Justin Trudeau was born on December 25th, 1971. His father was Prime Minister for a little over three years, but Trudeau really introduced himself to the country politically in October 2000, when he delivered a eulogy at his father s funeral. From that speech, people began whispering about a potential political career for Justin Trudeau.
00:06:21.440But I think it's fair to call it a political biography.
00:06:24.200It's I'm trying to tell the story of Justin Trudeau, the politician.
00:06:29.540So you spent a lot of time talking to him.
00:06:32.240I believe the number that I've seen quoted is more than 200 friends, associates and others that you spoke to in the book.
00:06:41.040Am I wrong in saying that prior to his being elected, that speech, that eulogy for his father and that boxing match were two of the catalysts that put him in there?
00:06:52.680Because you do talk about the boxing match quite a bit and describe how right after that they went into, OK, let's plan for this.
00:07:03.440So are those two key moments in his political career?
00:07:10.480And the boxing match was very important.
00:07:12.960I have a quote in the book from a Toronto, University of Toronto sociologist who said that the boxing match helped him go from being precariously masculine to sufficiently masculine.
00:07:30.200And I think she's on to something there, because until then, there was a sort of idea that he was lightweight and kind of feminine sort of character, you know, with long hair and a bit of a showboat.
00:07:40.960Some people even called him shiny pony.
00:07:45.780As you recall, I was doing the play by play and the guy sitting next to me doing the color commentary, kept calling him shiny pony.
00:07:55.720I mean, it really did seal the deal for a lot of liberals that, oh, we can get behind this guy now.
00:08:04.180Like, there were some that were behind him just for the name, and especially people of that generation that really loved and admired his father because they lived through his time in ways that you and I are a bit younger and did not to the same degree.
00:08:24.120But for others, I think, you know, that boxing match made people say, hmm.
00:08:28.540Yeah, I remember Andrew Potter writing something about it, about, you know, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but we're basically a nation of lumberjacks, and so the guy who wins the fist fight, you know, there's a sort of primitive part of Canadians who would say, oh, well, that was a good scrap.
00:09:50.340And I'm going to tell a story that I haven't told people.
00:09:54.220I don't think I've told this in a public forum before.
00:09:56.580But, you know, if Justin Trudeau's boxing match is responsible in part for him being prime minister, then I'm responsible in part for Justin Trudeau being prime minister.
00:10:07.220Because this was a sleepy charity event that had been going on in Ottawa for years.
00:10:12.400And back when the Sun News Network was still going, and I was a host, I'm sitting in the makeup chair one day, and Stefania Capavia, who cut Trudeau's hair, cut my hair, did the makeup, did Patrick Brazzo's hair.
00:10:26.200And he had told her he's doing this boxing match, and he's having trouble finding someone to fight.
00:10:32.040But he wanted to raise money for cancer.
00:10:34.160And she said, oh, I know a guy, and introduced him to Trudeau.
00:10:41.540I walk into Corey Tonight's office, who was the VP at Quebecor in charge of Sun News, and I said, Justin Trudeau's going to box Patrick Brazzo.
00:10:50.220And he jumped up and he said, we'll broadcast it like it's the moon landing.
00:11:17.440And it shows something about the guy, I think, that, you know, he believes in himself.
00:11:22.780And in the book, I have a quote from a former cabinet minister who will remain nameless who said, if we all had his self-confidence, it's like a superpower.
00:11:31.980Goodness knows what we could accomplish.
00:11:33.860And I believe that that self-confidence that he has comes from his very unusual childhood and his experience of life.
00:11:43.720So he is a separate sort of person, a different person than most of the people we've met in our lives.
00:12:01.460And I'm sure you've heard the same stories that I have, that people close to him, either politically or family or friends, have said, you know, I think maybe you should think about leaving.
00:12:15.480And one of the stories that I've heard back is that he sees it like the boxing match or like 2015 when everyone underestimated him.
00:12:24.700And he thinks that he thinks that he can just, you know, power through, that he's being underestimated now and that he can win the next election campaign.
00:12:35.980Given your overarching view of him, would you put any stock in that?
00:12:41.240Do you think that is part of his psyche at the moment?
00:12:44.280I don't presume to know what's going on in his mind.
00:12:49.320What I do know, though, is that he is trapped in a message box.
00:12:55.660Until the moment that he decides to take a walk in the snow to announce that he's moving on, he cannot afford to show weakness.
00:13:06.920He cannot afford to let on that he's thinking about it, even to the people who are quite close to him.
00:13:14.240Because the minute that people sense that he may leave, his life gets more difficult.
00:13:19.000You know the old saying, in politics, your opponents are across from you and your enemies sit behind you, right?
