Justin Trudeau

1

2Contents

1 Who Are These People? 3

2 The Crowd Effect 7

3 The No-Policy Policy 26

4 The Campaign Machine 34

5 Close to Home 45

6 Sticks and Stones 56

7 Whos the Boss 67

31 Who Are These People?

Pierre Trudeau was obviously in a reflective mood in October 1983 as his limousine sped through rural roads en route to an evening appearance in Strathroy, Ont. When he arrived at his destination, the prime minister shared some of his inner thoughts with his au-dience.

There was acre upon acre of farmland and all we could see though I pressed my forehead against the cold window all we could see were little lights here and there. And I was wonder-ing: what kind of people lived in these houses? And what kind of people worked in this part of Canada? And lived and loved here?

The Ottawa journalists travelling with Trudeau didnt know what to make of this speech. Globe and Mail columnist Michael Valpy would call it one of the most unusual speeches a prime minister of Canada has given, and told his readers of a 20-minute-long, almost trance-like stream of consciousness.

Trudeaus flight of fancy, though, was also a glimpse into a style of politics that kept a wall between the elected and the electors. Here was a man who had been in power for the better part of two decades and only now, at the end of his tenure, was struggling to see the connection between himself and the people who had voted for him.

I felt that my job in a sense is not all that different from the jobs that most of you have those of you who have jobs, because I know there are those who are unemployed too. It is to start in the morning, and work at things, and hope to get them finished by 6 or 7 when you can get home and see your family, and then often enough to work again after (seeing your family), as I know you do.

Trudeau was indeed describing his own routine, which includ-ed making time at 24 Sussex Dr. each evening for his three boys,

Justin Trudeau

4

Justin, then nearly 12, Sacha, nearly 10, and Michel, 8.

Pierre Trudeau with his sons in 1979 (Photo: Courtesy Trudeau family)

At one point in the speech, Trudeau seemed to shake himself out of the trance, if only to apologize to his audience for the off-script performance. I feel Im not living up to your expectations, he said. Because speeches, if youve ever heard me give them, are a few notes higher, a little shriller and they roll a little more. And just to show he was still fluent in politico-speak, he mimicked himself in full rhetorical flight. Then: But that isnt the way I feel like talking to you tonight.

What prompted this strange, emotive display? Was it a sorrow-ful look back on a road not taken, a journey he should have em-barked upon years earlier, to better know all those people whom he had led for the better part of two decades before this night?

Trudeau resigned about four months later, after a walk in the snow, on Feb. 29, 1984. The job of closing the distance between the

Justin Trudeau

5

electorate and this Liberal politician was thus bequeathed to future generations of politicians, and one in particular his eldest son, Justin Trudeau.

Flash forward almost exactly 30 years from those waning days of Pierre Trudeaus reign, and zoom in on London, Ont., not that far from the Strathroy roads where the former prime minister took his journey of the soul. For many decades, Londons demographics were seen as perfect for product-testing the first McDonalds in Canada, the first bank machines, the first cable-TV station were all rolled out in London before being unleashed on the public at large.

At Western University on this particular day in early 2013, a crowd of about 400 students is packed into the Spoke pub, and the stage is festooned in Liberal red. People are jostling each other to make more room in the pub; some students are complaining that they cant get near the counter to grab lunch. But its not a food product being tested in London today its actually a bit of a product rebrand.

On Feb. 7, 2013, Justin Trudeau, now 41, is the cause of the stir at Western. Trudeaus poster is plastered all over the building. Redshirted volunteers are fussing with the sound system. Trudeau is stopping here at noon as part of a typically frenetic day on his campaign to become Liberal leader to fill the shoes of his fa-mous father.

It is there that the parallels end. Where his father ascended to the leadership at an old-fashioned, brokered convention in 1968, his son has to win followers one by one, in an often chaotic, one-person/one-vote contest. Where his dad walked simultaneously into the jobs of Liberal leader and prime minister when he won, inheriting a healthy party and the reins of power in Canada, Justin Trudeau is vying for a damaged prize a party knocked down to

Justin Trudeau

6

third place in the 2011 election and with its future existence far from certain.

And where his father could lead a country apart and removed from his voters, this is not an option available to his eldest son in the manner of 21st-century politics.

Pierre Trudeau peered at voters from behind the glass of his prime-ministerial limousine and wondered what they loved and how they lived. Leadership for him had been an abstract, intel-lectual exercise.

Justin Trudeau wouldnt have that luxury. If he wins the job his dad once had, he will have to get out from behind the glass, plunge right into the populace and acquaint himself with all those voters face to face, one by one, on the ground and across vast social-media networks.

The story of that campaign, and the man who is at the centre of it, tells us a lot about how politics, the Liberal party and Trudeaus have changed since the 1980s.

72 The Crowd Effect

It is impossible to understand Justin Trudeaus campaign for Lib-eral leader without seeing and appreciating the size of the crowds. They are everywhere. They are like some underground army, lurking undetected by the political class and suddenly emerging from its hiding places to flood into food courts and community halls across the country.

They show up in the interior of British Columbia, where the name Trudeau has usually evoked memories of the Salmon Arm salute the one-finger greeting that Pierre Trudeau offered the demonstrators who pelted his railway car with tomatoes during a 1981 visit.

During a visit with a 600-plus crowd in Kelowna, someone asks Justin what he learned from his father. He quips: When in the B.C. interior, wave with your whole hand.

They show up in Winnipeg, at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, in a suburban community hall a good 20 minutes from the downtown core. You are sure, as you pull into the parking lot, that this will be like other town hall political meetings in this day and age: sev-eral dozen solid citizens, many of them with white hair, earnestly turning up to raise pet concerns with a politician.

Instead, its an old-fashioned party. A few hundred Winnipeg-gers of all ages are filling the room, waiting for Trudeau to make an appearance. When he arrives, hes mobbed, and he shakes the hand of every person who rushes up to him.

The Liberal volunteers who have been traipsing around with Trudeau over the previous days in rural Manitoba say the scene has been familiar everywhere they cant remember a Liberal getting a greeting like this in many years, maybe never.

In a mall in Cambridge, Ont., a winter blizzard threatens in ear-

Justin Trudeau

8

ly February. People are being advised to hunker down and stay off the roads. This time, you think, no one will show up its become kind of a test; there must be something that keeps the Trudeau army underground.

But in the food court, as the appointed hour of his arrival looms, the crowd forms again. Theyre here again in the hundreds, waiting to shake Trudeaus hand.

Generally, the crowds are a demographic mix of three groups: older people, seniors and near-seniors who remember Trudeau-mania of the 1970s; younger people who have a dim recollection of Pierre Trudeau, but know Justin from the media; and new Ca-nadians, 1970s-era immigrants and their children.

Justin Trudeau with a young fan (Photo: Vince Talotta/Toronto Star)

The long-time Liberals in the crowds, the ones who have stuck through the party in its darkest hours, are often among the most puzzled. They sidle up to the reporter passing through their town,

Justin Trudeau

9

they make a remark or two about the unusual size of the crowd, and then they invariably confess: they werent sure about this guy; whats all the fuss about? But then they point to the people they used to see at meetings; the lapsed Liberals lining up for a chance to meet Trudeau. And they shrug: who can argue with this raw measure of success? This happens at nearly every one of the two dozen or so stops that this writer attended.

However it may seem on the surface, this isnt a love-at-first-sight story between Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party.

After his father left office in 1984 and moved the family to Mon-treal, Trudeau didnt have much to do with the Liberals or politics. He got his Bachelor of Arts degree at McGill University, a degree in education at the University of British Columbia, and then spent a decade trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. He taught high school for a few years in B.C., dabbled in snowboard instruction, started and abandoned a couple of other degrees and served as chair of the Katimavik youth-volunteer program found-ed by his father (but killed in the 2012 budget).

There were the rare public appearances with his family, often on the steps of a church: in the wake of the heart-wrenching death of brother Michel in an avalanche accident in 1998, and then of the 2000 death of Pierre Trudeau himself, an event of nation-wide mourning that saw Justin, then 28, take the stage to deliver a dra-matic eulogy. There was a happier occasion too: his wedding to Sophie Grgoire in Montreal in 2005.

It wasnt until 2006, when the Liberals were dumped from pow-er and Prime Minister Stephen Harpers Conservative reign began, that Trudeau started to show an active interest in getting involved with Liberal politics. He signed up with the Speakers Spotlight bureau and began to pull in a hefty income from speaking engage-

Justin Trudeau

10

ments. In May that year, while the party was still licking its wounds from defeat, an organization known as Canada 2020 held a big conference at Mont Tremblant, specifically billed as an exercise in revitalizing the progressive side of the spectrum. Though it was an event laden with Liberals former cabinet ministers John Manley and Anne McLellan served as co-chairs technically this wasnt supposed to be a partisan event.

So there was some wincing in the crowd when Trudeau tried his hand at speaking out during the conference, proclaiming that at-tendees should aim to find what it takes to take over this country once again and make sure we are moving in the right direction.

