Justin Trudeau
Justin Pierre James Trudeau is a Canadian politician who served as the 23rd prime minister of Canada from 2015 to 2025. He led the Liberal Party from 2013 until his resignation in 2025 and was the member of Parliament for Papineau from 2008 until 2025.
Trudeau was born in Ottawa, Ontario, during the first premiership of his father, Pierre Trudeau. He attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from McGill University and a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of British Columbia. He then taught at the secondary school level in Vancouver before returning to Montreal in 2002 to further his studies. He served as chair for the youth charity Katimavik and as director of the not-for-profit Canadian Avalanche Association. In 2006, he was appointed as chair of the Liberal Party's Task Force on Youth Renewal. Trudeau was elected to represent the riding of Papineau in the House of Commons in the 2008 federal election. He became the Liberal Party's Official Opposition critic for youth and multiculturalism in 2009 and critic for citizenship and immigration in 2010. In 2011, he was appointed as a critic for secondary education and sport. In 2013, Trudeau was elected as leader of the Liberal Party. He led the Liberals to a majority government in the 2015 federal election, bringing the party from a third place finish in the previous election with the largest numerical increase of seats by a party in a Canadian election. He became the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history and the first to be the child of a previous prime minister.
Upon assuming office, Trudeau introduced the Canada Child Benefit, legalized medical assistance in dying, legalized recreational cannabis, pursued Senate reform by creating the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, and established the federal carbon tax. In foreign policy, Trudeau's government resettled refugees of the Syrian civil war, signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, and negotiated trade deals such as the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. He was found twice to have violated conflict of interest law by Canada's ethics commissioner—first in the Aga Khan affair, and later in the SNC-Lavalin affair.
Trudeau's Liberal Party was re-elected with a minority government in the 2019 federal election. From 2020, Trudeau responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent recession by launching financial aid programs, a nationwide vaccination campaign, and military support. His government also announced a ban on "assault-style" weapons after the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks and introduced a national $10-a-day child care program. He was investigated for a third time by the ethics commissioner for his role in the WE Charity scandal, but was cleared of wrongdoing. Trudeau led the Liberals to another minority government in the 2021 federal election. He then invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history in response to the Freedom Convoy protests; the Federal Court later ruled this action unjustified and in violation of Charter rights. In early 2022, the Liberals signed a confidence and supply agreement with the New Democratic Party, which resulted in the introduction of the Canadian Dental Care Plan and a framework for national pharmacare before the NDP withdrew from the agreement in late 2024. Internationally, Trudeau's government responded to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and authorizing humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine. His premiership ended during a trade war launched by the United States, to which he responded by implementing 25% retaliatory tariffs on $30 billion of U.S. goods.
Following a steady decline in popular support, the sudden resignation of deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland in December 2024 and an ensuing political crisis, Trudeau announced in January 2025 that he would resign as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party. He advised the governor general to prorogue Parliament until March 24, while the party held a leadership election. Trudeau remained Liberal leader until Mark Carney was elected as his successor on March 9. He resigned as prime minister five days later and stood down as an MP at the 2025 federal election.
Early life
Ancestry and birth
On June 23, 1971, the Prime Minister's Office announced that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's wife of four months, Margaret Trudeau, was pregnant and due in December. Justin Trudeau was born on December 25, 1971, at 9:27 pm EST at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. He is the second child in Canadian history to be born to a prime minister in office; the first was John A. Macdonald's daughter Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald. Trudeau's younger brothers Alexandre "Sacha" and Michel were the third and fourth.File:Margaret Sinclair, Pat Nixon, Justin Trudeau 1972-04-14.jpg|thumb|left|Margaret Trudeau with Pat Nixon holding Justin at Rideau Hall in Ottawa in 1972
Trudeau is predominantly of Scottish and French Canadian descent. His grandfathers were businessman Charles-Émile Trudeau and Scottish-born James Sinclair, who was minister of fisheries in the cabinet of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. Trudeau's maternal great-grandfather Thomas Bernard was born in Makassar, Indonesia and immigrated to Penticton, British Columbia, in 1906 at age 15 with his family. Through the Bernard family, kinsmen of the Earls of Bandon, Trudeau is the fifth great-grandson of Major-General William Farquhar, a leader in the founding of modern Singapore; Trudeau also has remote ethnic Malaccan and Nias ancestry.
