Politics can be a bruising business. But in a 2012 charity boxing match, the man who this week became Canada’s new prime minister-designate proved he could take the blows and, more importantly, dish them out.
If Justin Trudeau’s muscular opponent, the Conservative senator Patrick “Brass Knuckles” Brazeau, had done his homework, he might have thought twice about taking on his Liberal challenger, widely mocked in the right-wing media for his boyish good looks, foppish hair and the ballet lessons he took as a child.
True, the tattooed Brazeau had, as the TV commentators pointed out, come from a far tougher neighbourhood than the privileged son of Canada’s former prime minister, Pierre Trudeau.
But by the time the fight was stopped in the third and final round, the bloody and battered Brazeau, the commentators who had mocked Trudeau as an “overacting, ballet-dancing shiny pony” and the rest of Canada understood they had seriously underestimated the former high-school drama teacher turned political heavyweight.
In fewer than six minutes in the ring, punched his way out from the considerable shadow cast by his father’s political legacy.
Born on Christmas Day, 1971, Trudeau Jr knew privilege and expectation from the moment he took his first breath. His father, a lawyer, had become prime minister three years earlier, in 1968, and would remain in office until 1979. In 1980, he would return again, for a further four years.
Trudeau was acclimatised to the rare atmosphere of power and politics from an early age. At a state dinner in 1972, the American president Richard Nixon humorously yet presciently toasted the child as “the future prime minister of Canada”.
World leaders and world trips were a regular feature of his young life. Once, Ronald Reagan arrived for lunch at 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister's official residence in Ottawa, and taught the 9-year-old Trudeau a poem he loved, but which his intellectual father regarded as mildly inappropriate – Robert W Service's saloon-bar ballad The Shooting of Dan McGrew.
Following a motion of no-confidence in Canada’s Liberal government in 1974, Trudeau Sr successfully sought re-election, aided on the campaign trail by his wife, young son, not yet 3, and his 1-year-old brother, Sacha. A third brother, Michel, would arrive in 1975.
Life as a young Trudeau was nothing if not worldly. Before his marriage in 1971, his father had dated Barbra Streisand, and when he took power in 1968, was described by the Vancouver Sun as a "swinging young bachelor".
His mother, Margaret Sinclair, 30 years younger than Pierre and something of a jet-setting flower child, made repeated appearances in the press for behaviour deemed inappropriate for the wife of a prime minister. Clearly incompatible, the couple’s separation in 1977, followed by divorce in 1984, seemed inevitable.
The children stayed with their father and, despite the demands of his day job, "Papa" – father and sons always spoke French together – was "an engaged, hands-on father [who] introduced us to almost every physical activity available", Trudeau Jr recalled in his 2014 autobiography, Common Ground.
Trudeau Sr, an active outdoors man until near the end of his life, taught his three sons to sail, swim, climb, canoe, ski and – as Brazeau would later discover to his cost – to box. He also taught his future political heir some important life lessons.
By about the age of 8, Trudeau Jr had begun to think of his father as “the boss of Canada”. But in 1979, when the Liberals lost the federal election and the family had to move out of 24 Sussex Drive, he “understood that the real boss of Canada was the Canadian people”.
They weren’t gone long – his father returned to power in 1980. But in 1984, realising his waning popularity was threatening his party’s grip on power, Trudeau Sr decided to retire.
The three brothers left the capital, where they had spent their childhoods, and moved with their father to his home city of Montreal, where the 13-year-old Trudeau Jr was enrolled in Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, his father’s old school.
It was character-building stuff. He discovered that while Ottawa and Montreal were only two hours apart by car, “the culture gap between the two cities was closer in distance to a light-year”.
At school, he was teased about his mother’s appearances in the media. At Brébeuf, he would later write, he learnt “not to give people the emotional response they are looking for when they attack personally.”
He also determined that he wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps, either as a lawyer or a politician – and despite Nixon’s prediction, for many years it seemed that would be the case.
After Brébeuf, he pursued a career as a schoolteacher, graduating from McGill University with a degree in English literature in 1994, and via a spell as a snowboard instructor, with a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia in 1998. He spent the next four years teaching subjects including drama, French and English to pupils at two schools in Vancouver – one public, the other private.
In November 1998, Trudeau’s brother Michel, 23, was killed in an avalanche while skiing in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. It was an experience that reinforced his religious beliefs.
Further grief followed in 2000 when, after a brief battle with Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer, his father died.
It was a watershed moment for Trudeau. His remark during his moving eulogy at the state funeral that “this is not the end … It’s all up to us, all of us, now” was interpreted by one commentator as “the first manifestation of a dynasty”.
In 2005, he married Sophie Grégoire, a Quebec TV and radio host. Their son, Xavier, was born in 2007 on October 18, Trudeau Sr’s birthday. A daughter, Ella-Grace, followed in 2009, and was joined last year by another brother, Hadrien.
In 2007, after an unsuccessful two-year attempt to reinvent himself as an engineer, Trudeau bowed to the seemingly inevitable. The turning point was the Liberal Party’s 2006 leadership convention in Montreal, which Trudeau attended and found invigorating.
“Until that point,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I was not yet convinced that I was interested in a career in politics.”
The example of his mother had warned him of “the incredible personal costs to a politician’s life”. He was also wary of following in his father’s footsteps, which he feared might be interpreted as “harbouring the notion that as the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I somehow deserved a role based on that qualification alone”.
Yet the response he received from party members at the convention “surprised and enthused” him, and the experience taught him that “I had political skills independent of my last name”.
That year, against some strong party opposition, he sought and won the nomination for the Montreal riding, or constituency, of Papineau, a former Liberal stronghold that had fallen to the Bloc Québécois party in 2006. In the federal election of 2008, he recaptured the seat for the Liberals by a narrow margin.
In 2009, Trudeau dismissed suggestions that he should run for the leadership of the party. But he thought again after the Liberals suffered a massive defeat in May 2011, reduced to 34 seats and third-party status from a high of 172 seats in 2000.
The party, he concluded, had spent a decade in power “focused on itself rather than on the Canadians who supported it” and, as a result, Canadians had given the party “the drubbing it had earned”.
It was while considering his options that the idea of the charity bout with Brazeau surfaced. A keen boxer since his youth, Trudeau saw the political capital it might earn him. Friends or colleagues thought it wasn’t a good idea, but “when I signed on”, he later recalled, “the party was still reeling, and hurting”. Trudeau recruited a top trainer and trained hard for six months. He beat Brazeau “because I had a better team behind me, I had a better plan, and I had trained harder to make that plan reality”.
Fresh from his victory, Trudeau, driven by a growing conviction that Canada deserved a better government than that of the Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, was now thinking seriously about fighting for the leadership of his party. In July 2012, he finally took the plunge.
On Monday, 47 years after his father first came to power, the Liberals were back, ending nine years of Conservative rule with a crushing defeat. “This,” Trudeau told his supporters, “is what positive politics can do.”
It was a tough fight, with the Conservatives dismissing Trudeau in campaign ads as “just not ready”, but the Liberals’ knockout comeback won 184 seats to the Conservatives’ 99.
At 43, Canada’s 23rd prime minister will be the second-youngest to take office, and the first to follow a parent into office. Next month, when he takes office, Trudeau will set about delivering the Liberal vision that has so dramatically re-energised a nation. The Trudeaus, and Trudeaumania, are back.
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