Take over the country? Again? He might as well have waved a red flag in the face of the newly elected Conservative govern-ment. It was ample evidence that he wasnt yet ready for prime time.

Later that same year, during the Liberal leadership race, Trudeau emerged to some peoples surprise as a supporter of former Ontario education minister Gerard Kennedy, giving his nomination speech at the Montreal convention.

Trudeau had met Kennedy through his old friend Gerald Butts, who had worked at Queens Park as a principal secretary to Premier Dalton McGuinty. Butts and Trudeau had been the best of friends since their days at McGill University in the 1990s. Butts was at Trudeaus side when he wrote the famous eulogy for his fathers fu-neral a public debut that some found touching but others found cloying and overdramatic. A decade or so later, Trudeau can still provoke that polarized kind of reaction among his listeners.

Also in Kennedys camp in 2006 were some of the people who would go on to become members of Trudeaus own leadership quest seven years later including, notably, Katie Telford, who was Kennedys chief of staff and his national campaign director for the 2006 bid.

Justin Trudeau

11

Trudeau had asked to meet with Telford before the convention when he decided to back Kennedy. The got together for coffee and fell into a lively discussion about the issue of recognizing Quebec as a nation a hot topic at the time. Trudeau rattled off all the ar-guments hed been reading in the papers and the conversations hed been holding with people. Telford hadnt known what to expect when she met Trudeau for the first time, but clearly, despite her best efforts at a poker face, she displayed some surprise.

As Trudeau was leaving the restaurant, he looked over his shoulder, smiled and quipped: Im not quite what you thought I was, am I?

When Kennedy followed through on his deal to back former en-vironment and intergovernmental affairs minister Stphane Dion in subsequent ballots at the Montreal convention in December 2006 thus sealing Dions unexpected victory over front-runners Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae Trudeau climbed aboard too.

Im pleased, Trudeau told reporters after Dion won. Ive al-ways said about Stphane Dion and Gerard Kennedy that theyre the best hope for the country.

Not long after the convention, Trudeau told his friend Dsire McGraw that they should both start actively seeking nominations to be Montreal MPs, that it was time for generational change in the party. McGraw, then 37, already had nearly 20 years experi-ence in the public policy spotlight. Just out of high school in the 1980s, she had gone on a cross-country trek with other teenagers to argue for arms control. She had then gone on to be a lecturer and advocate on the environment, one of a couple of dozen people trained by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore himself to spread his Inconvenient Truth environmental presentation throughout Canada. McGraw had also worked closely with Paul Martin and his government, as an adviser and an aide, but she returned to her Montreal base after the 2006 defeat.

Justin Trudeau

12

Both McGraw and Trudeau discovered that the Liberal party was not as welcoming as they had hoped when they tried to break into elected politics. McGraw, the mother of young children, re-luctantly abandoned the effort, but her friend persisted. Trudeau had initially wanted to run in Outremont, a safe Liberal enclave, but the new leader, Dion, balked at that prospect. A series of simi-larly unhelpful discussions followed with Liberal officials, until Trudeau decided on his own to take his chances in Papineau, a struggling riding in Montreal that had been held by the Bloc Qubcois since 2006. Whats more, he had to battle for the Lib-eral nomination against a popular city councillor from the riding, Mary Deros. Still, he won the nomination in late April 2007.

When it became apparent that the Liberals were stuck with this Trudeau guy whether they liked it or not, he was summoned to an unusual meeting in the Opposition leaders office, which felt a bit like an old-fashioned star chamber.

Inside the old cabinet room on the fourth floor of Centre Block, Trudeau was seated all by himself on one side of the huge board-room table, while across from him was an array of Liberal policy advisers, ready to test his knowledge of policy and the issues.

This didnt bother him, apparently. It was just the kind of situ-ation he enjoyed, a habitat that had become familiar to him. Here were the sage minds of the Liberal party, determined to prove he was a lightweight, and he was determined to prove them wrong.

One of the things I remember was just how incredibly de-lighted I was to be there, Trudeau recalls. I mean, here I get to sit down across from really smart, mostly young folks who are deeply grounded in both politics and a subject area that they are passionate about. And we are to exchange for about three hours on just about every topic. And I got along with everyone, and I loved that ability to go deep into some fairly obscure but fascinating ele-ments.

Justin Trudeau

13

He won at least one convert from across the table that day: pol-icy aide Michael McNair, who would become a policy adviser on Trudeaus core leadership team.

Trudeau went on to win Papineau in 2008, taking a seat away from the Bloc Qubcois, winning over his detractors one by one, at the doorstep, on the street corners. He did it while many other Liberals were losing their seats, and then he did it again in 2011, when the party was reduced to third-place rubble and Harper won his much-coveted majority. Immediately after the election, though, he called Butts and said he was thinking of packing it in. Butts told him to sit tight, that as he saw for himself how the Conservatives functioned with a majority government, he might see how badly he wanted to defeat them. If Trudeau was out of politics, hed regret giving up the fight. But Trudeau said he definitely wasnt interested in running for the leadership; it was too early in his political career for that move. He spread the word among family and friends who were like family that a quest for the Liberal leadership wasnt in the cards for now.

Dominic LeBlanc is the son of former governor-general Romeo LeBlanc, who served as fisheries minister in Pierre Trudeaus cabi-net. Like Justin, his parents were separated when he was young, and like the Trudeau boys, the LeBlanc children spent the week-days with their dad and weekends with their mother. LeBlancs mother, Joslyn LeBlanc, lived on Stanley Avenue in the Ottawa neighbourhood of New Edinburgh, just a block away from Mar-garet Trudeaus home on Victoria St. So young Dominic and the Trudeau boys would often hang out together on the weekends or head together to Mont Tremblant for ski trips.

LeBlanc worked in Jean Chrtiens PMO but then became an MP in his own right in the election of November 2000 a position hes held ever since, despite the ups and downs of Liberal fortunes, which have left him the last Liberal MP standing in his home prov-

Justin Trudeau

14

ince. A possessor of a dark, even wicked sense of humour, LeBlanc will joke when he sees a lone chair at an event: Look, a place for the New Brunswick caucus to meet.

LeBlanc was almost a leadership candidate himself after Dion stepped down in the wake of the 2008 election. But eventually LeBlanc and Rae stood aside to make way for Ignatieff to be named leader uncontested a decision the party now largely regrets.

LeBlanc also mused again about running for the leadership af-ter the 2011 election, but no one seriously believed he would be a candidate if it meant running against his childhood chum.

LeBlanc and Trudeau had breakfast at Ottawas Sheraton hotel in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 election rout, and Trudeau told him, unequivocally, that he wouldnt be a candidate in the race to succeed Ignatieff.

Trudeau shared that decision with the public too, along with a gentle rebuke to all those messiah-complex Liberals who wanted him to run simply because of his last name.

There has been an expectation that if we just pick the right person at the top, everything is going to be fixed, Trudeau said in an interview with CBC-TV. Because of the history packaged into my name, a lot of people are turning to me in a way that actually, to be blunt, concerns me.

And that, for a little while at least, was that. But then came a flurry of events in early 2012 in particular,

the now-famous boxing match between Trudeau and Sen. Patrick Brazeau.

The idea for the boxing match came to Trudeau almost as a lark: it would be a way to mark his entry into his fifth decade. In the weeks before he turned 40 on Dec. 25, 2011, he got himself a Haida-image tattoo on his shoulder and became seized with the idea of going a few rounds in the boxing ring against a formidable opponent. A bucket-list thing, he called it, though he didnt let

Justin Trudeau

15

his friends in on his plans. He started looking around for possible Conservative contenders, even sounding out Defence Minister Pe-ter MacKay and Alberta MP Rob Anders about whether they were interested.

Brazeau, a former head of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, a then-37-year-old martial arts expert and former military reserv-ist, was the one who accepted the challenge. Three years younger than Trudeau, three pounds heavier, Brazeau seemed delighted at the prospect of punching a Liberal in the face. The two set the date for their match on March 31, 2012, and the event would be a fun-draiser for cancer.

Justin Trudeau and Patrick Brazeau (Photos: Courtesy Media Ball)

In the lead-up to the boxing match, Trudeau was cast as the un-derdog, a lightweight up against the brute strength of Brazeau, who had been trash-talking his opponent (and Liberals) in the weeks before the event. But in the ring itself, Brazeaus strength and bravado withered in minutes. Trudeau, defying the oddsmak-ers, triumphed in the third round with a resounding pummelling

Justin Trudeau

16

and knockout of Brazeau. More than mere entertainment, Trudeau had given the chatter-

ing classes of Ottawa something far more precious a metaphor. I proved a Liberal can take a punch, he told reporters after the match.

The headlines wrote themselves. Just watch him: Trudeau vic-torious, the Globe announced. Justin Trudeau proves hes no po-litical lightweight, Saskatoons StarPhoenix declared.

