In light woolen trousers, formal shoes and a coat that was partially open, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was minimally dressed for minus 13 degrees Celsius on Monday when he stepped out of his official residence to announce his resignation.
Mr. Ignatieff donned Team Canada’s hockey jersey – fittingly Liberal red – and, largely for the benefit of television cameramen and photographers, went to skate with some other members of Parliament and senators from his party.
I walked ahead of them and randomly stopped the other skaters to ask them if they recognized Mr. Ignatieff. There are few of them. No one waved to Mr. Ignatieff or paid any attention to him.
But as Mr. Ignatieff sat down on the bench to take off his skates, I heard a commotion on the ice behind me. Mr. Trudeau arrived — and was immediately overwhelmed.
[Read: In Canada, Covering the Trudeau News With an ‘Orchestra’]
Two years later, I got a personal demonstration of that star power.
I spoke with Mr. Trudeau at his election office in Montreal for profile which would appear just after he became leader of the Liberals in 2013. The office was above a drugstore and looked like the furniture had been left by a previous tenant.
We met in a dark meeting room. When we started talking about the death of his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the crowds that followed the route of his funeral train from Ottawa to Montreal, Mr. Trudeau briefly lost his composure and had to grab a box of tissues. I’ve never seen anything like it during an interview with a politician, and I haven’t seen it since.
After the interview, we headed in the same direction along the busy road in front of the office. It was another bone-chilling day. A man was running towards us from the other side of the street, weaving through the traffic. In African-accented French, he said all he wanted was to shake Mr. Trudeau’s hand.
[From Opinion: Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy]
[From Opinion: Saying au Revoir to a Trudeau. For Now.]
Although Mr. Trudeau’s popularity faded in the years that followed, the crowds never did. Neither is his obvious desire to meet people.
Stephen Harper, the conservative prime minister whom Mr. Trudeau succeeded in 2015, favored tightly controlled events in front of carefully selected audiences. In contrast, even outside the election campaigns, Mr. Trudeau held town halls that were open without registration and often drew overflow crowds even after they were moved to larger halls.
During the campaigns, Mr. Trudeau didn’t just stop for selfies and shake hands, he got going right away. If people had questions, he listened and had conversations – usually to the consternation of his staff, who were struggling to keep things on schedule.
With this approach, he sometimes worked without a network. In 2017, when his image was just beginning to tarnish, I was at City Hall in Peterborough, Ontario, on another cold day. While Mr. Trudeau clearly had admirers in the crowd, the gathering became raucous.
The Ontario government’s electricity utility has introduced steep price increases. One woman waved her monthly bill of more than 1,000 Canadian dollars at the Prime Minister. Although the utility was not under federal control at all, Mr. Trudeau became the target of public ire.
After he became prime minister, his interviews lost their former sincerity. His answers were carefully considered.
He certainly never again offered anything like his answer in that boardroom when asked why he opened himself up to the kind of vitriol his father received as prime minister.
“Am I going to be wrong? A lot of them,” he told me in 2013. “I’ll apologize, I’ll run into it. But I trust my core, I trust my values, and I trust Canadians. And if I blow it, it will really be because I wasn’t up to the task.”
Ian Austen he reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he has covered the politics, culture and people of Canada and reported on the country for two decades
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