When Justin Trudeau was running for Liberal leader five years ago, the huge crowds who flocked to his appearances fell into two basic categories.

One group was made up of political newbies: young people or new voters who saw Trudeau as an exciting, refreshing change to politics.

The other group saw him as someone comfortingly familiar: another Trudeau, son of the prime minister who attracted them to politics or even Canada back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It has been fascinating to watch Trudeau try to simultaneously appeal to both types of people, all the way from that leadership campaign right up to now, as prime minister. He’s the outsider who grew up at 24 Sussex Dr. He’s the lifelong Liberal who isn’t at all sentimental about the party’s history.

That history also includes his father’s legacy — as we’ve been seeing in the past couple of weeks with respect to apologies. As many observers have been noting in recent days, Justin Trudeau is walking a very different path from his father on the matter of apologies for historic wrongs. Pierre Trudeau was apology-averse. His son seems to see apologizing as an essential part of his job.

This week, the current prime minister framed the difference between himself and his father as a professional one, related to the jobs they had before entering politics.

“My father might have a different perspective on it than I do,” Trudeau told a social-policy conference in Toronto last Monday. “He came at it as an academic, as a constitutionalist, I come at it as a teacher, as someone who’s worked a lot in communities.”

That’s an interesting distinction between father and son, but it’s not the only one. Almost from the moment Justin Trudeau plunged into politics, we’ll recall, he’s gone to some lengths to show he’s not his father’s son.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issues a formal apology to Canada's LGBTQ2 civil servants in the House of Commons on Nov. 28. (ParlVU/House of Commons)

Where Pierre Trudeau was handed a safe Montreal riding and a cabinet seat on his entry to politics in 1965, Justin Trudeau had to fight for a nomination to become an opposition backbencher four decades later. Where Pierre Trudeau was known in the West as the father of the National Energy Program, Justin Trudeau flew to Calgary after his leadership-campaign launch in 2012 to disavow the NEP as flat-out “wrong.” It was, in retrospect, the first in a long set of apologies for things that happened in Canada when Pierre Trudeau was in power.

Justin Trudeau seems to relish the criticism that he’s “not his father’s son.” In the mouths of his critics, it is meant as a comment on Justin Trudeau’s smarts, but he uses the phrase to remind people that he’s also the son of Margaret Trudeau, a troubled soul, perhaps, but also someone in touch with her emotions.

I’ve referred to Justin Trudeau as someone with more emotional intelligence than his father, a remark that earned me a cameo appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2015, I’m not sure in an entirely good way. But it does help explain why you can’t draw a straight line between father and son, beyond what Trudeau said this week about mere professional differences. Justin Trudeau is too emotional for some, even some Liberals. But what looks theatrical may actually be more biographical.

I’ve encouraged people to read Trudeau’s 2014 biography, Common Ground — especially the first two chapters — if they really want to understand Justin Trudeau’s complicated feelings about his father. It’s all in there.

He rebels against his father by embracing pop-culture fiction. He writes about his father’s strict rules — including the one for French and English to be spoken on different floors of the Montreal art-deco mansion and how that made young Justin reluctant to bring his friends over to partake in the “less than kid-friendly atmosphere.” He tells a story of his father sending him off to play hockey with a strange, blue stick that Pierre Trudeau had been given on a state visit to Czechoslovakia a few years earlier. “My friends took one look at that stick and instantly knew I wasn’t going to make the school team,” he writes.

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In short, as uneasy as it was to grow up as the son of Pierre Trudeau, that also seems to remain the case as the son follows in his father’s political footsteps.

Amid all the formal, government apologies of the past couple weeks, it’s become a familiar refrain, for critics and supporters alike, to say that one would have never seen Pierre Trudeau apologizing the way his son does. Pierre Trudeau didn’t see the past through the lens of regret. His son, on the other hand, sees a past with flaws — mistakes that linger through generations. And that may be exactly the point.

sdelacourt@bell.net

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