Trudeau’s Canada, Again

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, six days after Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, was sworn in as prime minister of Canada, I was shown into his office on the third floor of the Parliament building in Ottawa. A dark oak-paneled room, it contained a jumble of outsize furniture chosen by the previous occupant, Stephen Harper, whose Conservative Party was in power for a decade. The office had the air of a recently abandoned bunker — shelves bare, curtains drawn, personal effects hastily removed. Trudeau’s father, Pierre, occupied the same office for 16 years during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and the new prime minister would shortly install his father’s old desk, a symbol of restoration but also an emphatic rejection of his predecessor. The squat, bulldoglike bureau left by the departing prime minister, Trudeau implied, was a reflection of Harper’s autocratic manner.

‘‘We’re going to move 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 we can sit down and actually have discussions. I’ll put a reclining seat over there, 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 virtually no transition period in Canadian politics, and it was clear that the electoral win on Oct. 19 had caught Trudeau, his staff and the country by surprise. During his first days in office, his small, overworked campaign team tried to cope with the unexpected demands of governing. With so many positions to fill, they had issued a call for résumés on social media and received 22,000.

Trudeau, who is 43, was still working on getting his staff to call him ‘‘Prime Minister.’’ For years, he was ‘‘Justin,’’ and staff members often still referred to him that way. ‘‘It’s like your really smart friend suddenly became prime minister,’’ Kate Purchase, his communications director, told me.

‘‘People in the street will either call me ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘Justin,’ ’’ Trudeau said. ‘‘We’ll see how that goes. But when I’m working, when I’m with my staff in public, I’m ‘Prime Minister.’ I say that if we’re drinking beer out of a bottle, and you can see my tattoos, you should be comfortable calling me ‘Justin.’ ’’

In person, Trudeau was as upbeat and friendly — as nice — 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 6-foot-2 and has an athletic build, his hair neatly trimmed after years experimenting with a variety of shaggy manes. There was little of the pomp of the powerful — just 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 print interview Trudeau had granted since taking office, and in his presence there 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 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 said. He dropped his voice an octave to imitate President Obama: ‘‘Justin, I like to think of myself as a young politician. The gray hair caught up with me, and it’ll catch up with you. But calling me ‘Sir’ makes me feel old. Call me ‘Barack.’ ’’

Trudeau shook his head, amazed. ‘‘That’s going to take some getting used to.’’

One week later, a new geopolitical relationship between America and Canada would begin in a conference room in Manila at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, when Trudeau and Obama sat down for the first time to talk. In an age of a rising China, Middle Eastern chaos and Russian belligerence, it may sound strange to say, but the United States has no relationship more important than the one with Canada. The country is one of America’s largest trading partners (on par with China), a peaceful neighbor and 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. In domestic affairs, 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 election, though Canada will be less likely to participate in airstrikes against ISIS in the Middle East.

The 45-minute session in Manila was casual and friendly; two of Obama’s campaign aides worked for Trudeau’s campaign, and the president followed the Canadian race and knew of the excitement the victory had generated around the world — much as his own triumph had in 2008.

In a private conversation, the president advised Trudeau to be active early, but also to think about calibrating sky-high expectations with a long-term plan for governance. Obama shared his impressions of various world 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 19 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 but not in a paternalistic way,’’ Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said. ‘‘Trudeau’s going to be on the stage for a long time. He’s got a ton of talent.’’

‘‘It was nice to confirm 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. I’m looking forward to having a beer with him.’’

The election this fall 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 civilizations, and that cultural and religious and linguistic differences and openness 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. 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 voice for peace and development at the United Nations — were born during that era. The earliest major political initiative of Pierre Trudeau in the late ’60s was to decriminalize homosexuality. ‘‘The state has no business 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 time would transform the great cities of the country into polyglot metropolises.

