Cannadas Trudeu Inviting Radicals to Teach Them Art and Poetry
Characteristic
Trudeau's Canada, Once again
With back up from President Obama and the legacy of his father on his side, Justin Trudeau sets out to redefine what information technology ways to be Canadian.
Justin Trudeau Credit... Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times
On Tuesday, November. 10, vi days after Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, was sworn in equally prime minister of Canada, I was shown into his role on the third flooring of the Parliament building in Ottawa. A dark oak-paneled room, it contained a jumble of outsize furniture called by the previous occupant, Stephen Harper, whose Conservative Party was in power for a decade. The office had the air of a recently abased bunker — shelves bare, defunction drawn, personal effects hastily removed. Trudeau'due south father, Pierre, occupied the same part for xvi years during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, and the new prime minister would shortly install his male parent's one-time desk, a symbol of restoration simply too an emphatic rejection of his predecessor. The squat, bulldoglike bureau left by the departing prime number government minister, Trudeau implied, was a reflection of Harper's autocratic manner.
''We're going to motion this place around,'' Trudeau said. ''This is very much the last guy's style, not mine. I'll have a smaller desk in the corner and a bigger couch so nosotros can sit down and actually take discussions. I'll put a reclining seat over in that location, for me to read.'' He smiled as he mentally redecorated the space, the Canadian version of the Oval Office. ''It's a different approach.''
There is near no transition period in Canadian politics, and it was articulate that the electoral win on Oct. 19 had caught Trudeau, his staff and the land past surprise. During his outset days in function, his small, overworked campaign team tried to cope with the unexpected demands of governing. With and then many positions to fill, they had issued a call for résumés on social media and received 22,000.
Trudeau, who is 43, was notwithstanding working on getting his staff to call him ''Prime Minister.'' For years, he was ''Justin,'' and staff members ofttimes still referred to him that way. ''Information technology's similar your actually smart friend suddenly became prime government minister,'' Kate Purchase, his communications director, told me.
''People in the street will either call me 'Prime number Minister' or 'Justin,' '' Trudeau said. ''Nosotros'll see how that goes. But when I'yard working, when I'g with my staff in public, I'm 'Prime Minister.' I say that if we're drinking beer out of a canteen, and you can see my tattoos, yous should be comfortable calling me 'Justin.' ''
In person, Trudeau was as upbeat and friendly — every bit nice — as might exist expected of a politician with a campaign mantra of ''Sunny Means,'' a reference to the optimistic adage of Wilfrid Laurier, a Liberal prime minister at the plough of the 20th century. Trudeau is vi-foot-ii and has an athletic build, his hair neatly trimmed after years experimenting with a diverseness of shaggy manes. There was fiddling of the pomp of the powerful — merely an aide named Tommy, who brought him half a tuna sandwich and a cup of chicken-noodle soup for lunch from the cafeteria downstairs. This was the first impress interview Trudeau had granted since taking function, and in his presence at that place was a palpable sense that he was still figuring out exactly how to play this new role — how to talk, how to gesture, how to adopt the mien of a world leader. Despite his studied manner, he was decumbent to providing glimpses of his unguarded self.
''It's very, very cool to have the president phone call upwardly, and I say, 'Hello, Mr. President.' I've never met him,'' Trudeau said. He dropped his voice an octave to imitate President Obama: ''Justin, I like to think of myself as a immature politician. The gray hair caught up with me, and it'll catch upwardly with you lot. But calling me 'Sir' makes me feel erstwhile. Call me 'Barack.' ''
Trudeau shook his caput, amazed. ''That's going to take some getting used to.''
One week subsequently, a new geopolitical relationship between America and Canada would brainstorm in a conference room in Manila at the Asia-Pacific Economical Cooperation superlative coming together, when Trudeau and Obama sat down for the first time to talk. In an age of a rising China, Centre Eastern chaos and Russian belligerence, it may sound strange to say, only the United States has no relationship more than of import than the one with Canada. The country is one of America'southward largest trading partners (on par with China), a peaceful neighbor and a crucial ally in global affairs — when the relationship is functional, equally it hasn't been in recent years. Harper's hawkish foreign policy put him at odds with Obama on the Islamic republic of iran nuclear treaty, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Syrian refugees. In domestic diplomacy, Harper was strongly in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Obama resisted; the president killed the project two weeks after the Conservatives lost. The discord may largely have ended with Trudeau's ballot, though Canada will be less probable to participate in airstrikes confronting ISIS in the Middle East.
