In light woolen pants, shoes and a partially open coat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was minimally dressed for the minus 13 degrees Celsius weather as he left his official residence to announce his resignation on Monday.
Mr. Ignatieff wore a Team Canada hockey jersey – a comfortable liberal red – and, largely for the benefit of television cameras and photographers, went skating with some other members of parliament and senators from his party.
I went ahead of them and accidentally stopped other skaters to see if they recognized Mr. Ignatiev. It was very little. No one waved to Mr. Ignatiev and paid no attention to him.
But when Mr. Ignatyev sat down on the bench to take off his skates, I heard a rumble on the ice behind me. Mr. Trudeau arrived and immediately packed.
(Read: Trudeau Covers News in Canada with “Orchestra”.)
Two years later, I received a personal demonstration of that star power.
I interviewed Mr. Trudeau at his constituency office in Montreal for the profile It would come shortly after he became Liberal leader in 2013. The office was above the pharmacy and the furniture appeared to have been left by the previous tenant.
We met in a dark meeting room. As he began to discuss the death of his father, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the crowds lining the route of the funeral train from Ottawa to Montreal, Mr. Trudeau briefly lost his temper and had to buy a box of tissues. I've never seen anything like that during an interview with a politician, and I haven't seen it since.
After the interview, we went in the same direction along the busy road in front of the office. It was another bone-chilling day. A man zigzagged through the traffic and ran towards us from the other side of the street. In African-accented French, she said all she wanted was to shake Mr. Trudeau's hand.
(From Review: Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy)
(From Review: Says au Revoir to Trudeau. For now.)
Although Mr. Trudeau's popularity waned in the years that followed, the crowd never lost. He had no desire to meet people.
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whom Mr. Trudeau succeeded in 2015, has favored tightly controlled events in front of carefully selected audiences. By contrast, even outside of election campaigns, Mr. Trudeau has held town halls that are open without registration and often draw overflow crowds even after they have been moved to larger arenas.
During the campaigns, Mr. Trudeau didn't just stop for selfies and shake hands, he took immediate action. If people had questions, he would listen and have conversations – usually to the annoyance of his staff trying to keep things on schedule.
With this approach, it sometimes worked without a net. In 2017, when his image was just beginning to tarnish, I attended a town hall in Peterborough, Ontario on another cold day. Although Mr. Trudeau clearly had fans in the crowd, the gathering was raucous.
The Ontario government's electricity utility has imposed steep rate increases. A woman waved over 1,000 Canadian dollars a month to the prime minister. Even though the utility is not under federal control, Mr. Trudeau has faced public ire.
After becoming Prime Minister, his interviews lost its former sincerity. His answers were carefully considered.
Certainly he never again offered anything like his answer in that boardroom as to why he exposed himself to the vitriol his father received as prime minister.
“Am I going to make a mistake? A lot of them,” he told me in 2013. “I will apologize, I will stumble. But I trust myself, I trust my values, and I trust Canadians. If I blow it up, it will be because I really can't do the job.”
Ian Austen He reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has been reporting on the country for two decades.
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