Common Ground

by Justin Trudeau

  My goal was simply to get the House of Commons to take note of the importance of youth service. I had seen in my time of advocating for Katimavik how difficult it was to get parliamentarians to understand just how empowering youth service could be, not just for young people themselves but for organizations and entire communities across our country. I didn’t want to score points, I didn’t want to embarrass the other parties; I simply wanted to get a study done on youth volunteerism and how the government might encourage it through a framework for a national youth service. So I introduced M-299, a motion for the creation of a national policy for youth volunteer service.

  When it was soundly defeated by the Conservative Party and the Bloc Québécois, I understood first-hand the catch-22 faced by anyone in politics advocating for youth issues. Young people don’t think that politicians care about their issues, so won’t be particularly outraged when politicians vote against them. And since young people don’t usually vote in large numbers, politicians don’t care to invest any time or energy in issues that matter to them. Which provides further incentive for youth to disengage politically. The cycle is self-perpetuating. It would take a personal commitment of political leadership to break it.

  The whole experience hardened my resolve to speak loudly and clearly for young people across the country. I would make sure that at least one strong, vocal politician was fighting for youth in Canada.

  My committee work also taught me a lot about how parliamentary politics really work. A parliamentary committee is a group of MPs charged with examining legislation or conducting a study within a certain area. A proposed bill is voted on initially in the House of Commons and, if passed, sent to the relevant committee for study. Members from all parties examine it, hear from experts, witnesses, and interested parties, propose amendments and improvements, and send it back to the House for a final vote.

  At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. In my experience, what witnesses say, or experts recommend, or opposition members propose all matters far less than the optics and the politics that surround a particular issue. In my first years I was on the environment committee, and later I served on citizenship and immigration. On the former, all the government cared about was looking as if it cared about the environment, while doing the absolute minimum it could get away with. On the latter, it felt it had all the answers already, and anyone who disagreed with or corrected it must be a rabid opposition partisan.

  I remember asking probing questions of witnesses, engaging in detailed discussions of various measures or recommendations, and regularly challenging—quite successfully, I felt—the Conservatives’ smug assertions about their record of environmental stewardship. After a few exchanges in particular, I felt that surely I had made a modest but significant contribution either to improving the way the government would act or at least to drawing attention to the way it shamefully neglected to concern itself with the well-being of the land that sustains us all. But the truth is that, these days, most of the proceedings in committees are sword-strokes in a pond, creating only small ripples that disappear quickly.

  Early in my first term as an MP, Canada’s political landscape changed dramatically. Within six weeks of the October 2008 election, the opposition parties signalled their intention to bring down the minority Conservative government with a non-confidence vote on the government’s grossly inadequate budget update. With that done we would establish a coalition government made up of Liberals with 77 seats and the New Democratic Party with their 37 seats. The Bloc Québécois agreed to support the coalition on confidence votes. But before we could take this action, the prime minister asked Governor General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament until January 2009, effectively cutting off the non-confidence vote.

  In theory, the proposed coalition could have survived well into the new year. In practice, it fell apart almost immediately.

  In our parliamentary system, the government is formed by whatever party or parties can gain and maintain the confidence of the House of Commons. Citizens put people in the House of Commons with their votes, and the House decides who wields power. In a majority government, one party has more than half the seats, and so becomes the government and wins all votes. But in a minority situation, no party commands the House on its own, and therefore the government is usually formed by the party with the most seats, which will then need the support of others to win votes and govern. The minority Conservatives lost that support, and the other parties were ready to come together to form a government that would have the support of a majority of the MPs in the House. This was perfectly legitimate in theory, but in practice, legitimacy also requires public support.

  The Conservatives were fighting for their political survival, and they used their powerful communications machine to erode that public support, in two ways. First, they blatantly misrepresented the way in which parliamentary government actually works and what is acceptable practice within it. It was easy—and convincing—to say, “Stephen Harper won the election and now the losers want to take over the government.” It was hard to counter this argument with a description of how government legitimacy is granted by the House of Commons. A sound bite beats a civics lesson every day of the week.

  Second, they emphasized the fact that the coalition would require the support of the sovereigntists to govern. Never mind that the Conservative Party itself, in minority government and in opposition, solicited and relied upon the Bloc’s support to win certain votes. Now, when it suited them, they played up the easy line that “sovereigntists would control Canada.” Prime Minister Harper even stated in the House that there had been no Canadian flags at the coalition signing ceremony, which was verifiably untrue.

  But in politics, perception often trumps reality. We just weren’t doing very well in getting out our message. The pivotal example of that came at the height of the crisis, shortly after Mr. Harper appeared on television to make his case to the public. Stéphane Dion’s response to Mr. Harper’s speech was supposed to air immediately afterwards, but his team could not meet the networks’ deadlines. And when the final product made it to air later that evening, Dion’s rebuttal appeared as a blurry, unprofessional mess that looked and sounded as though it had been recorded on a cheap cell phone. It wasn’t any one person’s fault, but Mr. Dion, being the party leader, was blamed. So the die was cast, and when the governor general granted Mr. Harper’s request for prorogation the next day, it was game over.