00:13:25.620So he can't afford to let on his plans.
00:13:31.520And I think we'll, you know, given the circumstances, I think he's got to be looking hard at leaving.
00:13:41.820But until he does, I don't think we'll know it.
00:13:43.860And one of the things about him is that he's been subject to unusual scrutiny since childhood, almost like Shirley Temple or Danny Bonaduce.
00:13:53.360You know, he's a, he was like a child star in a sense.
00:13:56.860And so he has developed the ability to be guarded and to project, you know, a mask.
00:14:07.720Much more so, I think, than most politicians.
00:14:11.080So I don't think we'll, we'll see it coming until he decides.
00:14:16.160Well, I mean, that's, you say that we won't see it coming until he decides politically.
00:14:21.700We had heard for years about troubles in his marriage.
00:14:25.580And I, I'd heard them so often, just like I'd heard them about Stephen Harper and his wife before that, that I discounted them.
00:14:34.680And I, I just said, like, look, marriage is tough.
00:14:38.480Anybody that's been in one knows that, you know, we'll find out when we find out.
00:14:43.020And then last August, he announced that it was over.
00:14:48.720You write a bit about that and the fact that, you know, if he had decided to leave, he could have saved his marriage.
00:16:32.020To me, a moment where, quote, what happened actually after the manuscript was finished, the, this budget that looked to me like a fairly effective budget, effectively sold, and it doesn't move the polls.
00:16:49.920Yes, I, I don't mean, uh, although I would say that, that the housing stuff, uh, I've talked to housing developers about this.
00:16:58.080He is going to cause the construction of a lot of rental units in this country and we need them, right?
00:17:04.340So that part, I think just on a policy basis for generational fairness and that kind of thing, we need that.
00:17:10.860Uh, there's other things that are, you know, partisans can argue one way or another.
00:17:14.320Uh, but politically, policy, and it was, well, uh, you know, they leaked it very professionally beforehand or not leaked it, but did a bunch of announcements and they tried to milk it for all it was worth.
00:17:26.520And you look at the polls and they get nothing out of it, right?
00:17:29.740So you got, if you're them, you have to start thinking, well, this is starting to look pretty tough, right?
00:18:51.120I saw that poll today and it made my eyebrows pop up.
00:18:53.820Uh, I'd like to look at the gender breakdown.
00:18:55.860I've long thought that the last, uh, constituency the liberals should ever lose would be, uh, francophone women in Quebec.
00:19:03.580The very important, you know, they saved Canada in the referendum and they saved the liberal party, you know, over and over again.
00:19:09.580So I'd like to see the gender breakdown, but that's, you know, he's, he's widely thought to be the best pollster in Canada.
00:19:15.060And I thought that poll today is another significant bit of bad news for the Trudeau operation.
00:19:20.780Um, one thing I would say, and it's a tiny little asterisk, is I have found over time that Quebecers, um, tend to be more volatile during election periods because they don't follow federal politics as closely as people in Ontario do.
00:19:52.800So yeah, for people that aren't in Quebec and, and I also worked in Montreal, um, you in Ontario and in certain other parts of the country, federal politics dominates.
00:20:04.660In Quebec and, and in other parts of the country, it's, it's, you're right, it's provincial.
00:20:09.220And, uh, I remember sharing an office with, uh, Ray Fillion, the longtime reporter on Parliament Hill for, uh, great, great guy.
00:20:19.300He had trouble getting on TV some days, right?
00:20:22.400There'd be big stories in Ottawa and they're like, yeah, but the junior minister of whatever in Quebec city said this.
00:20:32.880Uh, and so that means that between election polls in Quebec are a little less, I'm not saying it's not significant, but I, I, I, that really came into focus for me during the orange wave, uh, in 2011 when suddenly Quebecers said, wait, who's this Jack Layton guy?
00:21:00.340If you had to guess right now, if an election were held now, what would you say?
00:21:05.300Oh, uh, right now, what the polls say, a poly of majority, but, um, I think he is as yet untested, right?
00:21:14.660Until you see someone in a, um, uh, federal race, uh, there, uh, you look at, I don't know if you saw the nanos poll a while ago that found that people have sort of mixed feelings about him.
00:21:29.340Uh, and we're going to have to see, I mean, you and I both know that personally he could not be any nicer, uh, but he has a reputation.
00:21:40.500He's kind of a ferocious character and we'll have to see if, if Canadians, uh, like that when they see it in an election campaign, when they're paying attention.
00:21:49.940So I've got three rules about Canadian politics.
00:22:53.520And I would say that that election, I agree with you that that was the sort of winning message, but I would say that divisions on the conservative side, uh, made it difficult for O'Toole to take the kind of position on COVID.