The 45-minute session in Manila was casual and friendly; 2 of Obama'south campaign aides worked for Trudeau'due south entrada, and the president followed the Canadian race and knew of the excitement the victory had generated effectually the world — much as his own triumph had in 2008.
In a private chat, the president advised Trudeau to be active early on, simply also to remember about calibrating heaven-loftier expectations with a long-term plan for governance. Obama shared his impressions of various globe leaders, suggesting whom to build relationships with — and whom to steer clear of. Obama issued an invitation to Washington, and later to a state dinner to be held in the new year, the first honoring a Canadian prime minister in nineteen years. The president went out of his way to make clear that he looked forward to spending personal time together, with their wives. ''There was an air of mentorship just not in a paternalistic way,'' Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said. ''Trudeau'southward going to be on the stage for a long fourth dimension. He's got a ton of talent.''
''Information technology was nice to ostend in person how like-minded we are on so many issues,'' Trudeau told me. ''He said that seeing my family on TV on election night reminded him of his election in 2008 with his family unit. I'chiliad looking frontward to having a beer with him.''
The election this fall was zippo less than an existential struggle over what it ways to be Canadian. On one side, there was Harper's vision of a nation in an age of terror, in a world afire with conflict. On the other was Trudeau's moderate liberal conventionalities that the world is not riven by an epic clash of civilizations, and that cultural and religious and linguistic differences and openness are Canada'southward strength.
What the world knows as a progressive modern Canada was created largely under the rule of the Liberal leader Lester Pearson and and so Pierre Trudeau in the '60s and '70s, when the country began to sever its ties with United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and assert its own identity. The country created a new flag, replacing the Union Jack with the Maple Leaf, and adopted a national anthem. Quintessential Canadian characteristics — universal medical care, bilingualism, multiculturalism, a strong vocalization for peace and evolution at the United Nations — were born during that era. The primeval major political initiative of Pierre Trudeau in the late '60s was to decriminalize homosexuality. ''The country has no concern in the bedrooms of the nation,'' he said. In rapid succession, Trudeau legalized abortion, funded the arts and promoted a race-blind immigration policy, which over fourth dimension would transform the great cities of the land into polyglot metropolises.
Defeating the son of Pierre Trudeau would have been a metaphysical vindication for Harper. For the by decade, Harper did all he could to disengage the legacy of the older Trudeau, internationally, domestically and symbolically. In defense of ''old stock'' white Canada, Harper denigrated the United nations, made the modest attire of Muslim women a political issue and recast Canada'south role in the world as part of a grand brotherhood to defend Western culture. Harper freely admitted to loathing the older Trudeau, despite an adolescent fascination, writing ungraciously after his expiry in 2000 about coming together him for the first fourth dimension in the streets of Montreal. ''There I came face up to face with a living fable, someone who had provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion, all in the course of a tired-out, little old man.'' Harper's greatest ambition was to destroy Trudeau's vision of the country: ''He continues to define the myths that guide the Canadian psyche, but myths they are.''
Pierre Trudeau at a party in Hull, Quebec, in 1968, the year he was start elected the leader of the Liberal Party.
Credit... Bettman/Corbis-
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Pierre Trudeau at a party in Hull, Quebec, in 1968, the year he was first elected the leader of the Liberal Party.
Credit... Bettman/Corbis
Equally a Canadian expat living in America, I became acutely aware of the election's symbolic importance in September, when the torso of a little Syrian refugee boy washed up on the shores of Turkey. The child had relations in Canada who tried to help the family immigrate, but Harper had maintained a hard line on Syrian refugees, challenge national security was more important than the humanitarian crisis, and the family unit was forced to try to escape the war by sea. Later on the male child's death, Harper'south government continued to inveigh against Muslim ''jihadi'' immigration in a way that struck me and many others as astoundingly un-Canadian, at least in a historical sense. But the nation'southward self-image was precisely what the Conservatives were determined to remake.
For a decade, Harper remained in office through a mix of aesthetic politics, successful economic management and falling offense rates — also equally inept opposition. During that era'due south elections, the more progressive vote split between the Liberals and the New Democrats, a party to the left of the Liberals, allowing Harper to retain the prime ministry building. During nearly of the contempo campaign, Trudeau'south Liberal Party was running third behind the Bourgeois Party and the New Democratic Party. But subsequently the death of the Syrian male child and Trudeau's strong performance in five contentious debates, voters began to abandon the New Democrats, coalescing around Trudeau in the promise of defeating the prime number minister.