  The message to me and other Liberals that evening was clear. It would not be enough for us to be a party of values and ideas. We had to communicate those values and ideas with professionalism and rigour.

  Stéphane Dion announced his resignation as party leader four days later, which triggered yet another leadership convention, this one scheduled for May 2009 in Vancouver, with Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Dominic LeBlanc interested in the position. Some people had suggested that I might stand for the leadership, but there was never any intention on my part to pursue that idea. In fact, I was so uninterested in leadership squabbles that early on I assumed the neutral role of convention co-chair. Backroom manoeuvring quickly led to Dom and Bob dropping out of the race, which meant that Michael Ignatieff became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

  Mr. Ignatieff brought a familiar blend of qualities with him. Michael was a thoughtful, charismatic, well-travelled public intellectual prepared to adapt his philosophical sensibilities for the rough-and-tumble world of politics. This profile reminded many of my father. In fact, you could make a persuasive argument that Michael had been much more accomplished before entering politics. So why did one become a very successful prime minister while the other led the Liberals to significant defeat?

  Michael’s lack of intuitive feel for Canadian politics—perhaps a product of his many years living outside the country—left him vulnerable. More to the point, his timing couldn’t have been worse. He returned to Canada to lead the Liberal Party at perhaps its weak
est moment since before Laurier’s leadership in the early 1900s, and he faced opponents in the Harper Conservatives who had mastered the art of exploiting such weakness with the nastiest, most negative attack ads ever seen in Canada. When the Tories pounced on Michael, the attacks proved effective, partly because Liberals then lacked the modern fundraising abilities that would have allowed us to respond with an equal volume of retaliatory messages.

  But primarily, it was because the Liberal Party had lost touch with Canadians and we had been too busy infighting to notice. We paid the price.

  That said, no Liberal could have predicted just how badly we would fare in the May 2011 election. When the last ballots were counted, we were reduced to just 34 seats in the House. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives finally gained their majority with 166, and the 103 seats won by Jack Layton’s surging NDP knocked us to third-party status.

  I was re-elected in Papineau, but election night with staff and volunteers was nonetheless funereal. We Liberals had suffered our worst defeat in the party’s 144-year history. I remember thinking that it had been a long time coming and was a product of many serious errors. In a sense, I wasn’t really all that surprised. I had felt in my bones that the party’s connection to the country had grown perilously weak, and that this was the inevitable conclusion of a long period of disconnection and decline.

  On election night, some observers seriously questioned whether the party would survive. It was not an overstatement. In just seven years we had gone from governing with a strong majority government to being in distant third place. Our leader lost his seat, and Liberals all over Canada grimly pondered the future.

  Chapter Eight

  The Path to Leadership

  The day after the 2011 election, the survival of the Liberal Party of Canada was much more on my mind than whether I would ever lead it. There’s no way to sugar-coat it: we got trounced. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as what happened to the Progressive Conservatives in 1993, when they went from a comfortable majority to just two seats, but it was close.

  In fact, in some ways it was worse. The PCs suffered a sudden and calamitous shock to their system; what happened to the Liberal Party was more like the proverbial boiling frog. Starting in the comfortable water of a majority government after the 2000 election with 172 seats, the party was reduced to a 135-seat minority in ’04 before being sent to the opposition bench with 103 seats in ’06. We then won just 77 seats in ’08, my first election. Seen in this light, we couldn’t write off 2011’s 34-seat result as an anomaly or some sort of freak accident. It continued a long-term trend that saw the Liberal Party steadily lose almost half of its voters over the course of a single decade. I became convinced that unless something fundamental changed, our story would end just like the frog’s.

  Everybody had a theory about how the 2011 debacle happened. Some blamed the Conservatives’ negative attack ads; others pointed fingers at their aggressive organizational and fundraising efforts; many were convinced it was the result of Michael Ignatieff’s leadership. I think all these theories are too simple, and wrong. The truth was—as it often is—a lot more painful and difficult to face: Canadians gave the Liberal Party the drubbing it had earned. I know that is hard to hear for many Liberals, even now. But it is essential to remember.

  Over the course of a decade in power, facing a divided opposition, the party had become focused on itself rather than on the Canadians who supported it, elected it, and had faith in it. The notion that we were Canada’s natural governing party was axiomatic to many Liberals, but for me it captured perfectly everything that had gone wrong. It got to the point where it was commonplace for one Liberal or another to utter, as an article of faith, the tired old line: “The Liberal Party created Canada.” As I would say when I launched my leadership campaign seventeen months later, the Liberal Party didn’t create Canada; Canada created the Liberal Party.