It was an intriguing headline a few weeks later, though, which more or less foretold the imminent future for Trudeau and his par-ty. It came from a cover story in Macleans by Paul Wells. Justin Trudeau should be the next leader of the Liberal party. No, seri-ously.

Suddenly, Trudeaus ruled-out leadership ambitions were back in active speculation, and he didnt seem to be doing anything to quash that line of inquiry. There was a reason for that. Trudeau had already told his good friend Butts months earlier even before the Brazeau fight that he was reconsidering his decision to sit out the leadership race. Hed been looking out on the bleak landscape for Liberals as 2011 wore on and was starting to fear that there might not even be a party there by the time he got around to run-ning for the job. He was in despair over the funereal atmosphere hanging over the party. Butts and Telford, after a discreet meeting with Trudeau at Barootes restaurant on Torontos King St. W. in early 2012, had already started initial planning to put Trudeau into the race and create a skeleton organization. But this was all still a draft plan Trudeau would have to seriously talk this over with his family. He now had two very young children, Xavier, then 4, and Ella-Grace, then nearly 2.

And just as all this was simmering beneath the surface, it was now far from clear that Rae, the interim leader, would simply trade the temporary post for a permanent one, as most Liberal-watchers

Justin Trudeau

17

had expected. Sure enough, Rae announced in June that he was abandoning any bid for the permanent leadership of the Liberal party, and after that, it was just a matter of time before Trudeau and his team got busy trying to turn the Macleans headline into a reality.

Butts is very much the right-hand man in this adventure. He is a Cape Bretoner from Glace Bay, N.S., the son of a coal miner and a nurse, whose friendship with Trudeau stretches back to their un-dergraduate days. Their alliance endured in the subsequent years, even as Trudeau moved around the country and Butts became part of the inner circle of power in McGuintys Ontario, and then the head of the World Wildlife Fund Canada (a job he had to leave while running the Trudeau leadership). Butts, who boasts a pow-erful intellect and an impressive network of influential friends, is someone who has known Trudeau long enough to be brutally hon-est with him. They are much alike on a number of counts, even physically. Theyre both tall fellows with unruly hair and an arch, sometimes savage sense of humour. Butts is more of an introvert than Trudeau, but that puts him in the large majority of the popu-lation. They like to argue, Trudeau says, over everything from Ox-ford commas to the proper use of the word humbled.

Thinking objectively about Gerry is like thinking objectively about myself, Trudeau says. We bounce off each other really, re-ally well . . . Every now and then we encourage ourselves, each other, in the wrong direction, which is why we do need counter-point around us.

Enter Telford, the campaign manager a job rarely done by women in politics, especially women with young families. Telford gets prickly about being asked her age, believing its a meaningless way of describing a person. So lets just say shes under 40, married

Justin Trudeau

18

to Liberal lawyer and strategist Rob Silver, and mother to George, born in June 2011.

The common biographical thread among Trudeau, Butts, Tel-ford and Silver, beyond their Queens Park experience, is their shared history on the university debating circuit. Trudeau joined the debating society at McGill with Butts and, though he wasnt as immersed in it as his friend, they did go on some memorable road trips, including one to Princeton University in a snowstorm, to take part in debating championships. Butts was president of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate in 1992-93; Silver held that same post seven years later. Telford, a member of the English Debating Society at the University of Ottawa, met Sil-ver at a debate competition at Western University.

Gerald Butts, Katie Telford and others (Photo: Adam Scotti/Courtesy Justin

Trudeau)

One of the reasons that Telford doesnt like to talk about her age is probably because so many other people found it relevant when

Justin Trudeau

19

Trudeau chose her as his campaign manager. Trudeau took a lot of flak from the old guard of the Liberal

party, especially in Quebec, because he had chosen a young, virtu-ally unknown woman from Toronto a triple knock against her.

A lot of the usual suspects called up and said, No, no, no, Trudeau recalled. (They said,) You need someone grown-up in charge, you need someone with a steady hand.

Theres a little trick to dealing with Trudeau, which people soon learn if theyre working with him for any amount of time. Dont tell him hes not allowed to do something. Give him a problem to solve instead. If, for instance, you want Trudeau to cease wearing flip-flops with his business attire yes, a fashion crime he has been known to commit its a waste of time to say that it isnt allowed. Far better to ask him to assess what may be causing people to view his wardrobe as eccentric. Hell soon fix it himself.

So, no surprise, Trudeau pushed back when the Liberal party vets started telling him to find himself a more seasoned (read: old-er male) campaign manager.

Many months later, he would tell a group of multicultural-community activists in London, Ont., that his choice of Telford was a very deliberate poke in the nose of tired, old thinking in the Liberal party. He boasted that his core team was filled with young parents of, collectively, 25 to 30 children under the age of 7.

We have no time for the fights and the navel-gazing that has led the party to the place it is now, he said. When I chose my friend Katie to run the campaign, there were a lot of the backroom types who felt that I made a terrible mistake because there were a lot of other people in the party who had proven their worth and could help me properly. But the Liberal Party has gone from 170 seats in 2000 to 135 in the election after that to 100 to 77 to 35. I mean, its a straight decline. Something had to change.

Telford is a petite, soft-spoken woman with a get-down-to-

Justin Trudeau

20

business demeanour tempered by an easy laugh which comes in handy when dealing with Butts and Trudeau.

Katie is the grown-up around me and Gerry, Trudeau says. Shes the one who is exceedingly well-organized and she thinks things through in a really far-seeing and broad way. She thinks about the deeper consequences when Gerry and I are trying to outsmart each other.

Trudeau says that he and Butts need a boss, and that is Telfords role.

Certainly on everything that is campaign and organization, she constantly fights against people who dont take her seriously, who belittle her, who say they can do a better job and not just men, not just older men, but everyone. And its been a great reminder to me of the challenges that were still facing in changing politics as a culture.

Having Telford in charge actually inoculates the Trudeau cam-paign against falling into the same old patterns of doing politics, says Trudeau.

She brings an essential perspective to the campaign in terms of the temptation to revert to a kind of clubbiness, an old boys network, and she is so good at reminding us that is not who we are. I mean its not hard to get us back away from that, but shes really, really sensitive to that as well.

Over the summer of 2012, the campaign organization kept coming together, but it was still provisional. Trudeau was leaning strongly toward going for the leadership, but he still hadnt totally made up his mind. More important, neither had Grgoire.

The final decision came for the couple on the last weekend of July, when the core team, hand-selected by Butts, Telford and Trudeau, descended on the Mont Tremblant resort north of Mon-treal for a weekend of strategizing in chalets near the golf course. This was no holiday; Butts and Telford had loaded up the week-

Justin Trudeau

21

end with sessions on fundraising and organization, and seminars in the modern art of campaigning in the social-media universe. About a couple of dozen people were there many, like Telford and Trudeau, came with their young families. Trudeaus brother Sacha was there too. Tom Pitfield, who had grown up almost as a younger brother to Justin his father, Michael Pitfield, was a privy council clerk to Pierre Trudeau had found the spot for the group to meet. Pitfield was taking a leading role in the vast digital operations of the leadership campaign, and he was there with his wife, Anna Gainey, and children, their family probably the closest friends of Trudeau and Grgoire. Former Mississauga MPs Navdeep Bains and Omar Alghabra were among the group, both of them having spent a bit of time in previous months trying to persuade Trudeau to run. There were ad experts on hand and an array of Liberals who had done some work on election strategy or policy in the past.

It was the first time this eclectic group had gathered in one spot; if nothing else, it was a chance to see whether they would gel as a team. To open the meeting, Butts and Telford asked all the partici-pants to say why they were there. Their reasons ranged from the tactical to the deeply emotional; they talked about their desire to keep the Liberal party alive and about reversing the trend of cyni-cism and negativity toward politics.

Over the weekend, they had a hard talk, too, about the notion of co-operation or merger with the New Democrats or other pro-gressive parties as the best way to defeat the Conservatives. This sparked a spirited conversation around the table and a sentiment that found its way into Trudeaus repeated public declarations on the subject later. My goal is not to replace Mr. Harper with a dif-ferent government, Trudeau would say. Its to replace Mr. Harper with a better government. This oft-repeated line came directly from the discussion at Tremblant, Telford said later.

Justin Trudeau

22

At the end of gathering, Butts and Telford addressed the whole group again and asked them to summon up their best advice for Trudeau as he had to make a final decision on whether to run. Around the table they went, each making their own appeal. This time at Mont Tremblant, unlike a few years earlier, Trudeau wasnt talking about taking back power.

Trudeau had known as he arrived at Mont Tremblant that he was leaning heavily in the direction of running for leader, but he also realized that his wife had to be convinced.

Sophie was still at that point, not so much worried, but a little bit skeptical about how it would all unfold, he recalled.

