Common Ground Read online

  COMMON

  GROUND

  Justin Trudeau

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Childhood at 24 Sussex

  2. Growing Up in Montreal

  3. Travelling East, Going West

  4. The Woods Are Lovely, Dark, and Deep

  5. Two Life-Changing Decisions

  6. Papineau: Politics from the Ground Up

  7. Life as a Rookie MP

  8. The Path to Leadership

  9. Hope and Hard Work

  Appendix: Select Speeches

  Acknowledgements

  Photos

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  Dedicated to my best friend, partner, and soulmate.

  Thank you for all you do, and for all you are.

  Je t’aime, Sophie.

  Prologue

  In the kitchen and family room of our home in Ottawa, there are photos wherever you look. Plastered on the fridge, framed on shelves and countertops, hung on the walls. There are official recorded moments mixed with favourite family snapshots—Sophie with all the groomsmen at our wedding; Xavier’s school photo; the four of us in Haida Gwaii on our most recent trip to B.C. before Hadrien was born; me posing with constituents in Papineau; my brothers, Sacha and Michel, and me riding our bikes on the driveway of 24 Sussex; my mother, Margaret, smiling with her grandchildren. They each spark special memories and have meaning to us. But the group of photos that never fails to catch my eye is a trio assembled by a good friend of ours. These photos do more than bring back good memories; they tell a story.

  The first picture shows a middle-aged man in the stern of a canoe, his paddle at the ready and a big smile on his face. The canoe is riding over a patch of rough water, and the man is watching a boy seated in the bow of the canoe who is handling his paddle with only promising skill. The man is my father and the boy, of course, is me. We are on the water on a mild spring day. The smile on my father’s face suggests that he could not be more content. I suspect this is true because he is taking me on a special journey, a rite of passage that he would conduct for all of his sons.

  Each of us—Sacha, Michel, and I—made this same journey over these rapids with my father. We were barely walking before Dad put a paddle in our hands and initiated us into the techniques of the voyageurs. Under his watchful eye, we’d work up to this small set of rapids that marked the outflow of Harrington Lake in the Gatineau Hills. My father didn’t want us to enjoy a tranquil ride; he wanted us to face a challenge, to be involved in the journey, to help take control of things in some small way. He wanted us to have fun.

  In the next photo, two men are riding an inflatable craft through water far more challenging than in the first photograph. In fact, they are in some serious whitewater rapids. The older man, sporting a somewhat scruffy beard, is in the front of the craft with his kayak paddle across his legs. He looks somewhere between exhilarated and alarmed at the boat’s dangerous angle and the treacherous water around them. Behind him, in the stern, the much younger man is focused on staying clear of the large rocks nearby.

  It’s the same two people in both pictures, taken twenty years apart. In the second photo, my father is enjoying the ride and I’m guiding the boat, both of us totally engaged in the moment. The pictures are a touching measure of the passage of time and the effects it has on all of us.

  The third picture shows—surprise!—another canoe. This one is red and shiny, it glides on glassy calm water, and I am again seated in the stern. Sophie waves to the camera from the bow. Behind her, Ella-Grace mimics her wave while Xavier watches calmly from the middle seat. The photograph captures one of our many excursions in the canoe with the children. This one, taken above Miles Canyon on the Yukon River, is significant because it would mark our last summer together as a family of four: our son Hadrien was born the following winter.

  My father’s presence dominates the first two pictures, and I like to think he is in the third photo as well, this time in spirit. It is well known that he loved canoeing. It took him outdoors, it challenged his sense of independence and survival, and it connected him with his roots as a young man, as a gifted athlete, and as a Canadian. He loved any opportunity to pass at least part of a day paddling across water, charging down a ski hill, or exploring a hiking trail. He was as skilled an outdoorsman as I ever expect to know.

  These photos are a testament to the march of years, but they are also the ones that resonate deeply and make me miss my father most. It was when we paddled or hiked together back then that we felt closest as a family. The city was where the stress of work and politics would sometimes beat his family down. The outdoors was where we relaxed by getting in touch with who we were and not who others wanted us to be. Together, we learned to face down obstacles and overcome our fears and we developed an endless appreciation for our country and its great natural beauty.

  Today, I can no longer grab a snowboard or a paddle and a life jacket on a whim and lose myself on a mountain or a river for hours or days at a time. Sophie and I have to carve out those moments for our family, on vacation or on much-anticipated Sundays. However, the lessons of my youth remain alive in me, and they are what Sophie and I want to pass on to our children. Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien are the centre of our world and the reason we have embarked on this journey together.

  I have had the extraordinary opportunity to explore this nation at many points in my life—as a boy travelling with my father, as a young man going west for the mountains and teachers’ college, as the head of Katimavik, and now as a father and as a politician. Every journey has served to remind me of the kind of country we live in, the kind of physical distances we have to bridge, and the kind of abundant gifts that come with this land. Maps can’t provide any idea of the real scope of Canada, and air travel minimizes everything that our country offers. You can’t appreciate the sweep of the Prairie breadbasket or the engineering achievement of Rogers Pass from thirty thousand feet. You need to be at ground level, where you can not only explore the land but meet the people who cherish the land as much as I do.