00:23:09.260That he wanted to take, and those, uh, those, uh, divisions will not be present, I don't believe, in the next election.
00:23:18.520I think Polyev has the caucus behind him in a way that, uh, uh, O'Toole did not.
00:23:26.900Um, and so I think that they will be stronger and more formidable.
00:23:33.580Uh, it's hard to imagine an issue that, that would cleave the country in the same way that the liberals were able to cleave it in 2021 with mandates.
00:23:46.240I remember, uh, Nick Cuvales saying to me, well, 40% of people in Ontario are in favor of mandates.
00:24:01.960So, uh, but the one thing I'll say is we don't know if Trudeau is going to be the candidate.
00:24:12.340If, if Trudeau is not the candidate, if he decides to make way for someone else or if his inner circle, uh, puts the muscle on him and gives him the message that he's got to go, uh, things could change.
00:24:26.440Uh, because right now I think the next election would be a referendum on Justin Trudeau.
00:24:32.140And if he's no longer there, the conservatives would need to find a new ballot question and, uh, the liberals might be able to put more scrutiny on Polyev, right?
00:24:43.100So it's, it's, it's, I'm not saying that, that, uh, it would, uh, that would allow the liberals to save their bacon.
00:24:50.640Uh, but it, it just becomes less predictable.
00:24:53.480I think the current conservatives now have an excellent plan for how to defeat Justin Trudeau and he's got so much baggage that, that, uh, he personifies, uh, that, uh, another candidate might not carry all that baggage.
00:25:12.240All right. We've got to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to ask you about, um, where Trudeau fits in, in the liberal sphere of things, but also, um, you've got some interesting insights on a few incidents that happened, including blackface and how that went down.
00:25:28.980We ran an excerpt of that in national post. We'll talk about that when we come back.
00:25:33.120When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings. Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote? Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress? That jacket? Those shoes? Is anyone paying full price for anything?
00:25:58.700Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners. Find fabulous for less.
00:26:03.640Steven, one of the things that I want to ask you about is Justin Trudeau. He's had this alliance. I call it a coalition because, yeah, there's no NDP ministers, but you've got a working agreement. It's a coalition of sorts with the NDP.
00:26:19.040But that came about, I felt, after a couple of elections where Justin Trudeau tried to outflank the NDP, much like Kathleen Wynne tried to do in Ontario.
00:26:26.640And I've long thought that Justin's political center doesn't lie at Canada's political center. It probably lies closer to the NDP.
00:26:39.040And it reminds me of a famous quote. Judy Lamar, she'd been a minister in the Pearson government, was caught on a hot mic during the 1968 Liberal Leadership Convention,
00:26:49.120trying to convince other candidates to stay in the race against Pierre Trudeau, saying,
00:26:54.080he's not a liberal, he's a damn socialist. You've got to stay in the race.
00:26:58.520Is Justin Trudeau a classic liberal, or is he a damn socialist?
00:27:02.380Well, I think that there's, if you take a step back from just Justin Trudeau and look at the way politics has been trending in Canada and around the world,
00:27:20.860the Liberals, when, in 1968, when Pierre took over that party, were a brokerage party.
00:27:32.760Very similar to the Progressive Conservative Party, but they were just a more successful brokerage party,
00:27:38.560in that they generally sort of tried to make deals and keep ethnic and religious peace in the country.
00:27:48.060And a lot of people had connections to politics through patronage networks in one way or another.
00:27:56.240And Canadian politics was remarkable for being not very ideological.
00:28:00.940You had this big sort of centrist liberal party that kind of shuffled along, normally running the country,
00:28:07.380and every now and then the Tories would get in for a little while.
00:28:10.280But the big issues tended not to be along ideological lines.
00:28:15.100And gradually, we've seen the centre has fallen away, and our politics, partly, I think, as a result of fragmentation of the media,
00:28:26.840has become more ideological and more confrontational.
00:28:29.400So, I'm kind of giving you a mealy-mouthed answer.
00:28:32.360I mean, yes, it's a more left-wing government than previous liberal governments,
00:28:36.700but I think that the reason for that may have to do with historical trends.
00:28:41.400And the thing that I'll point to as evidence of that is the decline of the provincial liberal parties.
00:28:48.800When I started covering politics in Canada,
00:28:51.820there were liberal parties either in government or opposition in a lot of the provinces.
00:32:24.280Justin Trudeau had the same exact position as Tom Mulcair.
00:32:27.800And yet, Quebecers, who had given the NDP, what, 57 seats in the previous election, turned on Mulcair and switched to Trudeau over the kneecap issue.
