Justin Trudeau

Justin Pierre James Trudeau PC MP (/ˈtruːdoʊ, truːˈdoʊ/; French: [ʒystɛ̃ tʁydo]; born December 25, 1971) is a Canadian politician serving as the 23rd and current Prime Minister of Canada since 2015 and Leader of the Liberal Party since 2013.[2][3] Trudeau is the second-youngest Canadian Prime Minister after Joe Clark; he is also the first to be related to a previous holder of the post, as the eldest son of Pierre Trudeau.[4][5]

Born in Ottawa, Trudeau attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, graduated from McGill University in 1994, and then the University of British Columbia in 1998. He has a bachelor of arts degree in literature and a bachelor of education degree. After graduating, he worked as a teacher in Vancouver, British Columbia.[6] He started studying engineering at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 2002, but dropped out in 2003.[7][8] Beginning in 2004, he took one year of a master’s program in environmental geography at McGill University, but left without graduating in 2005.[9][8][7] He has also held jobs including camp counselor,[10] nightclub bouncer,[11][12][10] and snowboard instructor.[10][13]

In the 2008 federal election, he was elected to represent the riding of Papineau in the House of Commons. In 2009, he was appointed the Liberal Party's critic for youth and multiculturalism, and the following year, became critic for citizenship and immigration. In 2011, he was appointed as critic for secondary education and sport. Trudeau won the leadership of the Liberal Party in April 2013 and led his party to victory in the 2015 federal election, moving the third-placed Liberals from 36 seats to 184 seats, the largest-ever numerical increase by a party in a federal election.
Ancestry and birth
On June 23, 1971, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) announced that Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's wife of four months, the former Margaret Sinclair,[14] was pregnant and due in December.[15][16] Justin Trudeau was born on Christmas Day 1971 at 9:27 pm EST at the Ottawa Civic Hospital.[17] He is the second child in Canadian history to be born to a Prime Minister in office; the first was John A. Macdonald's daughter Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald (February 8, 1869 – January 28, 1933). Trudeau's younger brothers Alexandre (Sacha) (born December 25, 1973) and Michel (October 2, 1975 – November 13, 1998) were the third and fourth

Trudeau is predominantly of Scottish and French Canadian descent. His grandfathers were businessman Charles-Émile Trudeau[20] and Scottish-born James Sinclair,[21] who served as Minister of Fisheries in the cabinet of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent.[22] Trudeau's maternal great-grandfather Thomas Bernard was born in Makassar[23] and immigrated to Penticton, British Columbia, in 1906 at age 15 with his family.[24] Through the Bernard family, kinsmen of the Earls of Bandon,[25][26][27] Trudeau is the 5th-great grandson of Major-General William Farquhar,[28] a leader in the founding of modern Singapore; Trudeau also has remote ethnic Malaccan[29][30] and Ono Niha[31][32][33] ancestry.

Trudeau was christened with his father's niece Anne Rouleau-Danis as godmother and his mother's brother-in-law Thomas Walker as godfather[34][35] at Ottawa's Notre Dame Basilica on the afternoon of January 16, 1972, which marked his first public appearance.[36] On April 14, 1972, Trudeau's father and mother hosted a gala at the National Arts Centre, at which visiting U.S. president Richard M. Nixon said, "I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau" to which Pierre Elliott Trudeau responded that should his son ever assume the role, he hoped he would have "the grace and skill of the president".[37] Earlier that same day U.S. first lady Pat Nixon had come to see him in his nursery to deliver a gift, a stuffed toy Snoopy.[38][39] Nixon's White House audio tapes later revealed Nixon referred to that visit as "wasting three days up there. That trip we needed like a hole in the head."[40][41]

Childhood

His parents publicly announced their separation on May 27, 1977,[42][43] when Trudeau was five years old, with his father having custody. There had been repeated rumours of a reconciliation in the public for many years afterwards,[44] but his mother's attorney Michael Levine[45] filed in Toronto to the Supreme Court of Ontario for a no-fault divorce on November 16, 1983[46] and finalized on April 2, 1984,[47] with his father publicly announcing his intention to retire as prime minister on February 29 of that year.[48] Eventually his parents came to an amicable joint-custody arrangement and learned to get along quite well. Interviewed in October 1979, his nanny Dianne Lavergne was quoted, "Justin is a mommy's boy, so it's not easy, but children's hurts mend very quickly. And they're lucky kids, anyway."[49] Of his mother and father's marriage, Trudeau said in 2009, "They loved each other incredibly, passionately, completely. But there was 30 years between them and my mom never was an equal partner in what encompassed my father's life, his duty, his country."[50] Trudeau has three half-siblings, Kyle and Alicia, from his mother's remarriage to Fried Kemper,[51] and Sarah, from his father's relationship with Deborah Coyne.[52]