  Too many Canadians emphasize their regional differences and forget the things that unite us. We are one people who speak two official languages and share a host of others. For all our differences of culture, history, and geography, we are bound together by shared values that define the Canadian identity. I have a deep-seated love and respect for Canada and recognize that we have extraordinary potential. Everything about my life has emphasized and reinforced that fact. Everything I propose to do in my political career is built on that premise.

  However, it’s a potential that is easily wasted and, once gone, isn’t easily recovered. The last few years have seen this country’s potential greatness fade in the shadow of divisive politics and a focus on seizing power for its own sake. That’s not what Canada needs, nor what Canadians want. Our country was built on better goals than that, guided by a vision that was both unique and encouraging to people all over the world.

  This risk to our potential is among the reasons that led me to enter politics and to make my case for a different approach to guiding Canada forward. In many ways, my approach reflects the circumstances of my upbringing and my awareness that we need to share not just the bounty of our land but the responsibility of protecting and enhancing that bounty. We need to both prize and hone our acclaimed sense of acceptance and inclusion and our respect for democratic values. We need to honour the priceless heritage of this broad and beautiful land, and its promise of a rich future for our children and grandchildren.


  If I sound a bit rhapsodic, you’ll have to forgive me. I tend to get that way about things I love and treasure. I wrote this book to explain why I feel this way about our country and how I learned to lead.

  My vision for this country is very much shaped by my experiences and the influences upon me—Trudeau and Sinclair, father and mother, French and English, East and West. Just as every river is the sum of a hundred tributaries, so am I the product of many people and regions.

  I am always a son, but today, I’m also a husband, a father, and a man passionate about his country. And if I wish to one day have the opportunity to lead Canada toward a future of justice, equality, and shared purpose, I feel I must tell you my story in my own words so that you can know better the man I am, far from the glare of politics. I’d like to share with you the sense of duty that propels me: to serve our country by fostering the common ground where every Canadian can find his or her own place within a strong and fair country.

  Chapter One

  Childhood at 24 Sussex

  A fitting beginning to my story can be found more than a century ago in the town of Banff, on the thinly populated northeastern coast of Scotland known as Aberdeenshire. One day in 1911 a local schoolteacher and avid fisherman named James George Sinclair traipsed out to a nearby stream with some friends and dropped his line in the water. Almost immediately the group was set upon by a constable who declared that they were fishing illegally—the waterway was “owned,” one end to the other, by the local nobleman.

  Feudal land-use laws survived well into the twentieth century in Scotland and elsewhere in Europe, and the penalties for violators could be severe. If James was caught trying to pilfer the local lord’s fish again, the constable warned, it would mean jail time for him.

  As James and his friends packed up their gear and headed home across the meadow, he grumbled, “If I canna fish, I canna live.” One of James’s companions began describing a wide-open land to them, a bonnie place where the forests teemed with game and “no nobleman owns the fish.” He’d read about it in a book, the fellow said. A wonderful place it was, more than four thousand miles away, across the Atlantic and on the far side of Canada. A place called “British Columbia.”

  A few months later, James George Sinclair, his wife, Betsy, and their three-year-old son, Jimmy, were aboard a boat sailing to Canada. They found much more than fish in British Columbia. Their new home was a land of opportunity where hard work paid off, whatever your accent or ancestry. Over the next half century their son Jimmy grew up to earn a degree in engineering, become a Rhodes Scholar, serve as an RCAF officer in World War Two, be elected an MP, serve as a cabinet minister, have a successful business career—and remain all his life, like his father before him, an avid fisherman.

  He and his wife, Kathleen, named the fourth of their five daughters Margaret. Today she lives in Montreal; she’s my mom.

  In September 1941, while Jimmy Sinclair had the particular distinction of serving his first term as MP for the riding of Vancouver North while commanding an RCAF squadron in North Africa, a French-Canadian intellectual embarked on an extraordinary sixteen-hundred-kilometre canoe expedition from Montreal to James Bay, retracing the seventeenth-century journey made by the coureurs de bois who founded the Hudson’s Bay Company. The trip attracted some media attention; under the headline “Students Went on a Pleasant Voyage,” a local newspaper listed the six canoeists, including one by the name of Pierre E. Trudeau.

  It was an arduous journey. For my father, that was precisely the point. “I shot the rapids while the others portaged,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. “The food began to give out, the portages were impossible, the rapids dangerous . . . In a word, life was becoming beautiful.” This was the lens through which my father saw his native Quebec—as a proud and magnificent place full of rugged beauty. He always believed that the province’s defining spirit emerged as much from the land as from the language and culture.

