It’s Trudeau’s Canada, once again: Justin Trudeau makes his mark

He’s upbeat and friendly, but don’t be fooled: the new PM knows how to fight.

Federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau speaks to supporters during a campaign stop in Toronto on Monday, August 17, 2015. (Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

Tuesday, November 10, six days after Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada, I am shown into his office on the third floor of the parliament building in Ottawa. A dark oak-panelled room, it contains a jumble of out-size furniture chosen by the previous occupant, Stephen Harper, whose Conservative Party was in power for a decade.

Trudeau’s father, Pierre, occupied the office for 16 years during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and the new Prime Minister will soon install his father’s old desk, a symbol of restoration but also an emphatic rejection of his predecessor.

“We’re going to move this place around,” Trudeau says. “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 we can sit down and actually have discussions. I’ll put a reclining seat over there, for me to read.”

There is virtually no transition period in Canadian politics, and it is clear that the electoral win on October 19 caught Trudeau, his staff and the country by surprise.

Trudeau, who is 43, is still working on getting his staff to call him “Prime Minister”. For years, he was “Justin,” and staff members often still refer to him that way.

In person, Trudeau is as upbeat and friendly as might be expected of a politician with a campaign mantra of “Sunny Ways”, a reference to the optimistic adage of Wilfrid Laurier, a Liberal prime minister at the turn of the 20th century.

Trudeau is 188cm tall and has an athletic build, his hair neatly trimmed after years experimenting with shaggy manes.

This is the first print interview he has granted since taking office, and in his presence there is a palpable sense he is still figuring out exactly how to play this new role. Despite his studied manner, he is prone to providing glimpses of his unguarded self.

“It’s very, very cool to have the President call up, and I say, ‘Hello, Mr President.’ I’ve never met him,” Trudeau says. He drops his voice an octave to imitate President Barack Obama: “Justin, I like to think of myself as a young politician. The grey hair caught up with me, and it’ll catch up with you. But calling me ‘Sir’ makes me feel old. Call me ‘Barack’.” Trudeau shakes his head, amazed.

“That’s going to take some getting used to.” A week later, a new geopolitical relationship between the US and Canada will begin in a conference room in Manila at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit meeting, when Trudeau and Obama sit down for the first time to talk. In an age of Middle Eastern chaos and Russian belligerence, the US has no relationship more important than that with Canada.

The country is a crucial ally in global affairs — when the relationship is functional, as it hasn’t been in recent years. Harper’s hawkish foreign policy put him at odds with Obama on the Iran nuclear treaty, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Syrian refugees.

The 45-minute session in Manila is casual and friendly. In a private conversation, the president advises Trudeau to be active early, but also to think about calibrating sky-high expectations with a long-term plan for governance.

Obama shares his impressions of various world leaders, suggesting who to build relationships with, and who to steer clear of.

“It was nice to confirm in person how like-minded we are on so many issues,” Trudeau tells me. “He said that seeing my family on TV on election night reminded him of his election in 2008 with his family. I’m looking forward to having a beer with him.”

The election this northern autumn was nothing less than an existential struggle over what it means 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 belief that the world is not riven by an epic clash of civilisations, and that cultural and religious differences are Canada’s strength.

What the world knows as a progressive modern Canada was created largely under the rule of the Liberal leader Lester Pearson and then Pierre Trudeau in the 60s and 70s, when the country began to sever its ties with Britain and assert its own identity. Quintessential Canadian characteristics — universal medical care, bilingualism, multiculturalism, a strong voice for peace at the UN — were born during that era.

Defeating the son of Pierre Trudeau would have been a metaphysical vindication for Harper. For the past decade Harper did all he could to undo the legacy of the older Trudeau. In defence of “old stock” white Canada, Harper denigrated the UN, made the attire of Muslim women a political issue and recast Canada’s role in the world as part of a grand alliance to defend Western civilisation.

As a Canadian expat living in the US I became acutely aware of the election’s symbolic importance in September, when the body of a Syrian refugee boy washed up on the shores of Turkey. The child had relatives in Canada who tried to help the family immigrate, but Harper had maintained a hard line on Syrian refugees, claiming national security was more important than the humanitarian crisis, and the family was forced to try to escape the war by sea.

After the boy’s death, Harper’s government continued to inveigh against Muslim “jihadi” immigration in a way that struck me and many others as astoundingly un-Canadian.

Harper’s defeat at the hands of Pierre Trudeau’s son had obvious dramatic dimensions of the classical Greek variety, redeeming not just the family name but also Pierre’s view of the nation.

Virtually every Trudeau initiative, from tax policy to relations with China, seemed a rebuke to the previous administration. Even his simple act of answering questions from journalists in parliament’s press theatre took on myriad meanings.

Harper hadn’t held such a news conference in six 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 figure provokes stronger feelings in Canada than Pierre Trudeau. Depending on whom you ask, he was either the personification of a sophisticated and ambitious Canada or a socialist wastrel libertine.

