is always worth hearing for rare glimpses into Trudeau’s personal life, was punctuated this year with references to how the pandemic has aged the prime minister, who will turn 49 on Christmas Day.

Up until COVID-19 hit, Trudeau told DiMonte, his job had not often pushed him into many life-and-death decisions. Only the 2016 execution of two kidnapped Canadians in the Philippines — which Trudeau has previously called the toughest moment of his political career — really came close, he said.

“People are losing their loved ones,” Trudeau said when asked how he had been dealing with the weight of the pandemic. “People are dying because of this — There’s this moment in Canada’s history that’s going to leave marks, no matter what, for the coming decades.”

The interview wasn’t completely sombre — Trudeau and DiMonte chatted genially, as the old friends usually do — but the pandemic’s impact on Trudeau kept surfacing through the nearly 40-minute conversation.

Trudeau talked about the ups and downs of being home more often with the family — his wife, Sophie, and their three children, Xavier, 13; Ella-Grace, 11; and Hadrien, 6.

On the one hand, he said, it was good to be home more. All the travelling had been especially tough on Xavier, as DiMonte recalled from a previous conversation.

“It’s been a time of reconnection with the family. I’m not on the road two, three nights a week,” Trudeau said. But he added, somewhat candidly, “That comes with its own challenges — You know, it’s always nice to get out and away from the family every now and then.”

Trudeau also said that his mother, Margaret, has been having a hard time over the past year.

He didn’t go into details, but hinted that the pandemic has put a strain on her muchpublicized struggles with mental health.

“She’s not doing great,” Trudeau said. “She’s in Montreal and she’s going to be alone for Christmas and I’m not going to see her.”

His mother, he said, is normally “the champion of Christmas,” overseeing the turkey, the stuffing and the carrots mixed with turnips that only she and the prime minister appear to enjoy.

“It’s really tough, but you know, these are the things that families are having to go through — doing Christmas without my mom, knowing that she’s just a two-hour drive away, yet knowing that it might as well be light-years away.”

Trudeau talked a bit more about his wife, Sophie, and her early brush with COVID-19 in March, which gave her bad headaches and flu-like symptoms but, fortunately, no trip to the hospital.

He spoke of how working from home for a large part of this year meant that he was juggling his prime ministerial duties with math tutoring for the kids, or finding a jar of peanut butter while on the phone in a meeting. Still, he said he was one of the “lucky ones” who could do his job without needing to go into the office.

All the extra time with the family also appears to involve a lot of games and exercise — mountain biking with the children in the Gatineau Hills and intense sessions over the board game Catacombs, which was invented by a Hamilton company, Elzra Games. (The company’s website boasts that Catacombs has been named “Geek Dad’s game of the year,” which sounds about right for Trudeau.)

“It’s a dexterity-based game,” Trudeau told DiMonte. “It’s my Christmas recommendation.”

Trudeau said he and the family had been watching Christmas classic movies and this year, he planned to introduce the children to the “best Christmas movie ever” — “Die Hard.”

But, he added, “I haven’t told Sophie yet.” Trudeau talked of how Xavier is now regularly defeating him when they toss balls through the basketball hoop and how he had tried and abandoned intermittent fasting to keep in shape.

DiMonte asked the prime minister what he wanted for Christmas. Even that answer was pandemic-tinged.

Trudeau wants socks for Christmas. But not the showy socks that he used to flaunt on the international stage.

“Not stripey socks, not dress socks. I’ve got lots of those,” he said. “But actually nice fuzzy, warm socks that I can wear in the winter.”