Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015 without a foothold in Milton, the sprawling GTA community where he landed on Thursday as part of this winter’s cross-country town hall tour.

But if Trudeau wants to stay on as prime minister after this fall’s election, a lot will depend on how his Liberal government is grappling with all that Milton represents in the politics of 2019 in this country — particularly the tension between the old and new Canada.

It’s not a tension unique to Milton or even Canada. From Donald Trump’s “make America great again” to the undercurrents in the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom, populations the world over are being tugged between the forces of rapid change and nostalgia for a simpler time.

This business of “new” and “old” is a real thing in Milton, home to explosive population growth over the past two decades. It was Canada’s fastest-growing municipality in the 2006 and 2011 censuses and was the fastest-growing GTA community in the latest 2016 census, which put Milton’s population at 110,000 and climbing.

When growth happens that quickly, change is visible to the naked eye. What many residents remember not so long ago as farmers’ fields are now subdivisions or strip malls. The names and faces in the crowd at Trudeau’s town hall were far more diverse than the very old-Canada street names at the centre of the original town: Martin, Main, Mill, Queen and Ontario.

When I grew up in this town in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when its population hovered around 10,000, the brownest thing in town was the old Brown St. arena, where everyone went on Friday night to watch the local junior B hockey games.

Trudeau didn’t step foot in this old part of Milton when he touched down on Thursday. The prime minister’s first stop was at the GO station, built in 1981 to help seal the town’s then-new status as a commuter hub to Toronto. Trudeau then made his way to Craig Kielburger High School, on the very outer reaches of “new Milton.”

The crowd of approximately 1,300 people was mostly an admiring one; no surprise, probably, since you’d have to be a big fan of Trudeau’s to brave a sub-Arctic chill outdoors and a two-hour-long wait indoors just to sit and hear the PM give very long answers to random crowd questions. Gord Krantz, Canada’s longest serving mayor, sat in the front row.

Because Milton is represented in the House of Commons by Lisa Raitt, a former Conservative cabinet minister, it fell to neighbouring MPs to introduce Trudeau. Oakville MP John Oliver made sure to note that Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, spoke at a similar high school gathering in Halton county in 1974.

That was a nod to the old Milton, the old Canada. But Trudeau’s talk, for the most part, was very new Milton, new Canada. He made sure that participants knew that officials from his office were on hand to take any note of immigration issues people had; he spoke at length about climate change, plastics in the ocean, the need for carbon taxes, and just generally about how governing is a complicated and nuanced thing.

I found myself wondering about his intended audience. Regardless of the issue, Trudeau's answers were mainly pitched at those paying limited attention to the news — introducing background or complexity to questions about everything from the future of the auto industry to what he thought of the yellow-vest protest movement. (That turned into a mini-lecture on carbon taxation, the origin of the protests in France.)

It was, in effect, part high school lecture from a veteran teacher and part stump-speech-in-progress.

There were several jabs at Premier Doug Ford, on carbon taxes and potential cuts to all-day kindergarten, for instance, and Trudeau was rewarded with significant applause — a big hint of how that Ford-Trudeau conflict is bound to be a major feature of the Liberals’ 2019 election campaign in this neck of the woods.

Raitt, however, is not a Ford-brand Conservative, and she’s been navigating this old-new divide in Milton since she was first elected in 2008. When I sat down with her in her constituency office on Thursday afternoon, on Main St in the heart of old Milton, Raitt rattled off the ways in which big events in the town draw crowds from different sides of the divide.

“There are two distinct kinds of events I’m invited to ... If I go to the strawberry festival or a downtown business improvement association event, you’ll see old Milton,” she said. “If I go to Canada-India day, which I did on Saturday night, or if I go to Diwali, there’s a different Milton, which is oftentimes the newer Milton that came in from Mississauga and Brampton.”

What Milton needs, Raitt thinks, is more events that bring the old and the new together.

Raitt’s Liberal opponent for the Milton seat will be former Olympic kayak champion Adam van Koeverden, who grew up near Oakville and has childhood memories of weekly visits to Milton when it was “mostly farms.” That’s not Milton anymore, he said. “It’s a cosmopolitan place now, because most people who live in Milton work downtown (in Toronto) or in Mississauga.”

Still, van Koeverden says he doesn’t like all this talk of new and old Milton, which he worries is code for fear of outsiders and new Canadians.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Trudeau’s election victory of 2015 was built, much like contemporary Milton, on nostalgia and a desire for newness and change. Four years ago, this Liberal leader appealed simultaneously to those who liked Canada as it was in his father’s time — make Canada Trudeau’s again, if you like — and those pining for more youth and diversity in politics.

It’s not an easy coalition to manage; one wants assurance and continuity, the other wants radical change. That contradiction is one bedevilling other leaders at the moment, too.

Milton could well be a laboratory for managing the old-new divide. Trudeau might well want to make a return visit or two in the run-up to October’s election. I know I will be.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

Read more about: