Exclusive stomping grounds
Some of the landmarks of Justin Trudeau’s early life:
24 Sussex Dr., Ottawa
In his autobiography, Common Ground, Justin recalled playing on the driveway of the prime minister’s official residence one June day with his friend Jeff Gillin. The boys were about 11. A car pulled up, the door opened, and out stepped an elegant young woman carrying a gym bag. It was Diana, Princess of Wales, who had come over for a swim and — she was “a little out of sorts” — respite from her own gilded cage. “Oh, my God!” said young Mr. Gillin. “That was incredible!”
Harrington Lake, Que.
At the PM’s summer residence across the Ottawa River in the Gatineau Hills, the Trudeaus were, by most accounts, happiest. Pierre led frequent family hikes through the wilderness, startling the occasional party they ran into and exasperating the RCMP security detail. In winter, he led snowshoeing expeditions, spinning tales of the Mad Trapper of Rat River. “It was when we paddled or hiked together back then that we felt closest as a family,” Justin would say.
Parliament Hill
June 29, 1984: Pierre Trudeau spends his last day in the Commons as prime minister and his sons look on from the Speaker’s gallery. Afterwards, he asks what the boys want to do. They want to go to the top of the Peace Tower. Trudeau declines to cut in front of tourists waiting for the elevator. So the Trudeaus charge up a narrow, rarely used staircase to the top and — as if it were their own private tree fort — look out at the Ottawa landmarks, and across the river to the Gatineau Hills, at what had been the landscape of their childhood.
1418 Pine Ave., Montreal
Pierre Trudeau regularly hosted dinners for celebrated guests after retiring from politics. His sons would be given a heads-up about who was coming to visit — an architect, a musician, a political figure — and were expected to bone up on his or her bio in order to carry on a decent conversation. “He expected us to be interested and active participants in very grown-up conversations,” Justin told the Star. “It was based on teaching us to listen, to ask pertinent questions and to be engaged from a young age and to be fundamentally interested in others. Kids can be fairly wrapped up in themselves and their own games, especially three boys as close as we were, and to get us to be more aware of the grown-up world, I think, was something that my father found important.”
95 Queen Victoria St., Ottawa
Though it’s not easy to have separated parents, Justin Trudeau said his mother’s purchase of a house in the New Edinburgh neighbourhood of Ottawa, only blocks from the prime minister’s residence, helped the brothers handle the disruption in their lives. “We’d take the school bus in the morning to school and ignore the RCMP car driving behind us when we stayed over at my mum’s place,” he said. “In the lane, we’d just play for hours with the kids in the neighbourhood on bikes, on skateboards, goofing around — water-balloon fights and those sorts of things. That lane was a perfect place to just be an ordinary kid in what was sometimes a very unordinary childhood.”