Grgoire, like many political spouses, represents the final word for her husband in matters of personal relations and perspec-tive. He invokes her name often when talking about decisions hes made, whether its entering the boxing ring or the Liberal leader-ship contest.

I have a tendency to put things back into perspective, ask questions, juggle with the balls to make sure that the game or the decision or the moment makes sense, Grgoire explains.

Candidly, she admits that she had worried about the relative youth of the campaign team, and whether it could do with some seasoned advisers. Over the course of the weekend at Tremblant, she was persuaded that this was the right group. It struck her, in fact, as they were all gathered around an outdoor fireplace after a long day of sorting campaign logistics.

I think it was that moment, Grgoire said. When people were just simply being themselves, and we were all looking at each other and chatting about life and about politics and about everything around the fire outside. And it was just, like, Yep, this is going to work.

A little nudge from Butts didnt hurt either. He looked at her, taking it all in, and said: Soph, so this is going to be fun too, you

Justin Trudeau

23

know that. She laughed. Thanks for reminding me. The official launch came on the first week of October, start-

ing in Papineau, where Grgoire introduced him to the crowd, a blend of riding stalwarts and veterans of the Pierre Trudeau years, such as former finance minister Marc Lalonde and Andr Ouellet. Subsequent launches, notably in Mississauga a few days later, were jammed with the kind of crowds that would become fixtures of this leadership campaign.

It had been a long time since the party had seen something like this.

Though Trudeau was constantly compared to his father through-out the leadership campaign, there are comparisons to make, too, to other leaders of the Liberal party. It is hard not to see, for in-stance, some parallels to the juggernaut of Paul Martins leader-ship campaign a decade earlier. (Full disclosure: I wrote a book with that title about that Liberal leadership adventure.)

Like Martins team, Trudeaus core camp is made up of peo-ple who all see themselves as outsiders to the old Liberal estab-lishment, whose candidate is often viewed as a blank slate upon which to write future hopes for change and mass victory. Mar-tin, we might remember, was also seen as a dauphin, following in the footsteps of Paul Martin Sr., veteran cabinet minister and repeated leadership hopeful through the 1950s and 1960s. Martins team, like Trudeaus, had multiple media-savvy spokespeople and no clear hierarchy or separation of duties. Indeed, some of Mar-tins most senior supporters, including former campaign director David Herle and B.C. strategist Bruce Young, were at that initial meeting at Tremblant in the summer of 2012.

And like Martin, Trudeau is promising to change the way poli-

Justin Trudeau

24

tics is practised, to bring the fresh air of democracy into the dusty Liberal backrooms a promise that didnt exactly pan out for Martin when he finally got to be prime minister.

Trudeau rejects the precise parallels, arguing that his commit-ment to change politics runs deeper than it did for Martin. He says that his campaign is already practising the kind of democratic openness he intends to pursue as leader and maybe even someday as prime minister.

Funnily enough, even as he issues this denial, Trudeau acci-dentally lapses into Martin-speak specifically the former prime ministers fondness for inserting very, very into his declarations for emphasis.

I think that he (Martin) was very, very much focused on be-coming prime minister for personal reasons, or for family rea-sons, Trudeau says. I am very, very, very focused on what would I do if I became prime minister, and the process of being on that path is every bit as important now as what I decide to start once I get there. So the way Im focused on winning in politics is going to be an intrinsic, essential part of what I actually do once Im there.

Trudeau also believes this is the way in which he distinguishes himself from Jean Chrtien, who offered the candidate a benedic-tion of sorts in late September 2012, days before Trudeau was get-ting ready to officially launch his campaign.

Hes been elected twice so far, Chrtien pointed out. Its one more time than his father when he became the (Liberal) leader. The former prime minister, who had known Justin Trudeau as a young boy, then rattled off the list of all the people, including Harper, who had come to power with little cabinet experience.

Only me had a lot of experience to become prime minister, he said. (Pierre) Trudeau was elected once and he became prime minister. I had to wait 30 years of hard work to get the job.

Trudeau does believe that hes a different sort of politician from

Justin Trudeau

25

Chrtien, but it revolves around attitude, not experience, in his mind.

Jean Chrtien and Justin Trudeau in 2003 (Photo: Rick Madonik/Toronto Star)

The game focus of politics, for him its about, winning, Trudeau says. For me, its about serving. Its about building, its about doing right. Its not about the score. Its not to prove anything . . . We all know his background. He had a tremendous amount to prove and hes justifiably, extremely proud of what hes managed to build through his life, but the focus was on proving that to others, and for me thats not what this is about.

So what is it all about then?

26

3 The No-Policy Policy

One thing is clear: Justin Trudeau has not drawn big crowds be-cause of his bold policy pronouncements. Over the six months of the leadership contest, his campaign issued no more than a hand-ful of broad, blue-sky policy statements and as of this writing no platform has been released.

That has been the biggest knock against him, inside and outside the Liberal race. However, to the surprise of some, Trudeau has worn it as a badge of distinction.

At Western University in early February, when a student asked how he was different from the other leadership contenders, Trudeau laid out the reasons he had chosen to be the no-policy candidate even if it did frustrate the pundits and his opponents.

The big difference, to my mind, is in what we actually see as a need for the Liberal party to do, he said.

My emphasis right now, rather than being on policy-develop-ment, like most of my colleagues, is on organization. It is on build-ing the capacity to be relevant in every single riding across the country, folding people back, not just into the Liberal party, but actually into the political process.

Trudeaus main point was that policy is the least of the Liberal partys worries at its current juncture. Naturally, this approach hasnt sat too well with the rest of the candidates, who grew in-creasingly vocal at each debate about the yawning policy void from the front-runner. Montreal MP Marc Garneau who later with-drew as a candidate made the biggest noise about it, especially at the Mississauga debate in mid-February.

You have to have a track record, Garneau said in reference to his own long career in the military, as an engineer and as Canadas first astronaut. You have to have a record of making tough deci-

Justin Trudeau

27

sions, and often on your own.Trudeaus reply was a bit puzzling, almost a non-sequitur.

When Garneau challenged him on what he had accomplished in his career, Trudeau shot back that he had won tough elections in Papineau.

I did that by pulling people together in a riding that wasnt par-ticularly inclined towards the Liberal party or towards me person-ally, Trudeau said. You have to have a record of winning, Marc.

Wait a minute, though. Isnt this the candidate who said he was different from Jean Chrtien and Paul Martin on this winning-is-everything approach to politics?

Trudeau and his campaign team are convinced that the Liberals have almost entirely lost touch with the electorate over the past 20 years, not the least because of those Byzantine Chrtien-Martin feuds. They are equally convinced that most Canadians, regardless of political stripe, are tuned out of politics altogether. On this, they are in agreement with Stephen Harpers Conservatives.

Where they appear to differ with the Conservatives is on whether that trend can be reversed and how it can be handled. Harpers Conservatives have developed a sophisticated approach to break down the population into target constituencies, reachable through their wallets or policies specifically targeted at individu-als interests. The Trudeau team, on the other hand, is gambling that mass-market politics can still work, but not with the big na-tional-program attempts of another Trudeau era.

The big mass market in their minds is the middle class, which Trudeau called the centrepiece of his bid to be leader. The middle class, like Canadian politics and the Liberal party, is not the force it was when his father was in office.

It is truly gobsmacking to me that no politician in the last 15 years has picked up on the fact that the middle class hasnt had a (expletive deleted) raise in this country in three decades, says

Justin Trudeau

28

Butts. If you connect the dots, from his (Trudeaus) launch speech to

his stump speech, and include all of the op-eds that hes published, its basically trying to flesh out that big picture, which is that the Liberal party used to be the party of upward mobility, of a strong work ethic, of equal opportunity, and thats the kind of party it needs to be again.

Butts time in the premiers office in Ontario gave him a lot of lessons on the folly of big, bold policy pronouncements in this day and age. Actually, his most vivid instruction on this score came from across the Atlantic, while he was seeking out some advice from Tony Blairs Labour government in Britain.

Butts, helping McGuinty lay out a governing agenda after he won power in 2003, went over to London to sit down at 10 Down-ing St. with some key members of Blairs inner circle. When the Blair folks were asked about mistakes they made, they talked about their big regret of their first term specifically all the bold policy pronouncements they had made in the Blair governments first 18 months of office. They had been naive to the complexity of mod-ern governance. Merely by issuing this flurry of announcements and directives, Blairs officials expected Britain to change. But they told Butts that one day they stood up, looked around and realized that their levers of office werent attached to anything.

Its not a bad metaphor for the Liberals and their current exis-tential crisis. Over the past decade, the former natural governing party of Canada has suddenly realized that it, too, has become untethered from the levers of any influence with the population and most certainly now in Ottawa.

That always stuck with me, Butts said of his experience in Britain. The days of governing effectively by fiat are over and by governing effectively, I mean actually making something happen out there in the country.

