Carolyn Bennett, the minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, is accustomed to being on call.

For much of the first part of this year, Bennett was on standby, waiting to be called in to help negotiate an end to the Indigenous blockade crisis rocking the nation.

But late in the evening of Wednesday, March 11, Bennett got another type of call at her Ottawa apartment, taking her right back to her days as a family physician in the 1990s, before she was first elected as the member of Parliament for St. Paul’s in Toronto.

Two senior staffers in Justin Trudeau’s government were on the other end of the phone, wondering what Bennett would advise if the prime minister’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, was worried she had the COVID-19 virus. She was due to see a physician the next day.

Bennett snapped into her old doctor’s role, calmly urging that Grégoire take her temperature several times, to be sure, and to drink a lot of water in the meantime. Then Bennett was asked what this would mean for the prime minister. Self-isolation, Bennett said without hesitation — at least until the test was back.

As it turned out, the self-isolation would last much longer than that. Canada’s prime minister became the first major world leader to be hit right where he lived with the virus that is now a global pandemic.

One good thing has come out of it — Trudeau has “normalized self-isolation,” in the words of his adviser Ben Chin. Well, that’s if you can call it normal to run a country from a home office, with three children under foot and a sick wife in isolation — and no staff in the house.

The next morning, Trudeau’s PMO staff were told that the prime minister would be working from home in the morning. “Home” is Rideau Cottage, a 22-room brick residence on the grounds of Rideau Hall, where Trudeau and his family have been living since he became prime minister. Advisers huddled on the telephone to figure out how they would tell Canadians what was going on.

At 1 p.m. on Thursday, Trudeau announced that his wife was being tested for the virus.

“I have some personal news to share today,” Trudeau said on Twitter. “Sophie recently returned from a speaking event in the U.K., and last night she was experiencing mild flu-like symptoms. She’s feeling better, but following the advice of our doctor she is self-isolating as we wait on COVID-19 test results.”

He said he would be working from home for the rest of the day, and got busy on the calls — talking to U.S. President Donald Trump, among others. The two leaders discussed how a global pandemic was now literally at the Canadian prime minister’s doorstep. As Trump would later tell reporters, Trudeau was not expecting a positive result.

“He thought that she would not, most likely, have the virus,” Trump said.

But several hours later, the tests came back positive, and Trudeau’s world suddenly got very small. A first ministers’ conference scheduled for the Friday was called off and the prime minister was forced to recognize — as many Canadians would in the days ahead — that his home was also his workplace for at least the next two weeks.

Unlike many Canadians, however, Trudeau would have to figure out some way to keep himself visible to the country as the world was spiralling into the throes of a pandemic.

Late on Thursday night, various members of the Prime Minister’s Office consulted on how to get a picture out to the world, to show the PM at work at Rideau Cottage. Problem: the official photographer, Adam Scotti, was not allowed inside.

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Scotti, who is the father of a new, six-week-old baby, has been with Trudeau for 10 years; full-time since 2014, and knows the family well. He often lends his camera to the Trudeau children while on the road and his Instagram feed is peppered with shots taken by Xavier, 12, Ella-Grace, 11 and Hadrien, who’s six years old. So Scotti knew the children were up to the task of photographing their dad and sure enough, they threw themselves enthusiastically into the job. Scotti directed the photo session through text messages to his boss.

“I sent the PM a few of my own photos shot through doorways to give he and the kids an idea of how I would shoot it if I was there, the rule of thirds being in use,” Scotti said. (That “rule of thirds” is one of the first thing photographers are taught about composition, which basically involves mentally dividing the frame into nine squares and aligning the image along the 3x3 grid.)

Ella-Grace was using a phone, not one of Scotti’s cameras. “Your basic phone does all of the calculating for you when it comes to exposure — they aren’t great indoors but it works,” Scotti said. “The kids take a fair amount of phone photos on their own so I didn’t need to send them any specific instructions.”

Ella-Grace tried out a shot or two with Hadrien standing in for his father at the desk and also some long shots down the hallway. They all agreed the long shot was the best, so Trudeau took some time out from his multiple phone calls and sat at his desk. Ella-Grace shot the photo, and it was sent out for public consumption.

Trudeau also did a couple of quick radio interviews on Friday morning, again to assure people he was fine, and by noon, his team had figured out a way to set up a podium outside Rideau Cottage, where he could stand and speak at a safe distance from reporters.

He was asked about what was going on inside the cottage.

“Most of the morning the kids have been doing Lego and my wife has been on the phone to friends and family,” Trudeau said.

Actually, the family had already realized that more Lego supplies were going to be needed for 14 days of self-isolation. That afternoon, several more boxes were dropped off at Rideau Cottage (boxes from the Star Wars, City and Friendship collections, in case Lego aficionados are interested.)

They’ve all become accustomed to the long haul. With Sophie Grégoire Trudeau still obeying orders to keep distance from her family for at least another week, it’s left to Trudeau to put out the meals they have delivered to the house, set the table and make sure the kids are bathed and put to bed. According to Chin, Trudeau arrived unusually late for one of the big conference calls with ministers at 8 p.m. one night because he was late getting Hadrien out of the bathtub.

Often the sound of children playing can be heard in the background of all of those conference calls and more than once, the PM has, as Chin reports, interrupted conversations to “reason with a six-year-old.”

The prime minister prints his own briefing notes on the home printer, and sometimes this means the pages aren’t the same as the ones his staff are holding. Chin says he misses the eye contact of the usual circular huddle around the PM; the arched eyebrow that says Trudeau is not sure about what he’s reading or hearing.

The prime minister isn’t getting much exercise — no running or cross-country skiing as he has been doing in recent months. There is no gym at Rideau Cottage.

But by his own reports, he’s still feeling fine, no symptoms of the virus that has hit his wife, and too busy to worry too much about the vast change in his working conditions. In that, Trudeau isn’t alone — self-isolation is the rule now but it hasn’t been normalized, yet, just as nothing is exactly normal in Canada right now.

Susan Delacourt is a columnist covering national politics based in Ottawa. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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