The Prince: The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau - Softcover

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Stephen Maher has been writing about Canadian politics since 1989. As a columnist and investigative reporter for Postmedia News, iPolitics, and Maclean’s, he has often set the agenda on Parliament Hill, covering political corruption, electoral wrongdoing, misinformation, and human rights abuses. He has also won many awards, including the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism, the National Newspaper Award, two Canadian Association of Journalism Awards, a Canadian Hillman Prize, and has been nominated for several National Magazine Awards.

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Chapter 1: Fighter

1 FIGHTER

I didn’t fully understand the Justin Trudeau phenomenon when I arrived in the Montreal riding of Papineau on October 2, 2012, to cover the launch of his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada for the National Post.

I knew Trudeau was a celebrity who attracted attention wherever he went, but I was skeptical about his political future. It was hard to take him entirely seriously in those days. He had great hair, a famous name, and a friendly, open way with people, but he had no particular accomplishments for the job. He made jokes that weren’t funny, and when he talked about policy he often seemed like a poser, with convictions based on his own inclinations rather than a deep understanding of the issues. He looked like a charismatic lightweight, one of those characters who show up on the Hill, strut and fret for a season or two, and then wander off to a less demanding career. Politics, Max Weber wrote, is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Trudeau didn’t look like a slow borer of hard boards, unlike the other men he would face in Parliament if he won the leadership.

Stephen Harper, the incumbent Conservative prime minister, was an economist who had engineered the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives. Through patience, ruthlessness, and guile, he had won three elections in a row—two minorities, in 2006 and 2008, and finally a majority in 2011. By the autumn of 2012, his government was fading in the polls, but he was serious. So was his chief tormentor, New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair, a lawyer and former Quebec Liberal Cabinet minister who had been elected leader after the death of the popular Jack Layton. The interim leader of the Liberals, lawyer Bob Rae, the former NDP premier of Ontario and a talented off-the-cuff speaker with a deep understanding of Canadian politics, was of similar stature.

Trudeau, in contrast, was a former high-school teacher. He had never served as a minister and had made little impression in his four years sitting on the backbench amid the third party in the House of Commons. But there was more to him than his weak resumé. He was famous. In a Parliament of drudges, full of former mayors, car dealers, and immigration lawyers, Trudeau stood out like a red rose on a grey suit lapel. He was young and handsome. He wore flip-flops and skateboarded to the Hill. When he entered a room, people said, “Hey! There’s Justin!”

I first met him in Darcy McGee’s, an Irish pub on the corner of Sparks and Elgin Streets, before he was elected to Parliament in 2008. I was then Ottawa bureau chief for the Halifax Chronicle Herald and often went to Darcy’s, a gathering place for political staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Trudeau, who was known only as the flamboyant son of our former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, came in with his friend Gerry Butts, a hulking, bearded Cape Bretoner. I knew Trudeau was a quasi celebrity, and already there was speculation that he might one day run for office. A network of highly placed people associated with Trudeau père were rumoured to be waiting for the day when another Trudeau was ready to seek office.

I struck up a conversation with Justin and, at some point, mentioned his father in passing. “That’s weird,” I said. “I just realized I’m talking about your dad.”

He looked at me, squaring his shoulders. “Oh,” he said, “I never forget I’m a Trudeau.” He looked confident, poised, his eyes fixed. Huh, I thought. He’s like a prince.

Over the next couple of years, I had a few beers with him. He was friendly and chatty and, without making the slightest effort, was always the centre of attention. Almost everyone found it exciting to be around him. He has been famous since birth, the first child of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the beautiful Margaret Sinclair. That was the X factor that made his candidacy remotely plausible, that made him a wild card entering the deck on that October day in 2012 when he took the stage in Papineau.

The speech he gave that night in Papineau did little to explain why he wanted to lead the party or why the party should lead the country. He praised Canada, the Liberal Party, progress, national unity, diversity, the environment, youth, and First Nations, and promised to work for the middle class. In the Globe and Mail, Daniel Leblanc described the speech as laying out an “ambitious but vague agenda.” The only substantial point was his personal relationship to Canadians. “Think about it for a moment: when was the last time you had a leader you actually trusted? And not just the nebulous ‘trust to govern competently’ but… the way you trust a friend to pick up your kids from school, or a neighbour to keep your extra front door key? That’s a respect that has to be earned, step by step.” Trudeau argued that Canadians knew him. “I feel so privileged to have had the relationship I’ve had, all my life, with this country, with its land, and with its people,” he said. “We’ve travelled many miles together, my friends. You have always been there for me.”

Later I spoke with Butts, expressing mild skepticism about Trudeau. He laughed and assured me Trudeau’s name recognition was likely “the highest for a leadership candidate in the history of the country.” What I didn’t know, but he did, was that Canadians wanted Trudeau to be prime minister. “The positive vibe that people have about him shows they’re not satisfied with what they have in leadership and they’re hoping for something more. In that sense, it has nothing to do with him and his personal attributes other than a kind of positive feeling they attribute to him. And our job, and his job, is to work our collective arses off to show people that he can be about something more.”

Butts had already been working his arse off on the project. “The Trudeau organization starts with one person, Gerald Butts,” says David Herle, a pollster and strategist Butts had recruited to the cause. Another insider called Butts the “mastermind” behind it all: “The thing that impressed me most about him was just his Rolodex. I’ve literally never seen anybody who was so good at accumulating friends and contacts, internationally, across the country, in this town, wherever. There’s just one guy. He’s got some kind of supernatural skill, finding powerful people and getting close with them.”

“Gerry is my best friend,” Trudeau told Leblanc in 2013. “He and I have been talking about the possibility and the potential of politics all my life.”

Butts is the son of a coal miner and a nurse from Glace Bay, a gritty working-class town near Sydney, Nova Scotia. When he was eight, the coal mine blew up, killing ten men and throwing everyone else out of work. The steel industry in nearby Sydney was slowly dying, and the moratorium on cod fishing was undercutting the fish-processing industry. There were too many people and not enough jobs. Politically, the area has always been left wing, influenced by the Antigonish Movement—a Catholic social justice movement that encouraged poor workers to organize co-operatives and credit unions. It was a place of strident unionism, patronage politics, hard drinking, Export A cigarettes, Celtic music, and working-class solidarity. Rather...