Justin Trudeau became the leader of the Liberal Party on Sunday, 45 years and one week after his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, claimed a similar political victory. But the parallels between father and son may end there.
If he is to become prime minister like his father, Mr. Trudeau will have to grapple with a name that remains polarizing in Canada and show a skeptical public that he has his father’s substance as well as his flash. He faces a country where political dynasties are rare and, at best, viewed with suspicion. And while his father led the Liberal Party at a high point of its fortunes, Mr. Trudeau will take over a much diminished version that, for the first time in its history, fell into third place during the last federal election.
In his office above a pharmacy in the multiethnic section of Montreal that Mr. Trudeau represents in Parliament, he acknowledged that having the most famous name in modern Canadian politics was both a blessing and a curse. But he repeatedly emphasized that he expected no special breaks because of it.
“I always thought that if politics was going to happen, it was going to happen much later in life,” Mr. Trudeau, 41, said in an interview during his successful leadership campaign. “I knew that the challenge I would be facing all my life would be having people think that I expected anything to be handed to me in politics because of my last name, that I somehow have a right to be in politics because my father was in politics and my grandfather was in politics.”
His father’s intensely publicized marriage to the former Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of a retired cabinet minister, made Justin Trudeau a Canadian celebrity from the moment he was born, on Christmas in 1971. But Mr. Trudeau’s public profile, like that of his two younger brothers, would rise and fade over the coming years. Even after a leadership campaign that began in the fall, many political analysts in Canada find that much still remains unknown about him.
Mr. Trudeau, wrote Aaron Wherry, a columnist for the weekly magazine Maclean’s, is “somehow both underestimated and overestimated, underqualified and best-suited, the personification of both nostalgia and the future.” In a headline for a profile on the Web site of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that was posted just before the party’s vote, Mr. Trudeau was described as “a household name but still an enigma.”
As his parents’ marriage publicly crumbled — a widely distributed photograph showed Mrs. Trudeau partying at Studio 54 in New York while Mr. Trudeau was in the midst of an election campaign — Justin Trudeau and his brothers moved in with their father in Ottawa. His childhood, Mr. Trudeau said, was a mix of privilege and the plebeian.
A school bus picked him up each morning at the prime minister’s official residence and took him to a public elementary school that drew its students from Ottawa’s most affluent as well as one of its poorest neighborhoods.
“There were lunch hours where I wouldn’t eat at school because we had to rush home to have lunch with the queen, for example, which actually happened,” Mr. Trudeau said, speaking with a deliberate cadence that echoes his father’s. “At the same time, it was instilled upon us that this was a privilege and a responsibility, and nothing made us better than anyone else — maybe randomly luckier.”
AFTER his father’s retirement from politics, Mr. Trudeau moved to Montreal and attended a Jesuit-founded French-language high school with rigorous academic requirements. It was not a place where the Trudeau name was welcomed. Pierre Trudeau was the leading opponent of Quebec separatism, which had a strong following among the students and teachers. Mr. Trudeau’s friends at school, some of whom are now his political advisers, generally came from other families with mixed French and English backgrounds, he said.
Largely out of public view, Mr. Trudeau studied English and French literature at McGill University and ended up in British Columbia, his mother’s home province, where he worked briefly as a snowboard instructor and nightclub bouncer. Given his tall, very slim build, it was an unlikely calling, but he said he “didn’t feel physically threatened because I don’t have a fear gene, I guess.” Eventually, following an aunt’s urging, he completed a teaching degree and taught French and math at two high schools in Vancouver.
Two deaths returned Mr. Trudeau to the public eye. In 1998, an avalanche in British Columbia killed his brother Michel. The resulting outpouring of public sympathy, Mr. Trudeau said, was unexpected by the family. The death, he added, shattered his father physically. Pierre Trudeau died two years later at 80.
The confidence drained from Mr. Trudeau’s voice as he recalled the public reaction, including the sound of thousands of people’s hands touching a ceremonial train that carried his father’s body to Montreal from Ottawa for burial. Stopping to get a tissue, Mr. Trudeau was in tears as he described a man watching the funeral procession who mimicked the pirouette his father famously performed behind Queen Elizabeth’s back.
“That was something that encapsulated all those emotions, just a random stranger,” he said, repeatedly pausing to maintain his composure. “I hadn’t really realized the sense of connection people had to my family beyond politics.”
WHEN he entered politics himself in 2007, Mr. Trudeau, who is married to Sophie Grégoire, a former television host and model, did not follow what might have been an easier path. Instead, he said, he chose a densely populated electoral district in Montreal with below-average incomes and traditionally high levels of support for Quebec separatism to show “that I wasn’t taking anything for granted, and that I was willing to work for it.”
Mr. Trudeau follows a series of Liberal leaders who were supposed to revitalize the party but who instead prompted widespread musings about its extinction. He has refused to entertain the thought of formally cooperating during elections with Canada’s other major left-wing party, citing policy differences, particularly over Quebec, and political experts say he may not buckle, as his predecessors did, in the face of vigorous political and personal attacks from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his allies. Those began the morning after he became leader with a television advertisement that included video from a medical charity fund-raising event where Mr. Trudeau performed a mock striptease, suggesting that he was unfit to be prime minister.
Mr. Trudeau’s leadership campaign also suggests that he could solve the Liberals’ financial problems. The party has struggled to adapt to new election laws that ban corporate and union donations and limit individuals to relatively small contributions — a measure that the Liberals introduced. At last count, Mr. Trudeau had raised $1.3 million, a large sum in Canadian politics and more than all of the five other leadership candidates combined.
If nothing else, he has again focused attention on the Liberals. One of the events that kicked off his campaign last fall filled a banquet hall in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb. In the audience was a woman who said she had voted for his father and had driven three hours to hear Mr. Trudeau speak. Several people there were in their 20s and said they had never before attended a political event.
Mr. Trudeau, whose campaign was long on speeches about reviving public participation in Canadian politics and short on specific policies, acknowledged that he would inevitably disappoint some of his supporters.
“Am I going to make mistakes? Loads of them,” he said. “I’ll be apologizing, I’ll stumble through. But I trust my core, I trust my values and I trust Canadians. And if I blow it, it will really be because I wasn’t up to the task.”
Original Article
Source: nytimes.com
Author: IAN AUSTEN
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