Justin Trudeau

29

So, deliberately, the Trudeau campaigns policy pronounce-ments have been more broad statements of values: a commitment to ensuring that 70 per cent levels of post-secondary education are met; statements about the importance of foreign trade and invest-ment in reviving middle-class fortunes in Canada.

There is a policy shop inside the Trudeau organization, but it has flown mostly under the radar. The two national policy co-chairs are Stephen Kukucha, a B.C. expert in the renewable-energy business and Trudeaus old friend Dsire McGraw.

McGraw and Trudeau have known each other for years, but re-ally got politically acquainted when they were handed tasks on the sprawling Liberal Renewal Commission in 2006. McGraw was in charge of reviving environmental policy for the party; Trudeau had the job of doing policy outreach to young people. The two would cross paths frequently during that exercise, not least because the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and the Jeanne Sauv Founda-tion, which McGraw heads, are housed in the same restored old building on Montreals Doctor Penfield Ave.

Trudeau and McGraw, like many of the other chairs on the renewal commission, threw themselves into the effort, generat-ing dozens and dozens of conversations and pages and pages of recommendations. It was ultimately a frustrating experience for both of them. In retrospect, McGraw doesnt believe the party was serious about renewal; it was preoccupied instead with holding its own in a precarious minority Parliament and, as always, the re-volving leadership door.

It was in hindsight sort of a window-dressing exercise, Mc-Graw says.

Thus dispirited about the Liberals failure to come to terms with defeat, McGraw confesses to having had some initial feelings of trepidation when she was asked by Butts last year to be policy chair for a candidate who didnt want to issue a leadership platform.

Justin Trudeau

30

Wouldnt it essentially become the Maytag-repairman job of the campaign always on call, but never needed?

It hasnt turned out that way, says McGraw, who likes to joke, Mitt Romney-style, that she has binders full of policy. Quietly, while the campaign has trundled on without a platform, she has been busy generating a massive database. It contains briefing notes, position papers, and names of experts whove been sought out and of policy minds who have offered their services if and when Trudeau wins.

And on top of this old-fashioned method of accumulating pol-icy, the Trudeau campaign has been taking advantage of the vast new world of digital policy-gathering, largely thanks to the efforts of Tom Pitfield. Pitfield says that Canadians may be surprised to learn just how much expertise is in this country on the digital-en-gagement front. Though Pitfield has consulted widely with Barack Obamas savvy digital experts during the Trudeau campaign, he also believes that Canadians have stuff to teach the Americans. Right before he went out to purchase a U.S.-made digital platform to engage people who had signed up for Trudeau, Pitfield learned about a new start-up called SoapBox, created by a former Ryerson University student named Brennan McEachran. Its better than anything I could have got in the States, Pitfield says. Basically, its an online tool that encourages people to submit ideas or questions, which are then voted up or down by participants. In the first 24 hours after SoapBox was launched on the Trudeau website, it drew in 25,000 people.

On any given evening, laptop in front of her after the kids have gone to bed, McGraw pores through the hundreds of submissions to SoapBox and looks for intriguing new ideas. Shes found some on democratic reform, for instance, that she intends to pursue down the road.

One of Trudeaus rare policy pronouncements did revolve

Justin Trudeau

31

around democratic reform, including a vow to let Liberal riding associations choose their own candidates, with no pressure, ve-toes or appointments by the leader. While thats going a bit further than other leaders have in loosening their reins on power, much of Trudeaus talk on democracy through the campaign has not been all that original.

He has a standard stump-speech line, very familiar to this re-porters ears, about how politicians need to represent their con-stituents views in Ottawa instead of imposing Ottawas views on their ridings. Its a sentiment thats been packaged into political speeches of all stripes for the past couple of decades.

Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning even had a little shtick he did with a chair from the House of Commons: hed place it on the stage and tell his audiences that it belonged to them, not their MP in Ottawa. Back when Paul Martin was running in his long campaign to be Liberal leader in the early 2000s, he told all his audiences that he was going to turn over all this top-down gov-erning stuff too. Even then, a decade ago, it was becoming a cli-ch. Its the line that gets the biggest applause, I remember one of Martins advisers solemnly telling me while we were on the road at some point during those years.

Trudeau knows that hes offering up recycled material on dem-ocratic reform. Im very aware that its a promise that has been made pretty much by every politician in the past, but its one that Im absolutely committed to, he tells reporters at one stop.

Will he stay committed to it, though, or abandon the promise in face of the overwhelming demands on a leader to maintain the much-vaunted discipline over his troops? Thats been the pattern now through several recyclings. For now, we can only speculate, or as his father might have said, just watch him.

To be fair, the Trudeau campaign hasnt been totally devoid of substance. When it came to current events, Trudeau ventured

Justin Trudeau

32

some thoughts along the trail. A sampling: At his first official campaign stop in Alberta in October, he

disavowed his fathers national energy program, the one that had helped turn the West into a Liberal wasteland for the past 30 years. It is wrong to use our natural wealth to divide Canadians against one another, he said. It was the wrong way to govern in the past. It is the wrong way today. It will be the wrong way in the future.

More controversially, he also appeared to turn his back on the long-gun registry, calling it a failure. At a campaign stop in eastern Ontario in early December, he was asked about the regis-try, much cherished in Quebec and among Liberals in general, but scrapped by Harpers Conservatives.

The long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure and Im not go-ing to resuscitate that, Trudeau told reporters. We will continue to look at ways of keeping our cities safe and making sure that we do address the concerns around domestic violence that happen right across the country, in rural as well as urban areas in which, unfortunately, guns do play a role. . . . But there are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which is, has been removed.

The remarks seemed a bit of glib improvisation on an impor-tant policy matter an impression sealed when Trudeau had to backtrack in subsequent days. Within a couple of weeks, he was saying only that he was going to listen more to gun owners in any future attempts to regulate firearms use and ownership.

He came out in favour of the $15.1-billion Chinese takeover of the Calgary-based Nexen Inc., calling it good for Canada even before the Conservative government gave it cautious approval in December. He opposed, however, the so-called Northern Gate-way pipeline proposed by Enbridge, Inc., to ship oilsands crude from the West Coast to Asia.

He lambasted the New Democratic Party for its bill to allow for Quebec secession with a 50-plus-one per cent majority in a ref-

Justin Trudeau

33

erendum. But then he went a step further, hinting that a two-thirds majority would be more fair, prompting the Parti Qubcois to accuse him of provocation and Garneau, then his leadership rival, to scoff at a rookie mistake.

The plain fact of the matter, though, is that the no-policy ap-proach only makes sense if youre sure youre going to win. Trudeau, the front-runner, can afford to say to his audiences in a way his rivals cannot that organization will come first, policy later. And by later, he means after he wins.

Before we can sell someone on our platform as being the best one, the smartest one, the one with the vision, the one with the long-term view for this country, we actually have to remind Ca-nadians that its important for political parties to have a platform, a vision, a long-term view of this country, he told the student at Western University who asked him the question about how he dif-fered from his rivals.

And that only happens when you rebuild a connection with people in their lives, on their ground, feeling like they matter in how we shape the platform for the election.

And for that to happen, the Trudeau campaign has had to build a formidable machine, suitable for 21st-century politics, a task the Liberals had failed to do while basking in power and seeing Cana-dians from behind the windows of their government-issued cars.

34

4 The Campaign Machine

At 30 Duncan St. (Photo: Adam Scotti/Courtesy Justin Trudeau)

Its 5 p.m. on a bitingly cold February night, and the basement at 30 Duncan St. is buzzing with activity. This is the main hub for the Justin Trudeau leadership-campaign machine, lodged in a some-what dingy office space in the heart of downtown Toronto.

Young volunteers are shaking off the cold as they sign in for duty at the front counter. In one of the front offices, two students are sitting at laptop computers, entering data from stacks of sign-up forms into the Liberal party database.

My hands are getting cramped, one complains good-natured-ly, saying shes now able to process 40 to 50 forms an hour. This job, unlike most others in the vast Trudeau campaign machine, is paid work the data-entry employees are on short-term contracts,

Justin Trudeau

35

earning somewhere between $500 and $2000 a month. With a to-tal campaign spending limit of $950,000, none of the leadership candidates can afford to throw money at their workers, so this is an indication of just how important data has become to a party set on revival/survival. The Liberals need data as much as they need money to fight the 2015 election.

Trudeaus leadership campaign is actually making more money than it can spend the candidate told his caucus colleagues early in 2013 that he expected to have a surplus of more than $600,000 to deposit in Liberal party coffers when the campaign was over in April.

The makeshift boardroom is empty for now, but Omar Al-ghabra, the former Mississauga MP in charge of this operation, is getting ready to head into his office for a conference call with the Trudeau campaign team.

The main action takes place in the sprawling space at the back, a cement-floored, brightly lit expanse, walls decorated with pho-tos, progress charts and Justin shout-outs. At opposite corners of this 400-square foot space are a couple of rows of cheap, rented cubicles. These are the phone banks, where the serious business of recruiting support is carried out.

In another corner is a battered old couch and an assortment of chairs this is the salon where Trudeaus volunteers congregate to shoot the breeze or listen to the various speakers who pop by the campaign headquarters.

Former foreign affairs minister and interim leader Bill Graham has regaled the volunteers with stories at these speaker sessions; so has former minister Pierre Pettigrew.

The back wall is covered with plain brown wrapping paper, which visitors and volunteers are invited to autograph. Trudeau himself left his greetings on a recent visit, thanking all the workers at 30 Duncan.

Justin Trudeau

36

Its not the fanciest-looking office, says Semra Sevi, a 25-year-old University of Toronto student who is one of the volunteer managers, and one of the people responsible for keeping the place humming with recruits.

The whole place has the feel of a youth drop-in centre, which it is, essentially. Most of the volunteers milling around on this eve-ning were not even born when the federal Liberal party used to have its Toronto headquarters just a few doors away, at 15 Dun-can St., in the early 1970s. Its yet another echo of Pierre Trudeaus Liberal party, faintly sounding behind the political journey of his eldest son. But the old Trudeau Liberal party never had to con-tend with the democratic chaos of Canadian politics 2.0, a world of mass phone calls, sprawling social-media networks and an urgent need for volunteers to manage the mayhem.

Saudi Arabia-born Alghabra, 43, came to Canada when he was 19 and still has family back in Syria. Though he has degrees in me-chanical engineering and business administration, his vocational calling is politics, an interest first stoked when he became a mem-ber of the community editorial board of the Toronto Star.

He ran for office in 2006 and won a seat, but he was unable to keep it in the two subsequent elections, despite a delightful, quirky ad campaign, which he dubbed cynicism-free. The animated spots featured a cartoon biography of Alghabra doing everything from pumping gas to making doughnuts, while another ad fea-tured clips of Mississauga children trying to pronounce his name.

Now between jobs, still hoping to return to the House of Com-mons someday, Alghabra is in charge of volunteers for the Trudeau campaign, while his old friend Navdeep Bains, another former Mississauga MP, is in charge of operations. Neither is a small task. When the campaign released its numbers in early March, it boast-ed more than 160,000 supporters and a whopping 10,000 volun-teers on its rolls.

Justin Trudeau

37

Volunteerism experts often talk about the two Rs of their busi-ness: recruitment and retention. Katie Telford, though, has added a third component: reward, or, as she calls it, appreciation. All kinds of friendly competitions are held to motivate volunteers: prizes for the most sign-ups, Twitter shout-outs by Trudeau for jobs well done, periodic draws to raffle off tickets to leadership-campaign events. There were very few titles given to campaign workers, deliberately, because Telford believed that every person should be made to feel responsible for every aspect of the cam-paign: recruiting supporters, raising money and taking care of de-tails such as putting up signs and keeping lists. When famous speakers came by 30 Duncan to talk to the volunteers, they were asked to do some calling too and not allowed to leave until they signed someone up.

Borrowing heavily from lessons learned in Barack Obamas so-cial outreach to young voters in his presidential campaigns, the Trudeau team is trying to match the Democrats now-legendary ability to turn non-voters into voters. Pitfield is the one whos been paying most attention on this front, delving into the vast, largely uncharted world (for Liberals) of digital campaigning. Hes learned some important lessons in the process: details matter, its impor-tant to be nimble and to pivot, and online relationships between politicos and the voters are a dance, a courtship. The Trudeau campaign also experimented with some new technology in this campaign, with virtual phone banks so that people could do re-cruiting from home, as well as the SoapBox platform to generate ideas.

Telford got to know Alghabra and Bains when they were part of Gerard Kennedys campaign in the 2006 leadership. When she was assembling the core team for Trudeau in 2012, she said these two men were at the top of her list. Bains, first elected in 2004, had lost his seat in the 2011 election, and is now a distinguished

Justin Trudeau

38

visiting lecturer at Ryerson Universitys school of management. Throughout the leadership campaign, hes been juggling that job with his official title as a co-chair of the national organization. (He points out that a lot of the legwork has been done by his assistant, Vanabana Kattar.)

Alghabra and Bains are interesting choices. They are represen-tatives of the multicultural, new-Canadian constituency that used to automatically belong to the Liberals. But they are a new gen-eration, not representatives of the old party culture that too often treated these communities as little more than instant Liberals, fod-der for stacking nomination meetings. Trudeau had offers of help from veterans seasoned in these arts, but he says he turned them down. This is a side-benefit of running a front-runners campaign you can afford to be choosy about who helps and who speaks on the leaders behalf. The way hes done politics has ruffled too many feathers, Trudeau said about one of these veteran organizers he rebuffed.

The crucial challenge of building the Trudeau organization, Bains said, was to make it strong in every region. The way the Lib-eral leadership voting works, every riding is equal. Candidates get points based on their percentage of the vote in each of the 308 rid-ings. So its not good enough to have thousands of supporters in a GTA riding and a handful in rural Alberta.

Bains and the team across the country got to work on setting targets for each riding, which were based on local dynamics and past performance. Then they turned the volunteers loose to figure out their own ways of drumming up support. Throughout the ear-ly months of 2013, leading up to the March 3 deadline for signing up new supporters, the Trudeau campaign constantly stoked the competition between the ridings, to see who could overtake their targets. The days before March 3 saw a whirlwind of emails back and forth among the ridings, claiming various triumphs. The re-

Justin Trudeau

39

sult was the whopping 160,000-plus supporters the campaign was able to boast when the deadline closed.

Organizationally theres no one model, or one size that fits in any riding, Bains said. And this included planning for visits by the candidate, the thinking being that local people knew better than the central HQ where Trudeau would get the better turnouts. The local organizers, the local volunteers, they designed the tour.

Back a decade or so ago, Liberals could lure young volunteer recruits into the machine with the prospect of jobs in political or government offices. In third place in the Commons now, the road back to power far from assured, this means campaign organizers like Bains have needed to look for different methods of inspiration at the grassroots.

Long-term, Bains says, Its about laying down the foundations for a positive, progressive movement. Short-term, its about get-ting Trudeau elected as leader on April 14, and making his volun-teers feel good about the effort.

Elliott Moglica certainly feels appreciated. A poet and teacher originally from Albania, he has made the Trudeau campaign head-quarters his second home this winter. He is almost surrealistically upbeat; his admiration for Trudeau approaches worship. Asked how old he is, he smiles broadly and answers: 41, the same age as Justin.

He is also a reigning champion in signing up supporters, and he never stops. When the volunteers knock off duty for the day, they often head out for drinks and a bite to eat, and Moglica invariably manages to get the servers to sign a supporter form. In the running competition to sign up the most supporters the prize is a dinner with Trudeau Moglica stands one of the best chances of win-ning. During Trudeaus recent visit to 30 Duncan, the candidate wandered over to personally thank him and asked whether he had signed up any waitresses recently.

Justin Trudeau

40

How did he know? Moglica asks. Moglicas enthusiasm is infectious. On a whiteboard in the back

office, volunteers have scrawled their favourite Elliottisms ex-pressions he uses often in his unrelenting bid to find converts to the Trudeau cause.

A thousand thank yous from the bottom of my heart, he says when hes sealed a successful deal.

Moglica also shares another bit of biography with Trudeau his training as a teacher. Its taught him how to do active listening on the phone, he says, a skill he credits for part of his success in turning cold calls into support for his candidate.

Active listening is very important, he says. The first five sec-onds you can assess whether the person has time, wants to talk, is very tired, is very stressed, doesnt want to talk . . . You can under-stand right away the energy.

This isnt Moglicas first foray into political volunteerism. He knocked on doors in Toronto Centre for Bob Rae. But this cam-paign is different from others, he says the presence of young people is the most vivid distinction.

Here I can see young people involved, finally! he says. Usu-ally they dont want to be part of politics at all.

Moglica also feels something different when hes talking on the phone in this campaign. People are curious they want to know more. People want to talk. Finally, politics is fun. When you hear that, it means something is there. Something important is there.

Luanne Cunningham, 56, sits a few cubicles down from Mogli-ca at Trudeau headquarters, and she too has posted some success, not to mention long hours, pulling in new supporters for Trudeau.

A bit of a political rarity, Cunningham is a Liberal from Al-berta, one who embraced the party before and after her move to Ontario in the 1980s. She is very good at analyzing what works and what doesnt in the art of political cold-calling, and shes helped

Justin Trudeau

41

revise the script they use to connect Trudeau to the people at the end of the phone line.

One thing they learned, for instance, was to take money out of the equation altogether. When people felt that they were being asked to reach into their wallets, they tuned out. Cunningham and Moglica and the other volunteers quickly assure potential support-ers that the fundraising part of the Trudeau campaign is a totally different department one which theyre welcome to explore on the website, of course.

Witness the ravages of the telemarketing business: citizens get-ting a call from a stranger at home now immediately assume its some plot to part them from their hard-earned money, and hang up.

Cunningham says she has learned, through trial and error, how to keep them on the line. She explains how it works.

You listen first to see where they are and then you kind of take them with you.

I say: Im calling on behalf of Justin Trudeau. Do you know that hes running for the Liberal leadership?

As often as not, the people at the other end of the line are aware these are phone numbers theyve obtained from the Liberal da-tabase. Cunningham then speaks slowly: So what Im calling for is to find out if we can count on your vote in April.

By her rough estimate, only about 10 per cent of the people she reaches are hostile or nonsupportive. These are the people who have likely abandoned the Liberals for good; they ask to be taken off the lists.

But the other 90 per cent, she says, are receptive to the idea that Canadian politics needs something positive, something that unites rather than divides. Like Moglica, she talks this up at every opportunity the voters shes reaching are disgusted with politics as usual and want something very different. This job, the Trudeau

Justin Trudeau

42

callers tell their prospects, is something that their candidate will deliver.

Another addition to the standard call script came when the headquarters started getting reports of the crowds turning out at the Trudeau events in January and early February. They started adding notices of upcoming rallies or meetings if they were call-ing areas where the candidate intended to visit. So some of those crowds showing up at Trudeau events were in part a result of the efforts of the phone volunteers at headquarters.

The Trudeau headquarters, for all its casual appearance, is all about fanatic measurement counting support, logging hours for volunteers and oiling the machinery of modern campaigning. This is the legacy of a fundraising-law crackdown, which forced the Liberal party to abandon its reliance on well-heeled corporate donors and now concentrate, as the Liberals opponents have for years, on reconnecting the party to grassroots support as well as donors. The reliance on corporate donations and the complacency of power also left the Liberals woefully behind on accumulating the data that their rival Conservatives and New Democrats had gathered. The volunteers entering data at Trudeau headquarters are contributing to that catch-up effort. Those names and numbers will also come in handy in the next election, in 2015, when the Liberals have to go out and identify possible support.

Student Semra Sevi, who helped organize those famous vote mobs to pull out the youth vote in the 2011 election, wasnt a big fan of the campaign the Liberals ran that year. It seemed unfo-cused and out of touch with the issues she cared about. She also didnt think much of leader Michael Ignatieff.

But she was floored by the May 2 results with the Liberals reduced to 34 seats, Ignatieff defeated and gone, and the potential extinction of the Liberals looming as a real possibility. So amid all that destruction, Sevi picked her way through the ruins and

Justin Trudeau

43

took out a membership in the Liberal party. She wasnt alone. In-terim leader Rae would report a month later that membership in the party was, curiously, climbing after the May 2 defeat. Though the party wasnt keeping really close track of those post-defeat con-verts, long-time Liberal activists said that much of the interest was coming from red Tories progressive-minded conservatives who were alarmed at the prospect of choosing in 2015 between Harpers hard-right brand of conservatism or the stark alternative of the left-wing New Democrats.

As Sevi was settling into her new Liberal membership over the summer, she had to sign up for classes in the fall. Ignatieff, as it happened, would be teaching a course called Renewing Canadian Democracy. Sevi enrolled and after a few classes, she changed her mind about the former Liberal leader.

I was blown away by the things he said as a professor that he didnt say as a politician, she says. He talked about the problems that he saw in the party, and he talked about it openly, with no reservations. One of the problems, clearly, is the Liberal partys failure to capture the imagination, let alone the votes, of young people.

Sevi started work on a thesis, under Ignatieff s supervision, about improving youth turnout. Within a year, she had also got to know and admire Trudeau, and in short order found herself being advised by the former leader while working on the campaign of a man running to be his successor.

Yes, its quite funny how that all turned out, she says. It was Sevis idea to reach out to universities and high schools

and get students churning through Trudeau headquarters on an internship program. Working with various local secondary and post-secondary institutions in the GTA, campaign workers man-aged to find about 50 students to come and do volunteer stints as interns with Team Justin, two hours a week minimum. About 90

Justin Trudeau

44

per cent of them had never been involved with any kind of politi-cal campaign before.

Erwin Bocianski, 24, is one of them. Hes a student at the Uni-versity of Toronto. As a political science student, I thought it was important to see actually how the whole process works, he says. Its opened his eyes to the difference between the theory and prac-tice of his field of study.

Talking to people on the phone, trying to drum up support, Bo-cianski isnt encountering a lot of complicated talk about theory or policy. When he mentions that hes working on the Trudeau cam-paign, more often than not the response is positive. Most people are pretty excited, he says. Because of course, beyond the ma-chine, beyond the no-policy policy, this campaign really revolves around one person who Canadians seem to think they know: Jus-tin Trudeau.

45

5 Close to Home

Justin Trudeau often talks to his audiences about how he was lucky to grow up at 24 Sussex Dr.

But as a young child, he bristled under some of the living con-ditions. The constant presence of the RCMP, for instance, was a mixed blessing and an ever-present reminder of the limits to their childish freedom. Unlike other kids, the young Trudeau boys couldnt simply run off for a day of unsupervised adventure.

Young Justin received a stern lesson on this score when he gave the slip to his RCMP minders and took off on his bike through the rockeries at Rockcliffe Park in Ottawa. His father was furious, and the 12-year-old boy got a lecture he didnt soon forget. Dad says: Look, these guys have a job to do and you just made it a lot more difficult, Trudeau recalled. I never did that again,

Among the constant security presence at 24 Sussex there was a plain clothes officer who didnt have a lot of hair. So the Trudeau boys dubbed him Baldy. Again, their father was mightily unim-pressed. Overhearing them calling the man by this nickname, he plunked the three brothers in front of him and dressed them down about their lack of respect. Justin, Sacha and Michel were warned that in future, they were to address Baldy by his title and last name.

So, 30 years older and wiser, with those lessons of deference drilled into him, Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leadership candidate, stood respectfully beside Const. Jeff Ling on the stage at Loyalist College in Belleville. It was Valentines Day, 2013, and it provided a mo-ment that would become one of the most unexpectedly emotional of the leadership campaign.

Justin Trudeau

46

Ling, outfitted in the full vest and cap of the Belleville police force, was clutching a framed picture very familiar to Trudeau (and many Canadians too). Snapped by photographer Rod McIvor at a garden party at 24 Sussex in 1973, it shows Pierre Trudeau fer-rying an 18-month-old Justin under his arm, while off to the side an RCMP officer is offering a snappy salute. The elder Trudeau, his right hand firmly clutching his squirming child, is unable to return the salute, but he flashes an indulgent fathers smile.

Ling displayed the picture and told the audience a bit about it and its place in the history of Canadian photojournalism. Trudeau nodded politely; these trips down memory lane were pretty much standard fare of any stop on his leadership campaign.

The famous photo (Photo: courtesy Rod MacIvor/UPI)

But then Ling introduced another layer of nostalgia to this pre-sentation. The officer in the photo was his father, former RCMP Insp. Dennis Ling, who had been part of the security detail at

Justin Trudeau

47

24 Sussex before and after Justin Trudeau was born. Suddenly, the characters behind the glass, like those long-ago voters in the homes near Strathroy, Ont., had stepped into 2013 to become real-live people.

Trudeau gasped, and to his own and his audiences surprise, tears sprung to his eyes and began to roll down his cheek. Ling carried on, talking about his fathers job in protective services dur-ing the FLQ crisis and the War Measures Act of 1970.

My father and your father actually spent quite a lot of time to-gether, Ling said. And they found themselves sitting in a waiting room in a hospital on the 25th of December, back in 1971, which is Justins birthday, known in my family as Operation Newborn, I think we called it in our house, the year Dad was gone for Christ-mas.

As this proud son of an RCMP inspector finished the presenta-tion, he handed the photo to Trudeau and tried to give him a dad-style salute. Trudeau lunged in for a hug instead.

And then Trudeau apologized to his audience for the unex-pected burst of emotion, assuring the assembled that he was not normally a crybaby.

At almost every single stop across this country, I am over-whelmed with people who come and tell me great stories about my father and great stories about my mother and I have so far been able to resist the tears that always, inevitably flow. I am so touched and so honoured and so grateful to the men and women around this country who have chosen to serve this country with their very lives in the Canadian Forces and in the police services and it has always been something that always in my life has left me humbled.

Later, reflecting on that moment, Trudeau tried to analyze what happened. He has grown accustomed to being reminded of his late father and his own childhood. People often turn up at his speeches with souvenirs of Trudeaumania. In London, Ont., for example,

Justin Trudeau

48

Beverley Reed showed up with a teddy bear that was, quite frankly, a bit spooky, featuring a plastic likeness of Pierre Trudeaus face. She had picked it up back in the 1970s, at a Liberal conference in London, and decided to take it to the crowded German-Canadian hall where Trudeau the younger was doing a campaign rally in ear-ly February. Ahhh! Trudeau cried when he saw the artifact, leap-ing backward for dramatic effect. Thats not freaky at all, is it?