  Like too many successful organizations, the party took that success for granted and began to see it as part of the natural order of things. It forgot how it had become successful in the first place. The Liberal Party did well in the twentieth century because it was deeply connected to Canadians, in communities large and small, all across the country. It became the platform for their ideas, their hopes, and their dreams for their country. Gradually, we lost that connection. It probably started during my own father’s leadership; he (to be charitable) perhaps spent less time nurturing the grassroots of the party than he might have. It culminated in the last decade when, in opposition to a minority Conservative government, too many people thought we were just one or two adjustments away from being returned to power. These were all fundamental errors. But no matter; there is little point in assigning blame. The point is that our 2011 reckoning wasn’t preordained. We brought it on ourselves. In the breakup between the Canadian people and the Liberal Party, the issue was with the party, not the people.

  The real question I had on my mind in that spring was, Now that we’ve hit rock bottom, does my party get it?

  As one of the best-known Liberal survivors—it’s hard to use the term winner in the context of 2011—it was my responsibility to appear in the media during the rueful aftermath. I knew that I’d be asked whether I would seek the leadership of the party. I had no intention of doing so, and was concerned that any ambiguity on that question might trigger another round of the negative dynamic where some Liberals deluded themselves into thinking there’s a shortcut back to popularity and power. My message in those interviews was extremely blunt. I said that one thing and one thing only would get us out of the hole we had dug for ourselves: hard work. I believed then—as I do now—that Canadians would judge us both by whether they felt we really got the message they had sent us, and by whether we consistently showed them the disciplined work ethic required to earn back their trust.

  Like the bell that saves a staggering boxer, summer came mercifully soon after the 2011 election post-mortems. I spent most of that summer with Sophie and the kids. We went out to B.C. to recharge our batteries with family and friends. Xavier and Ella-Grace got to explore our spectacular West Coast beaches. We put the election behind us and spent a lot of time talking about our future.

  That summer was a season of reflection in other ways as well. I was in my fortieth year, and wanted to commemorate it with a permanent, personal testament of sorts. When I was very young (just five or six years old), my father took us with him to Haida Gwaii, on the Pacific coast. The Haida people have lived in that truly special place, among the most beautiful on earth, for millennia. They measure their culture’s history on this land on a time scale that is all but incomprehensible to Canadians who descended from settlers who came after European contact.

  In a ceremony honouring my father, the Haida also conferred upon my brothers and me a privilege reserved for very few, one we of course had done nothing to earn. They made us honorary Children of the Raven. It was a touching gesture of openness, goodwill, and friendship. So as I spent that summer with my own children on the West Coast, reflecting on my future and beset by reminders of just how fleeting and transitory our own lives can be, there was something comforting about the comparative permanence of the West Coast Native presence. I thought about that kindness shown to me some three and a half decades before, and repaid it with a very modern gesture: a Haida raven tattoo, based on a Robert Davidson design, on my left shoulder. It wraps around the globe that I’d gotten years before.

  I am not telling you this story to romanticize First Nations. I have spent too much time in too many remote reserve communities to be anything but clear-eyed about the challenges many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people face. My gesture was as much about the future as it was about that past event. It is a reminder of a fundamental fact of Canadian life: we have failed to achieve a respectful, functioning relationship with First Nations. This is one of Canada’s greatest unresolved questions.

  In fact, I would go further than that. The predi
cament of First Nations, and our willingness as non-Aboriginals to abide the abject poverty and injustice that afflict so many, is a great moral stain on Canada. To take perhaps the most poignant example of our unwillingness to face these challenges head-on, there are more than 1,100 missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. The government refuses to call an inquiry into the issue, and that is shameful.

  That said, what troubles me most about the government’s response is that the Conservatives clearly feel they exist in a political environment that will not punish them for their inaction. Nor is this simply a point about Mr. Harper. With the notable exception of Paul Martin, who through the Kelowna Accord created a framework and principles to tackle so many of these problems together, significant progress has eluded most of our prime ministers.

  What progress has been made has largely come through the courts, as First Nations people litigate the Charter and other constitutional means of protecting their rights. This has to change. Canada’s relationship with first peoples is definitional when it comes to our national character and is currently a practical obstacle holding our country back. The courts are telling us what we ought to have always known: First Nations communities across Canada have a right to a fair and real chance at success. They cannot be an afterthought as we develop the resources on their land.

  We were on Vancouver Island when we got the tragic news that Jack Layton had died. It was impossible not to like Jack. Even though we were political opponents, I also couldn’t help but admire what he had achieved in my home province of Quebec. For many observers, the Orange Wave was an overnight success, but like all such things it was years in the making. From the beginning of his leadership, Mr. Layton had made achieving a breakthrough in Quebec one of his very highest priorities. I’m sure there were many within his own closest circle who thought it was a stretch at best, but he stuck to it. He was dogged and disciplined about it; he chipped away at it over a long time until he got his opportunity. When it came, he was ready. This was one of many important lessons to be learned from his success. The fact that he was cut down by cancer so shortly after achieving that success added poignancy to the tragedy of his death. We chatted only a few times, but like almost everyone he met, I was always touched by his grace and friendliness.