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“I’m going to stay focused on bringing forward solutions to Canadians, talking with them about the big issues and demonstrating that I have the strength of my convictions.

“So when someone criticizes me because they don’t think I’m smart enough or serious, it doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t affect me. I simply focus on doing what I can with all the tools that I do have, and they are considerable, to contribute to the world in a positive way.”

Trudeau said that as a politician he has consistently outperformed expectations: winning a Liberal nomination in a Montreal riding where “everyone wrote me off”; winning the two federal elections that followed in that riding; emerging as the victor in a charity boxing match where he was considered the underdog against Sen. Patrick Brazeau; and not falling “flat on my face” in the 2013 party leadership race he won.

As he gears up for the 2015 election, comparisons are also being made to his father and whether he can replicate the “Trudeaumania” that swept Pierre Trudeau into office as prime minister in 1968.

Justin Trudeau, who spent more than a decade of his early years living at 24 Sussex Drive, spoke about the effects of that and “the pressure that I put on myself. I had an extraordinary example in a father who dedicated himself to building a better country, building a better world, and being a great dad at the same time.”

Many years after Pierre Trudeau left politics and his health was deteriorating before his death in 2000, Trudeau decided to sit down with his father to ask some important questions.