''People decided to line upwardly behind whoever was going to beat out Stephen Harper,'' Trudeau told me. ''I was of the mind that even if there was uncertainty about my own personal power to run the economic system, at that place was the feeling that the party had a squad and history that meant nosotros'd get the compromises and balances y'all have to make. So I could take much bigger risks to challenge the orthodoxy.''
While campaigning, Harper portrayed Trudeau every bit the feckless, high-taxing son of the old prime minister, a novice whose surname was his sole qualification for high office. I of many areas of confrontation during televised debates was a police force Harper proposed that would have allowed the government to revoke citizenship for Canadians with dual nationality if they were found guilty of terrorism — in effect making Canadians born in some other land a separate class of citizen.
''Why would we not revoke the citizenship of people convicted of terrorist offenses against this state?'' Harper asked Trudeau incredulously.
''A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian,'' Trudeau replied defiantly. ''And you devalue the citizenship of every Canadian in this place and in this country when you intermission down and go far conditional for anyone.''
Conservatives countered that Trudeau was naïve, rejecting Canada's role in the state of war on terror and instead emphasizing soft-minded issues like global warming. ''The focus on climate change every bit the 'top threat,' while important, is also lawmaking for isolationism and an unwillingness to bargain with the Islamic State and terrorism in general,'' said Christopher Alexander, former minister for citizenship and immigration in the Harper government. Alexander remains convinced the country has made a large, potentially tragic mistake in electing Trudeau. ''In that location was a stiff thread of nostalgia in the Liberal campaign for a simpler fourth dimension, for a more peaceful globe and the nostrums of Trudeau'south begetter when Canada didn't have to deal with global terror threats,'' he said.
Harper'due south defeat at the hands of Pierre Trudeau'southward son had obvious dramatic dimensions of the classical Greek variety, redeeming non just the family name only besides Pierre's view of the nation. The younger Trudeau has appointed a cabinet from a wide sweep of ethnic groups and made a betoken of choosing equal numbers of men and women. Virtually every Trudeau initiative, from revenue enhancement policy to an embrace of the L.G.B.T.Q. customs to relations with China, seemed a rebuke to the previous administration. Government scientists, who had been finer prevented from talking to the press lest they contradict Harper's skeptical view of climate alter, now shared their inquiry with reporters in tones of relieved anaesthesia. Even Trudeau'southward simple act of answering questions from journalists in Parliament's press theater — a infinite similar the White House's briefing room — took on myriad meanings. Harper hadn't held such a news briefing in half-dozen years.
''It's a whole new world,'' a reporter muttered as Trudeau approached the lectern. ''I don't know what to do with myself.''
No political effigy provokes stronger feelings in Canada than Pierre Trudeau. Depending on whom you enquire, he was either the personification of a sophisticated and aggressive Canada or a socialist wastrel libertine. Pierre'due south male parent made a fortune in gas stations, netting $1.2 million in 1932, which freed his son from the need to work — just every bit Justin never had to make a living. Equally a young homo, Pierre traveled to Africa and Asia, studied at Harvard and the London Schoolhouse of Economics and socialized with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.
During his fourth dimension equally prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and once more from 1980 to 1984, the Montreal-born boulevardier was despised in western Canada for an energy policy that enriched the eastern provinces. He was besides hated by separatists in Quebec, who saw him as a quisling for Anglo elitists. Yet in many means he was a visionary. At the time, Canada'due south Constitution could be inverse only with the approval of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's Parliament, a colonial vestige. In 1982, this provision was washed away with, and Trudeau in effect became a Canadian founding father. An intellectual who approached issues with an belittling and a creative mind, he fashioned a constitutional legal landscape midway betwixt America's rights-based rules and the unwritten and informal British approach.
Trudeau gave his son a front seat to history. When he was a boy, Justin met Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (who recited verses from the poem ''The Shooting of Dan McGrew''); Richard Nixon toasted the toddler in Ottawa, predicting he would become prime minister someday. But the younger Trudeau told me he never discussed the discipline with his father until the terminal twelvemonth of his life. ''He was much more than focused on having substantive conversations,'' Trudeau said. ''Politics didn't fit into that for him.''
The younger Trudeau has a bachelor'southward degree from McGill University and a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia, just despite his pedigree and inherited wealth, when he reached adulthood his life was remarkably unremarkable. He traveled the world and smoked marijuana and snowboarded and worked as a bouncer at bars, somewhen ending up educational activity loftier school in Vancouver.
