Article content continued

Trudeau had recently revealed to the Ottawa Citizen that his inheritance from his late father is now worth about $1.2 million, and he has built up a public-speaking business that earned him more than $450,000 in its best year.

Trudeau has made defending the middle-class a key tenet of his leadership campaign.

“You keep referring to the middle-class,” Hall Findlay said Saturday. “You yourself have admitted that you actually don’t belong to the middle-class. I find it a little challenging to understand how you would understand the real challenges facing Canadians.”

The statement prompted a terse response from Trudeau.

“From the very first day I chose to put my name forward to run for a contested nomination in the riding of Papineau, I got people coming at me to say ‘Well what do you know about representing one of the most economically disadvantaged ridings in the country?’” Trudeau said in the debate.

“I’ve been lucky in my life to have been given an opportunity to go to grade school, to travel around the world, and what is important for me is to put everything that I’ve received like each of us wants to in service of my community. And that is what my identity is all about.”

Garneau, meanwhile, pressed Trudeau throughout the debate, accusing the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau of not having the necessary experience to be a national leader, and saying that “leadership is about more than being a motivational speaker.”