00:32:39.040Not solely, but that was a big part of it, wasn't it?
00:32:53.480And Carl Belanger, for people who don't know, was a longtime NDP staffer, operative, very well-known on the Hill, very respected, worked for Jack Layton, worked for Tom Mulcair.
00:33:08.500And he had a Tory who he would talk to from time to time, a senior guy on the Harper campaign, who had said, we want to win, but if we have to lose, we'd rather lose to you than to the liberals, right?
00:33:26.140And Carl eventually ends up saying to him, well, you're killing us on this kneecap thing, right?
00:33:42.280So I think, I thought at the time that Harper was trapped playing whack-a-mole, that he was going to lose to either Tom Mulcair or Justin Trudeau in that election.
00:33:50.580Because you could see the, what Frank Graves calls the promiscuous progressives, who wanted to replace Harper and didn't particularly care who was going to do it.
00:33:59.660And in the course of that campaign, Trudeau emerged as the, you know, the champion for that part of the country.
00:34:07.780And basically, once Quebec moved to Trudeau, the rest of the country, on the progressive side, moved to Trudeau.
00:34:13.900I would want to look at the polling, because I was talking to someone not long ago who said that the last piece to fall in place was Quebec.
00:34:23.500Quebec is what gives them the majority.
00:34:28.840But, I mean, it was volatile there for a while.
00:34:33.980Yeah, so I think the Tories made a mistake in hitting it so hard, the kneecap thing.
00:34:39.260And they also had the, what was the other thing?
00:34:51.380Yeah, the snitch line, which, you take those two things together, and the kind of rhetoric that the Prime Minister was using about national security at the time,
00:35:02.040it had, it was a little bit different from the kind of campaigns we normally have.
00:35:12.600And I thought it was a sign that they were in trouble and having to try to rattle people with national security and identity kind of stuff.
00:35:24.540I think the Niqab issue could have been of benefit to them.
00:37:39.380But will Justin Trudeau fight with his very last breath to make sure that this Canada stays the Canada that we collectively know it can be?
00:37:48.740The way you tell the story in the book is that Kevin Bosch and Daniel Lauzon, two long-time experienced Liberals staffers, people who knew how the business of politics worked, had told him, don't go out there.
00:39:31.500He shouldn't have said something mean about her.
00:39:36.080Anyway, so, but when he messed up, when he would say something, a lot of times, he would go to his team.
00:39:46.740The interview would finish, and he'd say, I shouldn't have said that, should I?
00:39:49.820And they'd say, no, no, no, here's what you should have said.
00:39:52.180Say, oh, shit, do I, well, we'll work it out.
00:39:56.100So he kept making mistakes, but when he did, he would apologize.
00:40:00.980And he kept, this is one of the things that I found impressive, is that he kept working on himself, improving his message discipline,
00:40:10.820and did that kind of painful work of watching tapes of himself and being critiqued.
00:40:21.220When I first met him, he was just a backbencher who wanted to talk to me because I was with CJD in Montreal, and you talked 1010 in Toronto.
00:40:33.620So he saw me, and he's like, oh, local reporter.
00:40:36.740Much like you did to him, I'm a journalist.
00:44:03.860And she calls down and says, well, I just want to make sure that you have a diaper service because I'm going to be coming with my little newborn or my child.
00:44:14.140And they said, oh, goodness, ma'am, we don't have diapers here because we don't allow babies at this resort.
00:44:21.040And she was crushed and afraid that if she told Pierre, he would just say, well, I guess we'll stay in Ottawa then.
00:44:27.220And so she had the high commission in Kingston nose around.
00:44:33.180And they said, well, there's this other place, Prospect Estate.
00:44:35.240And so she called there and, without telling Pierre, moved their reservation.
00:44:40.400And it was owned by a fellow named Sir Harold Mitchell, who was a very impressive and interesting man, who had been an official in Winston Churchill's Conservative Party and an industrialist and built, I didn't put this in the book, but he built a boys' school in Jamaica where a lot of, might be the best boys' school in Jamaica.
00:45:06.420So a sort of charitably minded person.
00:45:08.900Anyway, and they went and stayed there and became friends with him and friends with his daughter, who later married a man named Peter Green, who had a couple sons who became close to the Trudeau boys.
00:45:25.020And so they would go there quite often, and there would be five of them, you know, a little tribe of boys running around.
00:45:33.040You probably know what that's like from your own family.
00:45:36.420And so it's a place with really special and happy memories.
00:46:08.760And much like his trip to the Aga Khan Island that you write about, the public doesn't know things and then they get annoyed.