Justin Trudeau's lack of qualifications to exist prime minister were obvious, as was his lack of his begetter's erudition — just he considers himself to have undergone his own peculiar kind of schooling. Trudeau points out that he has visited well-nigh 100 countries, many of them for international summit meetings with his father, which provided an intimate agreement of statecraft. Travel has also given him compassion for the less fortunate around the globe. In his memoir, ''Common Ground,'' Trudeau described a moment from a boyhood trip to Bangladesh, recollecting information technology in the kind of mawkish language his opponents ridicule but that is patently heartfelt. On state business with his father in Dhaka, the younger Trudeau saw a poor old man with a bicycle look patiently while their motorcade swept past. He was suddenly seized with empathy for the man, realizing that in that location were billions of people on world, each a unique individual, each with a story. ''I accept never looked at my life and my circumstances in quite the same way since,'' he wrote.
The drama of the Trudeau family has long played out in the Canadian imagination, much similar that of the Kennedys in America. Justin Trudeau's mother, Margaret, was 22 in 1971 when she married Pierre, then 51. He was the prime minister and a famous eligible bachelor; he was also a workaholic and a notorious skinflint. Later on giving nascence to three boys in quick succession, the beauty dubbed ''Maggie T.'' by the printing smoked marijuana while under the watch of Mounties, ate peyote before giving a speech in Venezuela and left her husband to political party at Studio 54 in New York. The Trudeaus eventually divorced. According to Margaret's own account, she had affairs with Teddy Kennedy, Ryan O'Neal and at least one Rolling Rock.
Despite the glamorous trappings, a central part of the Trudeau family story is rooted in tragedy, in the death of Justin's younger brother Michel at the historic period of 23, in an barrage on a backcountry ski trip in British Columbia in 1998. His expiry seemed to bear upon off a downward spiral in Pierre. A deeply religious man with a Jesuitical bandage of mind, he began to dubiety his faith. Michel's death was likewise devastating for Margaret, and Justin tended to her. Information technology was just later, after Margaret was committed to a mental institution, that she learned she had an undiagnosed case of bipolar disorder; she has turned the cause of mental health into her life'southward piece of work.
The death of Pierre Trudeau in 2000 marked the starting time of Justin Trudeau's public life. Equally the eldest son, then 29, he was asked to give the last eulogy for 1 of the towering figures in Canada'south history. The state funeral in Montreal for the older Trudeau remains ane of the about meaning events in Canadian television history, and Justin was the unquestioned star, delivering an emotional remembrance with the touch of a natural orator. ''Je t'aime, Papa,'' he said, laying his head on the coffin in an instantly iconic gesture of national grief.
Justin Trudeau entered politics viii years after, running for Parliament in Papineau, a working-class, multiethnic district in Montreal. Trudeau distinguished himself with hard work and an ambition for retail politics; Trudeau's male parent never loved pressing the flesh, merely his son's greatest talent might well be his mutual touch. When Trudeau won that twelvemonth, in an upset, it was news — but of the celebrity and nostalgia variety.
The younger Trudeau's road to victory every bit prime minister truly began on a Saturday night in 2012 in a boxing ring in Ottawa. At the time, the Liberal Party was leaderless and lost, after a devastating defeat in the election of 2011 reduced its seats in Parliament to only 34, roughly one-tenth of the total at the time. The sensible style frontward seemed to be a merger with the larger New Autonomous Party. Aiming to change the political dynamic, Trudeau literally picked a fight. In what looked like a publicity stunt, he challenged a 37-year-former Conservative senator named Patrick Brazeau, known as Brass Duke, to three rounds of battle to heighten coin for cancer research.
Everyone expected Trudeau to receive a purple beating, including his wife. Brazeau had a blackness chugalug in karate and a armed services background, and he grew up on hardscrabble First Nations reservations; his bar brawler'southward physique, tattoos and trash-talking blowing made him the three-to-one favorite by fight nighttime.
That Saturday evening, the country tuned in to a conservative news aqueduct to run across Trudeau — ''the shiny pony,'' according to the correct-fly political commentator who was calling the fight — stunned by roundhouse rights and haymaker lefts from Brazeau. Simply then something unexpected happened: Trudeau constitute his feet and worked his jab. The tough-guy senator was punched out, also tired to raise his arms. His face alternated amid outrage, fear and encarmine-nosed confusion every bit Trudeau beat him senseless. The bout was stopped in the third round, saving Brazeau the indignity of hitting the canvass.
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The commentator recognized the importance of the victory. ''I tin hear it already,'' he sighed. ''Trudeau for leader.''
