Who is he really? Follow the tweets
What is Justin Trudeau really like? It’s a question being asked a lot, now that the Montreal MP is running for the Liberal leadership. What we do know is that this very modern politician is a great user of social media. So in an effort to plumb Trudeau’s depths, I pored through 18 months of his Twitter posts. With its 140-character-per-message limit, Twitter is not always conducive to great thoughts. But what a sender’s tweets can impart to readers (known as followers in Twitter parlance) is an inchoate sense of personality. The picture that emerges from Trudeau’s postings is that of a man who is carefully open, strategically friendly and rather clever. At 40, he is on the cusp of middle age. But he has mastered the Internet’s youthful style, employing the air of spontaneous intimacy that convention demands without giving away too many secrets. Thus his 152,799 followers can learn that on Sept. 16 he went to the Montreal comic convention with his kids and had a great time. That followed a trip to Toronto’s Centre Island a week earlier during which he also had a great time. On Aug. 3, he and his family had a fabulous time sitting on a patio in Charlottetown. On July 6, they had an equally wonderful time eating lunch (which he pronounced delicious) on a patio in Calgary. What we learn from this is two things. We know that Trudeau travels the country, a fact that may have something to do with his leadership ambitions. And we also know that, unlike his pricklier father, Pierre, he seems to have fun wherever he goes. (Pierre Trudeau, it may be remembered, did not always enjoy his trips to the hinterland and, during one memorable trip to the West, gave those protesting his appearance the middle-finger salute). When the Commons is sitting, Justin Trudeau’s tweets follow a predictably partisan path. In at least three tweets, he mocks Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government for spending so much money. Whether this means that a Liberal government led by Trudeau would spend less is never spelled out. There are no essays on fiscal policy linked to his tweets – or at least none that I could find. He is openly proud of who he is. In a May 13 tweet, he notes that people refer to both his parents – mother Margaret as well as father Pierre — as inspirational figures. But he also wears his history comfortably. In one June posting, he berates Immigration Minister Jason Kenney for disparaging an Alberta politician, noting: “Even (former US president Richard) Nixon apologized to my dad for calling him an a--hole. Jason Kenney, you sir are no Richard Nixon.”
And perhaps because of his own background, he has some sympathy for the family of politicians. An April 14 tweet dismisses as “garbage” a CBC story detailing how Harper took his daughter to a baseball game in New York while on government business.
Throughout runs a thread of puckish humour. “Every now and again someone makes a huge mistake and lets me do something dangerous,” he says of a picture that shows him holding a welding torch.
“Totally stoked about playing rugby on the Hill lawn today,” he tweets in another posting. “Last time . . . I split my pants.”
Serious content is not entirely absent. In May, Trudeau tweeted a link to a Commons speech he made against homophobia. Last month, he noted that the youth unemployment rate was too high. In February he posted a video of himself asking a gender identity question in the Commons.
And he routinely links to newspaper articles that he likes.
In one of these, a National Post writer advises the Liberals to avoid expensive promises and instead focus on minor but practical Commons reforms. “Some GREAT points here,” Trudeau comments.
What we don’t know is if a Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau would follow such minimalist advice.
Perhaps he was revealing what was truly in his heart. Or perhaps he was expressing random thoughts while waiting in line to buy a doughnut. With Twitter, it’s hard to tell. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.