Trudeau was baptized with his father's niece Anne Rouleau-Danis as godmother and his mother's brother-in-law Thomas Walker as godfather, at Ottawa's Notre Dame Basilica on the afternoon of January 16, 1972, which marked his first public appearance. and given the names "Justin Pierre James". On April 14, 1972, Trudeau's father and mother hosted a gala at the National Arts Centre, at which visiting U.S. president Richard Nixon said, "I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau" to which Pierre Trudeau responded that should his son ever assume the role, he hoped he would have "the grace and skill of the president". Earlier that day, first lady Pat Nixon had visited him in his nursery and gifted him a stuffed toy Snoopy.
Childhood
Trudeau's parents announced their separation in 1977, when he was five years old; his father was given primary custody. There were repeated rumours of a reconciliation for many years afterwards. However, his mother eventually filed for a no-fault divorce which the Supreme Court of Ontario granted in 1984; his father had announced his intention to retire as prime minister a month earlier. Eventually, his parents came to an amicable joint-custody arrangement and learned to get along quite well. Interviewed in October 1979, his nanny Dianne Lavergne was quoted, "Justin is a mommy's boy, so it's not easy, but children's hurts mend very quickly. And they're lucky kids, anyway." Of his mother and father's marriage, Trudeau said in 2009, "They loved each other incredibly, passionately, completely. But there was 30 years between them, and my mom never was an equal partner in what encompassed my father's life, his duty, his country." Trudeau has three half-siblings, Kyle and Alicia, from his mother's remarriage to Fried Kemper, and Sarah, from his father's relationship with Deborah Coyne.Trudeau lived at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, the official residence of Canada's prime minister, from his birth until his father's government was defeated in the 1979 federal election. The Trudeaus were expected to move into Stornoway, the residence of the leader of the Official Opposition, but because of flooding in the basement, Prime Minister Joe Clark offered them Harrington Lake, the prime minister's official country retreat in Gatineau Park, with the expectation they would move into Stornoway at the start of July. However, the repairs were not complete, so Pierre Trudeau took a prolonged vacation with his sons to the Nova Scotia summer home of his friend, Member of Parliament Don Johnston, and later sent his sons to stay with their maternal grandparents in North Vancouver for the rest of the summer while he slept at his friend's Ottawa apartment. Trudeau and his brothers returned to Ottawa for the start of the school year but lived only on the top floor of Stornoway while repairs continued on the bottom floor. His mother purchased and moved into a new home nearby at 95 Victoria Street in Ottawa's New Edinburgh neighbourhood in September 1979. Pierre Trudeau and his sons returned to the prime minister's official residence after the February 1980 election that returned him to the Prime Minister's Office.
File:Justint Pierre Elliott Trudeau.jpg|thumb|10-year-old Justin touring the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France with his father in 1982
His father had intended Trudeau to begin his formal education at a French-language lycée, but Trudeau's mother convinced his father of the importance of sending their sons to a public school. In the end, Trudeau was enrolled in 1976 in the French immersion program at Rockcliffe Park Public School. It was the same school his mother had attended for two years while her father was a member of Parliament. He could have been dropped off by limousine, but his parents elected he take the school bus albeit with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police car following. This was followed by one year at the private Lycée Claudel d'Ottawa.
After his father's retirement in June 1984, his mother remained at her New Edinburgh home while the rest of the family moved into his father's home at 1418 Pine Avenue, Montreal known as Cormier House; the following autumn, he began attending the private Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, his father's alma mater. The school had begun as a Jesuit school but was non-denominational by the time Justin matriculated. In 2008, Trudeau said that of all his early family outings he enjoyed camping with his father the most, because "that was where our father got to be just our father – a dad in the woods". During the summers his father would send him and his brothers to Camp Ahmek, on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, where he would later work in his first paid job as a camp counsellor.
Trudeau and his brothers were given shares in two numbered companies by their father: the first containing a portfolio of securities, from which they receive regular dividends, up to $20,000 per year; and the second which receives royalties from their father's autobiography and other sources, about $10,000 a year. As of August 2011, the first numbered company had assets of $1.2 million. The Trudeau brothers were also given a country estate of about 50 hectares in the Laurentians with a home designed by the esteemed Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, and the Cormier House in Montreal. The country estate land was estimated to be worth $2.7 million in 2016.