Trudeau cites Scottish grandfather as influence on his ‘retail politics’

JUSTIN Trudeau has strong connections to Scotland.

He is the son of Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair, whose father James ‘Jimmy’ Sinclair was from Scotland.

He was born in 1908 in the hamlet of Crossroads in the Banffshire parish of Grange near Keith. Jimmy’s father, also James, was a teacher from Wick and his mother Betsy had been a Ross from Evanton on the Easter Ross Peninsula.

The family moved to Vancouver in 1911. His father had gone a year earlier, and was among the founders and later a principal of Vancouver Technical Secondary School, the area’s first vocational school.

Jimmy Sinclair studied engineering at University of British Columbia, mathematics at Oxford (a Rhodes scholar) and mathematics and physics at Princeton. He served in the Royal Canadian Airforce in the Second World War.

He became a Liberal MP for a Vancouver seat and rose within the government to cabinet. He was minister of fisheries from 1952 to 1957 and was regarded as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party in the late 1950s, before he left politics to return to business.

According to the Vancouver Sun, he had places in his garden named after Justin and his two siblings - Justin’s Path, Sacha’s Rock, Michel’s Lookout.

In his 2014 autobiography Common Ground, Trudeau wrote that his grandfather helped teach him the “retail” political skills that he would have never learned from his brilliant but shy father.

In October 2015 Justin Trudeau concluded his successful election campaign at a rousing rally of around 3,000 people in the the North Vancouver seat his grandfather Jimmy Sinclair had represented for 17 years.