Slipping through the streets of Ottawa on Nov. 10, six days subsequently his swearing-in, I sabbatum with Trudeau in a motorcade that was comically polite. His peloton of four blackness Due south.U.V.s stopped at lights, signaled respectfully, followed the speed limit and used no sirens or police escort. It was similar a skit satirizing Canadian manners. Nosotros were headed to an arena packed with 16,000 youths gathered to celebrate a nonprofit called Free the Children. In a nice chip of political stagecraft, Trudeau had appointed himself minister of youth, inverting the significance of a postal service more often than not seen as marginal.
I asked the prime government minister if the fight with Brass Knuckles Brazeau had been part of a larger plan — a piece of agitprop aimed at turning around his political fortunes, and with them the nation's. Trudeau gazed out the window for a moment, contemplating, then turned to me and offered a clipped nod and a sly smile. He knew perfectly well the power of symbols and had intended to exploit that power.
''I saw it that mode a picayune bit,'' he said, his vocalism betraying a distinct note of guile. ''The fight was going to be a way of highlighting and surprising people with what I am. Information technology wasn't about proving anything to myself — other than perhaps equally a reminder that I'g very proficient at sticking to and executing a plan. Only information technology was a mode of pointing out to people that y'all shouldn't underestimate me — which people take a tendency to exercise.''
Riding in a motorcade as he had as a boy, simply never as the center of attention, Trudeau chose his words carefully. ''There was a perception that I'd grown up with a silvery spoon in my mouth,'' he said. ''I'd boxed for 20 years on and off, so I knew that the worst-case scenario was that I was going to accept a barbarous beating simply stay standing until at least near the end. I was confident I could take a punch. I knew I had the stamina to last three rounds. People were saying that maybe he was nonetheless smoking while he was training. I was absolutely focused on my training. One affair people are starting to realize is that I work incredibly hard at everything I set my heed to.''
One year later, the Liberal Political party elected him leader, and two years after that, the country elected him prime minister. The scale of Trudeau's underdog victory was stunning: With a comfortable majority of 184 seats in Parliament, and Liberals in seats spread across the land, he won an undeniable national mandate. As he has managed the transition from campaigning to governing, he has presented an ambitious agenda: funding infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy, supporting programs to reduce childhood poverty, investigating the disappearance and murder of more than ane,000 Offset Nations women, introducing a rigorous carbon-capture policy, legalizing marijuana. The Canadian organization does not accept the same checks and balances among branches that the American organization does, so Trudeau can implement his policies without being stymied past correct-fly opposition.
As an example of his thinking, Trudeau noted his conclusion to heighten taxes on the pinnacle i percent of earners while lowering center-class taxes, even as his authorities funds infrastructure improvements. He knew that Canada would run a arrears, which was unusual for a country known for financial probity, only he believed it was the way forward. ''Confident countries are willing to invest in the future,'' Trudeau said, ''not always follow the bourgeois orthodoxy of counterbalanced budgets at all costs.''
In the confront of the Syrian refugee crisis, Trudeau had pledged to bring 25,000 civilians fleeing war to Canada by the finish of the year — a cry that rallied the nation in his honeymoon days. The shootings in Paris didn't change this policy, but he has decided to slow the procedure to ensure it is orderly and safe. (Past Jan. i, 10,000 will exist admitted.) Merely if the Paris or San Bernardino attacks had happened in Montreal or Winnipeg before the election, he may well have lost, an illustration of the fragility of autonomous institutions in the historic period of terror. Trudeau said he wants Canada to be gratuitous from the politics of fearfulness and segmentation.
''When a mosque was vandalized in a small rural community in Common cold Lake, Alberta — which is as conservative as you lot can imagine in Canada, with the stereotypes around that — the entire town came out the side by side solar day to scrub the graffiti off the walls and help them gear up the impairment,'' Trudeau told me. ''Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a claiming to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds. In France, in that location is still a typical citizen and an atypical denizen. Canada doesn't accept that dynamic.''
Terrorist groups have specifically said they are targeting Canada and Canadians. And on the subject field of national security, Trudeau's critics say he's a lightweight and a dangerous i. Trudeau's about radical argument is that Canada is becoming a new kind of country, defined non by its European history simply by the multiplicity of its identities from all over the globe. His embrace of a pan-cultural heritage makes him an avatar of his father's vision. ''There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,'' he claimed. ''There are shared values — openness, respect, pity, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the get-go postnational land.''
Stepping out of the S.U.Five., eager to plunge into the crowd, Trudeau seemed like a man at the beginning of a very big, and very uncertain, journeying. ''I'm excited to be on the globe stage,'' he said, with peculiar Canadian understatement mixed with dynastic conviction. ''I retrieve people are starting to see that I'one thousand really reasonably fit for this office.''
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/magazine/trudeaus-canada-again.html
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