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, 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’s role in the world as part of a grand alliance to defend Western civilization. Harper freely admitted to loathing the older Trudeau, despite an adolescent fascination, writing ungraciously after his death in 2000 about meeting him for the first time in the streets of Montreal. ‘‘There I came face to face with a living legend, someone who had provoked both the loves and hatreds of my political passion, all in the form 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.’’

As a Canadian expat living in America, I became acutely aware of the election’s symbolic importance in September, when the body 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, 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, at least in a historical sense. But the nation’s self-image was precisely what the Conservatives were determined to remake.

For a decade, Harper remained in office through a mix of artful politics, successful economic management and falling crime rates — as well as inept opposition. During that era’s 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. During most of the recent campaign, Trudeau’s Liberal Party was running third behind the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party. But after the death of the Syrian boy and Trudeau’s strong performance in five contentious debates, voters began to abandon the New Democrats, coalescing around Trudeau in the hope of defeating the prime minister.

‘‘People decided to line up behind whoever was going to beat Stephen Harper,’’ Trudeau told me. ‘‘I was of the mind that even if there was uncertainty about my own personal ability to run the economy, there was the feeling that the party had a team and history that meant we’d get the compromises and balances you have to make. So I could take much bigger risks to challenge the orthodoxy.’’

While campaigning, Harper portrayed Trudeau as the feckless, high-taxing son of the former prime minister, a novice whose surname was his sole qualification for high office. One of many areas of confrontation during televised debates was a law 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 another country a separate class of citizen.

‘‘Why would we not revoke the citizenship of people convicted of terrorist offenses against this country?’’ 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 break down and make it conditional for anyone.’’

Conservatives countered that Trudeau was naïve, rejecting Canada’s role in the war on terror and instead emphasizing soft-minded issues like global warming. ‘‘The focus on climate change as the ‘top threat,’ while important, is also code for isolationism and an unwillingness to deal 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. ‘‘There was a strong thread of nostalgia in the Liberal campaign for a simpler time, for a more peaceful world and the nostrums of Trudeau’s father when Canada didn’t have to deal with global terror threats,’’ he said.

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. The younger Trudeau has appointed a cabinet from a wide sweep of ethnic groups and made a point of choosing equal numbers of men and women. Virtually every Trudeau initiative, from tax policy to an embrace of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to relations with China, seemed a rebuke to the previous administration. Government scientists, who had been effectively prevented from talking to the press lest they contradict Harper’s skeptical view of climate change, now shared their research with reporters in tones of relieved amazement. Even Trudeau’s simple act of answering questions from journalists in Parliament’s press theater — a space like the White House’s briefing room — 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 gas 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 traveled to Africa and Asia, studied at Harvard and the London School of Economics and socialized 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 Britain’s Parliament, a colonial vestige. In 1982, this provision was done away with, and Trudeau in effect became a Canadian founding father. An intellectual who approached issues with an analytical and a creative mind, he fashioned a constitutional legal landscape midway between 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 subject with his father until the last year of his life. ‘‘He was much more focused on having substantive conversations,’’ Trudeau said. ‘‘Politics didn’t fit into that for him.’’

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 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, eventually ending up teaching high school in Vancouver.

Justin Trudeau’s lack of qualifications to be prime minister were obvious, as was his lack of his father’s erudition — 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. 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 it in the kind of mawkish language his opponents ridicule but that is plainly heartfelt. On state business with his father in Dhaka, the younger Trudeau saw a poor old man with a bicycle wait patiently while their motorcade swept by. He was suddenly seized with empathy for the man, realizing that there were billions of people on earth, each a unique individual, each with a story. ‘‘I have 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 like 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. After giving birth to three boys in quick succession, the beauty dubbed ‘‘Maggie T.’’ by the press smoked marijuana while under the watch of Mounties, ate peyote before giving a speech in Venezuela and left her husband to 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 Stone.

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 age of 23, in an avalanche on a backcountry ski trip in British Columbia in 1998. His death seemed to touch off a downward spiral in Pierre. A deeply religious man with a Jesuitical cast of mind, he began to doubt his faith. Michel’s death was also devastating for Margaret, and Justin tended to her. It was only 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’s work.

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 for one of the towering figures in Canada’s history. 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 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 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; Trudeau’s father never loved pressing the flesh, but his son’s greatest talent might well be his common touch. When Trudeau 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 reduced its seats in Parliament to only 34, roughly one-tenth of the total at the time. 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. In what looked like a publicity stunt, 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, including his wife. Brazeau had a black belt in karate and a military background, and he grew up on hardscrabble First Nations reservations; his bar brawler’s physique, tattoos and trash-talking bravado made him the three-to-one favorite by fight night.

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 and haymaker lefts from Brazeau. But then something unexpected happened: Trudeau found his feet and worked his jab. The tough-guy senator was punched out, too tired to raise his arms. His face alternated among outrage, fear and bloody-nosed confusion as Trudeau beat him senseless. The bout was stopped in the third round, saving Brazeau the indignity of hitting the canvas.

The commentator recognized the importance of the victory. ‘‘I can hear it already,’’ he sighed. ‘‘Trudeau for leader.’’

Slipping through the streets of Ottawa on Nov. 10, six days after his swearing-in, I sat with Trudeau in a motorcade that was comically polite. His peloton of four black S.U.V.s stopped at lights, signaled respectfully, followed the speed limit and used no sirens or police escort. It was like a skit satirizing Canadian manners. We were headed to an arena packed with 16,000 youths gathered to celebrate a nonprofit called Free the Children. In a nice bit of political stagecraft, Trudeau had appointed himself minister of youth, inverting the significance of a post generally seen as marginal.

I asked the prime 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 way a little bit,’’ he said, his voice betraying a distinct note of guile. ‘‘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, but never as the center of attention, Trudeau chose his words carefully. ‘‘There was a perception that I’d grown up with a silver 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 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 realize is that I work incredibly hard at everything I set my mind to.’’

One year later, the Liberal 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 country, 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 1,000 First Nations women, introducing a rigorous carbon-capture policy, legalizing marijuana. The Canadian system does not have the same checks and balances among branches that the American system does, so Trudeau can implement his policies without being stymied by right-wing opposition.

As an example of his thinking, Trudeau noted his decision to raise taxes on the top 1 percent of earners while lowering middle-class taxes, even as his government funds infrastructure improvements. He knew that Canada would run a deficit, which was unusual for a country known for fiscal probity, but he believed it was the way forward. ‘‘Confident countries are willing to invest in the future,’’ Trudeau said, ‘‘not always follow the conservative orthodoxy of balanced budgets at all costs.’’

In the face of the Syrian refugee crisis, Trudeau had 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 Jan. 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 said he wants Canada to be free from the politics of fear and division.

‘‘When a mosque was vandalized in a small rural community in Cold Lake, Alberta — which is as conservative as you can imagine in Canada, with the stereotypes around that — the entire town came out the next day to scrub the graffiti off the walls and help them fix the damage,’’ Trudeau told me. ‘‘Countries with a strong national identity — linguistic, religious or cultural — are finding it a challenge to effectively integrate people from different backgrounds. In France, there is still a typical citizen and an atypical citizen. Canada doesn’t have that dynamic.’’

Terrorist groups have specifically said they are targeting Canada and Canadians. And on the subject of national security, Trudeau’s critics say he’s a lightweight and a dangerous one. 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 from all over the world. 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, 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 postnational state.’’

Stepping out of the S.U.V., eager to plunge into the crowd, Trudeau seemed like a man at the beginning of a very big, and very uncertain, journey. ‘‘I’m excited to be on the world stage,’’ he said, with peculiar Canadian understatement mixed with dynastic confidence. ‘‘I think people are starting to see that I’m actually reasonably fit for this office.’’