00:46:15.900You know, his staff told him, don't take this trip to the Aga Khan's Island, or at least those close to him, like Katie Telford and Jerry Butts.
00:46:22.840He ends up coming across, instead of coming across as someone that wants to go back to somewhere he's been going his whole life, he comes across as entitled.
00:46:40.780So, I mean, does he get that he comes across as an entitled, out of touch, aloof elite?
00:46:49.340What he said to me, it's, so when I interviewed him for the book, and I only had one interview, I went into it not planning on grilling him or, you know, getting into arguments with him about S&C Lavalin or, you know, I didn't think that would be productive because I wanted to get his thoughts on a number of different things.
00:47:07.320You don't get a good interview like that, despite what people think.
00:47:10.780Yeah, during an election campaign on TV, it might be good, but that's not the way to, I wanted to get some, fill in some gaps for the book.
00:47:19.340Tell me about this, tell me about that.
00:47:21.340And I was impressed, Brian, I'll tell you, you and I have both done a lot of interviews.
00:47:26.020He understood why I was there, and I think he did his best to make a productive meeting for both of us, if you know what I mean.
00:47:32.280Like, it was a thing where you go, yeah, the guy knows what he's doing.
00:47:36.820He's trying to help me here, trying to, he's taking an hour of his time, and he's trying to give me some quotes for my book.
00:47:41.940So, but the one thing that I said to him is, I talked to him, I asked him about that story, and then I said, okay, well, I should tell you, I'm not trying to argue with you,
00:47:53.620but I thought that that was a mistake, and I'm likely going to write that, and he said, yeah, okay, fair enough.
00:47:59.120He thought about it for a minute, and he said, you know, he talked about his kids, how hard it is for him to have time with his kids in his job,
00:48:06.460and said it's an impossible thing to, it's an impossible balance, you know?
00:48:13.960So he feels torn, I think, between his responsibilities to his family and his responsibilities to the country.
00:48:20.260I still think it's a mistake, but I, I...
00:48:24.580Look, if you're going to do it, at least try and explain the context to people.
00:48:28.880Yeah, yeah, well, and they told him, before the Aga Khan thing, like, okay, if you're really going to do this,
00:48:35.440then we better have a plan for explaining it.
00:48:38.220Now, thank goodness for our friends Chris Selle and David Akin that they didn't,
00:48:43.040because the boys got a pretty good scoop out of it, didn't they?
00:49:26.060And then Global comes out with a third photo that wasn't the one that they released.
00:49:31.460I think they released the second one thinking that's the one Global must have.
00:49:36.020Um, that had to be incredibly difficult.
00:49:40.120So how did he and his team deal with that?
00:49:44.180It was an incredibly, uh, stressful thing for Trudeau and his people.
00:49:49.860Um, the, the, it broke while he was campaigning in my hometown of Truro, Nova Scotia, where, uh, uh, what should be in normal circumstances, uh, a Tory seat.
00:50:03.000Uh, but they had a good candidate there, a former provincial, uh, MLA, uh, Lenore Zahn, and Trudeau had gone in to try to get her over the finish line.
00:50:11.880And she told me, and several other people who were at the rally told me that he seemed a little bit extra frenetic, extra energetic, uh, and a bit weird, almost like really hyper.
00:50:22.820And that appears to be because before the rally, as best as I can figure out the timeline, Ottawa had had the call from time magazine and they knew that a bucket of effluent was going to fall on their heads that day.
00:50:40.200And, um, you know, I, I often thought if, if I was in his shoes and they said, well, the blackface pictures are coming out.
00:50:47.200I'd say, well, let's cancel the rally and let's get some rum.
00:50:52.160Like, you know, good idea why you don't want to be in politics.
00:50:57.940Um, so he went, uh, in there and he did it.
00:51:01.740And then the story breaks, he did the rally story breaks and they're all on the bus.
00:51:06.280They take the bus from Truro to Halifax airport and, and the reporters are all freaking out and they're all in trouble with their desks because time magazine broke it.
00:51:16.000And, you know, they all they're, so it's a frantic and unpleasant kind of moment.
00:51:22.740And then there's a scrum and he's apologizing and give him credit.
00:51:27.200He, he, not once in that whole thing, did he try to say, well, come on, I was dressed up.
00:51:49.880The whole thing was kind of ugly and unpleasant.
00:51:56.540And there followed about 24 hours, maybe less than 24 hours, where liberals, a bunch of liberals, including a bunch of black liberals, did a gut check.
00:52:08.960And, uh, there was a generational divide in some cases that older black liberals were kind of found it easier to say, well, he was a foolish young fella.
00:52:21.540And I know racism and that isn't what it looks like.