  As a family, we’ve always had a strong connection to the water. In fact, water plays a role in my very first memory. I was not quite two years old, bundled up in a snowsuit and sledding with my father at Harrington Lake, the government-owned prime ministerial residence in Gatineau Park, which was one of my parents’ favourite places to spend time together. It was December 1973, and the lake was not quite frozen over. My mother stood at the top of a hill, ready to burst with the imminent birth of my brother Sacha, and cheered us on as my father went up and down the slope with me on a sled. Each swift descent ended near the stream that flowed out of the lake, the one I would later paddle down.

  After a few turns, my father satisfied himself that the run was safe and decided I should have a go by myself. From the top of the hill he gave the sled a push, and off I went down the slope while he and my mother looked on. Almost immediately, my dad saw a huge problem. When he and I were aboard the sled together, our combined weight was enough for the sled’s runners to break through the icy crust and slow us down. But with just me on board, the sled skimmed lightly on the crust more like a skate and began gaining speed, heading directly for the stream. As my father bounded down the slope in hot pursuit of me, my mother stood atop the hill terrified, shouting, “My baby, my baby!”

  As young as I was, I clearly recall the ride ending with the sled half-buried in the sandy shore and my outstretched hands wrist-deep in the ice-cold water. I was wearing blue knit mittens, and my principal concern was that I had gotten them soaked. “Fall down river, mittens wet!” I cried out to my father, half-delighted and half-surprised, when he arrived to rescue me. He scooped me up with one hand, grabbed the sled with the other, and carried me back up the hill. It was a significant day: I had been baptized an outdoorsman.

  Before this adventure, however, was the eventful time of my birth. Sir John A. Macdonald was the last prime minister to have a child in office. My father and mother both embraced the goals of the new feminist movement that was revolutionizing the way men and women approached their roles as parents. However, they were born three decades apart, and the difference in their ages was something that was not easily overcome. To put that in perspective, my father was born in 1919, the year that women gained the right to stand for federal office in Canada.

  In 1971, the Ottawa Civic Hospital still excluded husbands from accompanying their wives in the delivery room. My mother was furious when she heard about this. If her husband couldn’t be at her side in the hospital when she gave birth, she would have the baby—that was me—at 24 Sussex. When word of my mother’s protest reached the hospital’s board of directors, they promptly abolished the old-fashioned restriction, followed by other hospitals in Ottawa and eventually across the country. On Christmas Day, my father was at my mother’s side when I came into the world. It was, I am told by reliable sources, an easy and uncomplicated delivery. And I like to think that, along with my father, I helped my mother strike a blow against old-school patriarchal thinking.

  My brother Sacha arrived two years after me, and Michel followed less than two years later, so we were close in many ways. We were constant playmates—chasing, teasing, getting into scrapes. Actually, we were rough-and-tumble little lion cubs. I taught Sacha to wrestle when he was still in diapers, and Sacha was rolling around with Michel when he was still a toddler. Taking a cue from all that energy, my parents put tumbling mats in the basement of 24 Sussex, eager to see us burn off our boyish hyperactivity in a wholesome way.

  Harrington Lake in those days was like the setting for a Hardy Boys novel, a place that begged for adventure. My father, to our delight, always seemed to encourage the idea. An old farmstead with an abandoned barn could be explored nearby. Halfway down the lake, past an old mica mine, sat an unused boathouse where my brothers and I would sun ourselves in the summer. About a hundred metres offshore was a tiny island that was the locus of our own rite of passage. When each of us turned seven years old, we determined we would swim out to the island and back again.
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  It was an example of our father’s encouragement to always test our physical boundaries that he agreed to this. Of course, he guided and protected us—when we attempted this ritual he was there, swimming alongside us, to the island and back.

  He also liked to surprise us. He would pull out topographical maps of Gatineau Park, place his finger on a spot and say, “On va là.” A half-hour later, we would all find ourselves scrambling to keep up with him and our mother as he marched confidently into the wilderness. His sense of direction was excellent, and we never got lost. But the same wasn’t true for other visitors to the area. Occasionally some confused hiker would stumble upon us and find himself getting directions from the prime minister of Canada. When I look back on such episodes now, they do seem surreal. But as a young child, the prime minister assisting hikers lost in the Gatineau Hills seemed perfectly normal.

  A change in season didn’t stop our outdoor explorations and family excursions. Snow on the ground meant many things. We all began skiing at a young age, but at Harrington Lake, we’d usually strap on snowshoes and head out the door. These weren’t the modern lightweight designs available today. We wore the old wooden teardrop-shaped variety, which looked a bit like tennis racquets and were strung with catgut (which, our father assured us, doesn’t really come from cats). While trekking through the wilderness, my father, always in French, would spin tales of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, an infamous Depression-era criminal who led the RCMP on a nearly 250-kilometre manhunt through the Northwest Territories and into the frozen Yukon wilderness. This, naturally, inspired us to take turns playing the Mad Trapper, heading into the Gatineau countryside to see if we could evade capture by other family members.

  Tracking someone in snowshoes is easy if he walks in a straight line. The idea was to confuse the pursuers by walking in circles, branching off and doubling back, following a figure-eight pattern or even swinging from a tree branch to create a break in the trail. We loved this game, and it kept us going for hours.