Trudeau lived at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, the official residence of Canada's prime minister, from his birth until his father's government was defeated in the federal election on May 22, 1979. The Trudeaus were expected to move into the residence of the Leader of the Official Opposition, Stornoway, at 541 Acacia Avenue in Rockcliffe Park, but because of flooding in the basement, prime minister Joe Clark offered them Harrington Lake, the prime minister's official country retreat in Gatineau Park, with the expectation they would move into Stornoway at the start of July.[53] However, the repairs were not complete so Pierre Trudeau took a prolonged vacation with his sons to the Nova Scotia summer home of his friend, MP Don Johnston, and later sent his sons to stay with their maternal grandparents in North Vancouver for the rest of the summer while he slept at his friend's Ottawa apartment. Justin and his brothers returned to Ottawa for the start of the school year, but lived only on the top floor of Stornoway while repairs continued on the bottom floor.[54] His mother purchased and moved into a new home nearby at 95 Queen Victoria Avenue in Ottawa's New Edinburgh in September 1979.[55][56] The Trudeaus returned to the prime minister's official residence in February 1980 after the election that returned his father to the Prime Minister's Office.[57]

His father had intended Trudeau to begin his formal education at a French Lycée, but Trudeau's mother convinced his father of the importance of sending their sons to a public school.[58] In the end, Trudeau was enrolled in 1976 in the French immersion program at Rockcliffe Park Public School, the same school his mother had attended for 2 years when her family relocated to Rockcliffe Park while her father served as a federal Cabinet minister.[59] He could have been dropped off by limousine, but his parents elected he take the school bus albeit with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police car following.[60][61][62][63] This was followed by one year at the private Lycée Claudel d'Ottawa.

After his father's retirement, in June 1984, his mother remained at her New Edinburgh home while the rest of the family moved into his father's home at 1418 Pine Avenue, Montreal known as Cormier House[66] where the following autumn he began attending the private Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, his father's alma mater. The school had begun as a Jesuit school but was non-denominational by the time Justin matriculated.[67][68] In 2008, Trudeau said that of all his early family outings he enjoyed camping with his father the most, because "that was where our father got to be just our father – a dad in the woods".[69] During the summers his father would send him and his brothers to Camp Ahmek, on Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Provincial Park, where he would later work in his first paid employment as a camp counselor.[65][70][71][72][73]

University and early career

Trudeau has a bachelor of arts degree in literature from McGill University and a bachelor of education degree from the University of British Columbia. In his first year at McGill, Trudeau became acquainted with his future Principal Secretary Gerald Butts, through their mutual friend, Jonathan Ablett.[74] Butts invited Trudeau to join the McGill Debating Union.[75] They bonded while driving back to Montreal after a debate tournament at Princeton University[74] in which the Princeton team included Ted Cruz, a U.S. Senator, who was a candidate for the U.S. Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2016.[76] After graduation, Trudeau stayed in Vancouver where he became a substitute teacher at local schools and worked permanently as a French and math teacher at the private West Point Grey Academy. He became a roommate at the Douglas Lodge[77] with fellow West Point Grey Academy faculty member and friend Christopher Ingvaldson.[74][78] From 2002 to 2004, he studied engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, a part of the Université de Montréal.[79] He started a master's degree in environmental geography at McGill University, but withdrew from the program to seek public office among other reasons.[80]

Trudeau, then 28, emerged as a prominent figure in October 2000, after delivering a eulogy at his father's state funeral.[81][82][83] The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) received numerous calls to rebroadcast the speech after its initial transmission, and leading Quebec politician Claude Ryan described it as "perhaps ... the first manifestation of a dynasty".[84] A book issued by the CBC in 2003 included the speech in its list of significant Canadian events from the past fifty years.[85]

In 2007, Trudeau starred in the two-part CBC Television miniseries The Great War, which gave an account of Canada's participation in the First World War. He portrayed his fifth cousin, twice removed,[86] Major Talbot Mercer Papineau, who was killed on October 30, 1917, during the Battle of Passchendaele.[87] Trudeau is one of several children of former prime ministers who have become Canadian media personalities. The others are Ben Mulroney (son of Brian Mulroney), Catherine Clark (daughter of Joe Clark), and Trudeau's younger brother, Alexandre.[88] Ben Mulroney was a guest at Trudeau's wedding.[89]

Advocacy

Trudeau and his family started the Kokanee Glacier Alpine Campaign for winter sports safety in 2000, two years after his brother Michel Trudeau died in an avalanche during a ski trip.[90] In 2002, Trudeau criticized the Government of British Columbia's decision to stop its funding for a public avalanche warning system.[91]

Trudeau chaired the Katimavik youth program, a project started by longtime family friend Jacques Hébert, from 2002 to 2006.[92][93]

In 2002–03, Trudeau was a panelist on CBC Radio's Canada Reads series, where he championed The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston.[94][95] Trudeau and his brother Alexandre inaugurated the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto in April 2004; the centre later became a part of the Munk School of Global Affairs.[96] In 2006, he hosted the Giller Prize for literature.[97][98]

In 2005, Trudeau fought against a proposed $100-million zinc mine that he argued would poison the Nahanni River, a United Nations World Heritage Site located in the Northwest Territories. He was quoted as saying, "The river is an absolutely magnificent, magical place. I'm not saying mining is wrong ... but that is not the place for it. It's just the wrong thing to be doing."[99][100]

On September 17, 2006, Trudeau was the master of ceremonies at a Toronto rally organized by Roméo Dallaire that called for Canadian participation in resolving the Darfur crisis.[101][102][103]

Political beginnings

See also: Electoral history of Justin Trudeau

Trudeau supported the Liberal Party from a young age, offering his support to party leader John Turner in the 1988 federal election.[104] Two years later, he defended Canadian federalism at a student event at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite high school which he attended

Following his father's death, Trudeau became more involved with the Liberal Party throughout the 2000s. Along with Olympian Charmaine Crooks, he co-hosted a tribute to outgoing prime minister Jean Chrétien at the party's 2003 leadership convention, and was appointed to chair a task force on youth renewal after the party's defeat in the 2006 federal election.[106][107]

In October 2006, Trudeau criticized Quebec nationalism by describing political nationalism generally as an "old idea from the 19th century", "based on a smallness of thought" and not relevant to modern Quebec. This comment was seen as a criticism of Michael Ignatieff, then a candidate in the 2006 Liberal Party leadership election, who was promoting recognition of Quebec as a nation.[108][109] Trudeau later wrote a public letter on the subject, describing the idea of Quebec nationhood as "against everything my father ever believed".[110][111]

Trudeau announced his support for leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy shortly before the 2006 convention and introduced Kennedy during the candidates' final speeches.[112] When Kennedy dropped off after the second ballot, Trudeau joined him in supporting the ultimate winner, Stéphane Dion.[113][114]

Rumours circulated in early 2007 that Trudeau would run in an upcoming by-election in the Montreal riding of Outremont. The Montreal newspaper La Presse reported despite Trudeau's keenness, Liberal leader Stéphane Dion wanted Outremont for a star candidate who could help rebuild the Liberal Party. Instead, Trudeau announced that he would seek the Liberal nomination in the nearby riding of Papineau for the next general election.[115][116][117] The riding, which had once been held for 26 years by André Ouellet, a senior minister under his father, had been in Liberal hands for 53 years before falling to the Bloc Québécois in 2006.[118]

Trudeau faced off against Mary Deros, a Montreal city councillor and Basilio Giordano, the publisher of a local Italian-language newspaper for the Liberal nomination. On April 29, 2007, he easily won the party's nomination, picking up 690 votes to 350 for Deros and 220 for Giordano.[119]

Opposition, 2008–2015

Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an election for October 14, 2008, by which time Trudeau had been campaigning for a year in Papineau. On election day Trudeau narrowly defeated Bloc Québécois incumbent Vivian Barbot.[120] Following his election win, Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, noted that Trudeau would "be viewed as few other rookie MPs are—as a potential future Prime Minister—and scrutinized through that lens"