Even international superstars want to draw the line between fa-ther and son. In late October, not long after Trudeaus leadership campaign was launched, Barbra Streisand performed at a huge, sold-out concert in Ottawa. Still dazzling at age 70, clad in a spar-kling, floor-length black gown, Streisand regaled the crowd with some anecdotes between songs. Pacing the stage, pouring herself a glass of water, Streisand smiled and took her listeners back 40 years.

She told the audience about her first visit to Ottawa in 1970. I was a guest of your prime minister at the time, she said, coyly, and the audience laughed with her, as if they all shared this pri-vate, romantic memory of the brief relationship between Pierre Trudeau and this musical legend. Streisand recalled the ballet they attended.

Then she talked about she had recently done a show in Mon-treal and how Justin Trudeau and his lovely lovely wife, Sophie, had come to see her.

He seemed so full of progressive ideas for the people and this wonderful country of yours that I can see why Macleans magazine called him the most popular politician in Canada, she said. He may be occupying 24 Sussex Dr. in a few years. I sure hope so.

Whether the reminders are famous, freaky or frequent, theyre part of being Pierre Trudeaus son, running for the job his dad once held. Every now and then, as it happened in Belleville, some-one punches through the polite veneer and hits Trudeau in the gut.

Justin Trudeau

49

Father-son relationships always get me, Trudeau says. Al-ways. Its a trigger for me. Heres the son talking about how proud he is of his father. Bam! Right here! That for me is such a core ele-ment. The way my dad was looking at him, the way I was looking at him. It encompassed so much in terms of the respect (for police officers). That was such a big part of my life.

Trudeau is a father himself now, too, and the mother of his two children, Sophie Grgoire, attests that there is a big bond between her husband and her young son, Xavier, born in 2007. His younger sister, Ella-Grace, born two years later, has been known to com-plain mostly good-heartedly that her older brother takes up a lot of space and attention. The two children have very different personalities, the parents say: in times of stress or upset, Xavier joins in the emotion; Ella-Grace runs to comfort everyone.

Trudeaus entire campaign schedule was organized around making sure that he wasnt spending too much time away from his wife and young family that was the deal made at the outset. His travel schedule was broken down into four-to-five day bursts of rapid-fire activity and then a couple of down days with the family. He even took time out for a brief family holiday in Florida in early March, after the deadline passed to sign up new Liberal members and supporters.

When hes on the road, he calls Grgoire frequently to update her on his day and get reports from home. In casual conversation, he mentions her often she is, as often as not, cast as the one who needs to be convinced on some matter or another. It was Grgoire, for instance, who had the sternest words for her husband after he called Environment Minister Peter Kent a piece of s--- in the Commons in late 2011. It was Grgoire who needed to be assured that Trudeau was in his right mind when he agreed to step into the boxing ring with Sen. Patrick Brazeau in March 2012. As Trudeau recounted to Macleans Paul Wells: My wife couldnt get past the

Justin Trudeau

50

size of his arms and just what a scary mofo he was. And that gen-erally delighted me. But I told Sophie, Look, come in and watch me train one time . . . Ill show you that I can hold my own. No problem. So she eventually came around to trusting me on this.

This pattern, of being Trudeaus sober second thought, was set early in their relationship. On their first date, in fact, Trudeau an-nounced that he intended to marry Grgoire. His date, however, needed to be persuaded.

Grgoire and Trudeau first met at a Grand Prix event in Mon-treal in the spring of 2003 and were dating by the fall. Grgoire, at 28, was a bit of a celebrity in her own right in Montreal, as a televi-sion host, aspiring actress and personal shopper at Holt Renfrew. Despite her own claims to fame, however, she was aware that by accepting Trudeaus invitation to dinner, she was likely entering another circle of celebrity altogether.

Was I intimidated by the Trudeau name? she says. Im sure I was. I remember thinking, Oh, my God, what am I getting into?

Trudeau suggested a restaurant in Montreal, one that was rea-sonably well-known and getting good reviews, but Grgoire said she didnt want to go anywhere he had taken previous girlfriends. At the suggestion of his brother Sacha, they chose an Afghan res-taurant called the Khyber Pass, on Duluth St., where they sat at a garden table in candlelight.

As she remembers it, he simply declared: Ive been waiting for you 31 years. . . . This is where we were meant to be in our life, and now its happening, and were going to be together for this whole lifetime.

Grgoire, looking back on the moment, thinks she probably also decided then and there that the two of them would end up married. Theres a reason why he chose me, but theres also a reason why I chose him. Its because I knew as well. There was a graceful certainty to the whole thing, she said.

Justin Trudeau

51

Grgoire had a very different upbringing from Trudeau. An only child, she spent the first five years of her life in rural Quebec, in St. Adele, and her memories of these early years are bucolic. I truly have a sensory memory of my years spent in the woods, pure freedom, playing with the animals outside. I just feel that those five years, those first days of my life where I lived in the countryside, completely stuck with who I am today.

When she was 5, her family moved to Montreal, and she did the rest of her growing up in the Town of Mount Royal as the daughter of a well-to-do stockbroker. She got a degree in communication from the University of Montreal, a certificate in commerce from McGill and further training in radio and TV broadcasting. She was a fan of extreme sports, but not of extreme lifestyles. In this, she and Trudeau are much in sync.

Ive jumped out of an airplane, 13,000 feet, she says. Ive done lots of stuff in my life that brought my emotions to a high level. But we were never people who were attracted to drugs and stuff that made us disconnect from our state of mind.

Within a year or so of their first date, Trudeau formally pro-posed to Sophie, on Oct. 18, 2004, which would have been his fa-thers 85th birthday. The two had visited Pierre Trudeaus grave that day and Trudeau popped the question at dinner.

Their marriage, in May 2005, was treated as a paparazzi-worthy event, even if it didnt exactly conform to glamour-in-excess stan-dards of celebrity weddings.

A Hollywood wedding this was not, Shinan Govani wrote in the National Post. These nuptials were notable for their non-over-the-topness, and a guest list not made up overwhelmingly of back-scratching political hacks or two-bit celebrities spread out like cream cheese on the couples big day cracker. These were, more or less, the couples close friends and family.

As Govani did note, however, there were enough reminders

Justin Trudeau

52

of Pierre Trudeau built into the day to placate the diehard, old Trudeau maniacs. The couple departed in Pierres 1960s Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a single red rose was tucked into the garland adorning the back of the car.

Justin and Sophie on their wedding day (Photo: Bernard Weil/Toronto Star)

With marriage and then children grounding him, Trudeaus pursuit of a political career appeared to begin in earnest. He said in frequent interviews that he was determined to avoid the mistakes his parents made mismatched ages and interests, lives spent too much in the public eye. Grgoire, in the meantime, took up yoga with a passion. Trudeau kept up his paid speaking engagements, on top of his MPs salary a decision that would become ammu-nition for his critics during the leadership when he disclosed the hundreds of thousands of dollars hed earned, some from charita-ble and school groups. Despite their expanding finances, Trudeaus

Justin Trudeau

53

family also moved from Outremont to a smaller house near the Town of Mount Royal in 2010 a bid, Grgoire says, to simplify and unclutter her life, just as it was to become more complicated, professionally, for her husband. She became a certified yoga teach-er in 2012, the same year that her husband decided to seek the Liberal leadership.

Anna Gainey, wife of Trudeaus childhood friend Tom Pitfield, serves as Grgoires pillar in the campaign, organizing her rare talks with the media and making sure the campaign logistics work for her. Gainey is very familiar with the political and public fray her father is the general manager of the Montreal Canadiens, and she heads the Gainey Foundation, which helps finance envi-ronmental and arts programs for youth. She is also a former aide on the Hill and current riding president of Westmount-Ville Marie (though she stepped aside from those duties while the MP for that riding, Marc Garneau, was running for the leadership against one of her closest friends).

Gainey also has two young children. Her oldest, Jackson, was born a month after Ella-Grace, and she worries, of course, about all the ways in which political life can play havoc with young families. But as part of the couple closest to Trudeau and Grgoire, almost like family herself, she recognizes that this is another adventure for them. And the friends are fiercely loyal to aiding their friends through the adventure.

Important as Trudeaus family is not just to his life right now, but to understanding his background they have stayed far be-hind the scenes during the leadership campaign. After Grgoire introduced him at the campaign launch in Montreal, she made few public appearances, concentrating instead on her own busy life of speaking engagements, yoga instruction and keeping the home fires burning. She is far less of a public presence to her political husband than her mother-in-law, Margaret Trudeau, was to hers.

Justin Trudeau

54

Grgoire has a good relationship with Margaret Trudeau. They have travelled together on holidays and for charitable work. Gr-goire is involved with a number of charities, including being a spokesperson for the Shield of Athena family services organiza-tion in her husbands Papineau riding. Margaret Trudeau, in her 2010 book Changing My Mind a book on her battles with bipo-lar disorder wrote extensively on her admiration of the women