Pierre’s father made a fortune in petrol stations, netting $1.2 million in 1932, which freed his son from the need to work — just as Justin never had to make a living.

As a young man, Pierre studied at Harvard and socialised with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris.

During his time as prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, the Montreal-born boulevardier was despised in western Canada for an energy policy that enriched the eastern provinces. He was also hated by separatists in Quebec, who saw him as a quisling for Anglo elitists.

Yet in many ways he was a visionary. At the time, Canada’s Constitution could be changed only with the approval of the British Parliament, a colonial vestige.

In 1982, this provision was done away with, and Trudeau in effect became a Canadian founding father.

The younger Trudeau has a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia, but despite his pedigree, when he reached adulthood his life was remarkably unremarkable.

He travelled, and smoked marijuana and snowboarded, eventually ending up teaching high school in Vancouver.

Justin Trudeau’s lack of qualifications to be prime minister were obvious — but he considers himself to have undergone his own peculiar kind of schooling.

Trudeau points out that he has visited nearly 100 countries, many of them for international summit meetings with his father, which provided an intimate understanding of statecraft.

The death of Pierre Trudeau in 2000 marked the beginning of Justin Trudeau’s public life. As the eldest son, then 29, he was asked to give the final eulogy. The state funeral in Montreal for the older Trudeau remains one of the most significant events in Canadian television history, and Justin was the unquestioned star, delivering an emotional remembrance.

“Je t’aime, Papa,” he said, laying his head on the coffin in an iconic gesture of national grief.

Justin Trudeau entered politics eight years later, running for parliament in Papineau, a working-class, multiethnic district in Montreal. Trudeau distinguished himself with hard work and an appetite for retail politics.

When he won that year, in an upset, it was news — but of the celebrity and nostalgia variety.

The younger Trudeau’s road to victory as 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. The sensible way forward seemed to be a merger with the larger New Democratic Party.

Aiming to change the political dynamic, Trudeau literally picked a fight. He challenged a 37-year-old Conservative senator named Patrick Brazeau, known as Brass Knuckles, to three rounds of boxing to raise money for cancer research.

Everyone expected Trudeau to receive a royal beating. Brazeau’s bar brawler’s physique, tattoos and trash-talking bravado made him the three-to-one favourite.

That Saturday evening, the country tuned in to a conservative news channel to see Trudeau — “the shiny pony,” according to the right-wing political commentator who was calling the fight — stunned by roundhouse rights from Brazeau. But then something unexpected happened: Trudeau found his feet and worked his jab.

Brazeau’s face alternated among outrage, fear and confusion as Trudeau beat him senseless. The bout was stopped in the third round, saving Brazeau the indignity of hitting the canvas.

The commentator recognised the importance of the victory. “I can hear it already,” he sighed. “Trudeau for leader.”

Slipping through the streets of Ottawa on November 10, six days after his swearing-in, I sit with Trudeau in a motorcade. We are headed to an arena packed with 16,000 youths gathered to celebrate a non-profit called Free the Children.

I ask the Prime Minister if the fight with Brazeau was part of a larger plan — a piece of agitprop aimed at turning around his political fortunes, and with them the nation’s. Trudeau gazes out of the window for a moment, contemplating, then turns to me and offers a clipped nod and a sly smile. “I saw it that way a little bit,” he say. “The fight was going to be a way of highlighting and surprising people with what I am. It wasn’t about proving anything to myself — other than perhaps as a reminder that I’m very good at sticking to and executing a plan.

“But it was a way of pointing out to people that you shouldn’t underestimate me — which people have a tendency to do.”

Riding in a motorcade as he had as a boy, Trudeau chooses his words carefully.

“There was a perception that I’d grown up with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he says. “I’d boxed for 20 years on and off, so I knew that the worst-case scenario was that I was going to take a brutal beating but 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 still smoking while he was training. I was absolutely focused on my training. One thing people are starting to realise is that I work incredibly hard at everything I set my mind to.”

A year later the Liberal Party elected him leader, and two years after that, the country elected him Prime Minister.

As Trudeau 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, introducing a rigorous carbon-capture policy, legalising marijuana.

In the face of the Syrian refugee crisis, Trudeau has pledged to bring 25,000 civilians fleeing war to Canada by the end 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 process to ensure it is orderly and safe. (By January 1, 10,000 will be admitted.) But 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 democratic institutions in the age of terror.

Trudeau’s most radical argument is that Canada is becoming a new kind of state, defined not by its European history but by the multiplicity of its identities. His embrace of a pancultural heritage makes him an avatar of his father’s vision.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he claims. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post­-national state.”

Stepping out of the SUV, eager to plunge into the crowd, Trudeau seems like a man at the beginning of a very big, and very uncertain, journey. “I’m excited to be on the world stage,” he says, with peculiar Canadian understatement mixed with dynastic confidence.

“I think people are starting to see that I’m actually reasonably fit for this office.”

Guy Lawson is the author of Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners Became the Most Unlikely Gun Runners in History. A feature film based on the book will be released in August. Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine.