Rendezvous with Justin Trudeau

Justin Trudeau is one of the most popular political leaders, he certainly is one of the most photographed political leaders in the world. Political commentators say that part of his charisma or his popularity is attributable to the turbulent times that we live in. He came to office on a back of a stunning victory in 2014 on the promise of providing an optimistic, hopeful vision of public life. He has a larger than life public persona, which is tailor-made for the social media times that we live in.

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, is in conversation with CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan on how does he manage expectations and what is his charter of change for Canada, what is his vision for Canada and India’s economic ties going forward.

A: There has been lots of hardest parts but one of them being dealing with people’s expectations with me. I was very lucky as a kid, my father was Prime Minister when I was born so the first thirteen years of my life, I was surrounded with people when I had meet them would have certain images or expectations of being – if they supported my father, they tended to like me a whole lot and thought I was great. If they didn’t support my father, they didn’t like me and thought I was a terrible kid and I had to learn early on that that was completely separate from who I actually am and that other people’s perception of me cannot define me and I have to work hard to define myself first and foremost for myself and then through what it is that I do. So anything I have done whether it was being school teacher, whether it was being environmental advocate or any other things that I have done, I have focused on what I am doing, how I am doing it and what impact I have on the world in a tangible way and what people’s perceptions are of course matter to a certain extent in politics but are something to be managed not something that defines me for me.

A: That was my father’s thing. I think all of us try and figure out what it is that our parents did that we want to be like and we get to choose whether there is that our parents did that we don’t want to be like and that is sort of how you check your path and your identity as an individual, so pirouetting was his thing.

A: Apparently it is socks.

A: I think obviously I had a certain level of advantages because people had felt that they had seen me since I grew up, they knew values that I was raised with in deciding whether to vote for me or not but citizens aren’t fools. Citizens can tell whether someone is genuine in their approach or they are just trying to live up to some lofty familial expectation and for me, all my life, I focused on how I could best make a difference. So I decided earlier on much to my father’s pleasure, that I wouldn’t go anywhere near politics because for one thing, I knew more than anything and anyone else what kind of a difficult impact it has on one’s kids.

So it wasn’t an automatic choice for me. Far from it, I was happy to become a school teacher, I was happy to be involved in all sort of different things and there was only at one point when I realised that the path, the potential path I had before me going into politics was genuinely my own and wasn’t linked to my father, wasn’t the same way my father did and I spent a lot of time working specifically with young people who had very little idea or attachment to my father in a tangible way. For me, that was a important check because if young people responding positively to the messages I had, to the way I was challenging them, to the way I was drawing them into the political process than it wasn’t out of some dynastic affection, it was because what I had to say was relevant to them. So I won’t say, it didn’t help in certain ways but it also made a lot of people look at me more sceptically and I think for every example of someone who is successful son or grandson or daughter or niece of a famous or successful politician, there is a whole lot of others who aren’t that successful because quite frankly, it is not a guarantee that one generation to the next is going to be a successful.

A: My automatic answer is the same answer my father gave which is I hope they figure out their own path and politics is a very difficult, unpleasant in many ways, incredibly rewarding in other ways, path they take and the one thing that is certain is it has to be something that you deep inside want to do for your own reasons because the hour, the travel, the time away from family, the incredible workload - nothing will justify unless you are driven deeply from inside. So familial expectations just isn’t the way to do it.

A: I think everybody understands that politics involves making choices sometimes very difficult choices. If governing was easy, anyone could do it well and it is very difficult.

I am an environmentalist, I have been all my life. The way to move forward into a more sustainable planet is to make smart decisions and to know that sometimes we have to figure out a path for that isn’t entirely obvious. We brought in a national framework on reducing our carbon emissions, which is a difficult thing for a candidate to do because we are a very cold country in the winter and a very warm country in the summer. We need air-conditioning, we need heating, we have vast distances between our communities and we have significant fossil fuel resources. So there is all the reasons in the world for a candidate to say, we are not going to take the lead on climate change, we will let other people do that because it is in our interest to stay hooked on fossil fuels as long as we can and we are not worried about that.

That is not the right path to take. So I have been leading on actually a plan that is going to reach our commitments, we are actually going to reduce our climate emissions and one of the things I was able to do to get our oil producing province to sign on to that national plan – it is to say where we are going to build a safe and secure pipeline to continue to get oil resources to market in a reliable way while we move forward in this transition because we are not going to switch off onto renewable overnight. It is going to take some time. While we are getting that, you have to make decisions and you have to make choices around the best path to get there.

There are still people out there however who would say that there is still a choice to be made between the environment or the economy or else a lot of people in my country and around the world understand that the only way to build a sustainable economy for the future is to protect the natural world, protect the environment and to do them both together. Doing them together means doing things that if you look at the people who are on the fringes of either debate who want absolutely nothing on the economy and everything on the environment – no, I am going to find a middle ground that will probably upset a lot of people but most people get that you have to move forward in a responsible way.

A: That is something that I have been saying for an awfully long time. People look at me, a Canadian liberal with the openness and the values that I have and they say well that is a big contract with President Trump and I actually have to point out to people that both President Trump and I got elected on a very similar approach. I made the case that the middle class in Canada, the hardworking people hadn’t been the beneficiaries of the growth we have had over the past decades. That the wealthiest are doing well but ordinary hardworking folks haven’t had the benefits of whether it was trade deals, whether it was investments, whether it was tax schemes, whatever it is, people were feeling left aside or left behind in the growth of our economies.

Donald Trump had a very similar approach. He was going to make America great again for the folks who feel that progress that offshoring, all the different changes in our global economy have not helped them out. Now the two of us have very different approaches on how to solve that but we come and look at the same problem, which is we have to make people who feel like they are no longer confident that the future holds much promise for them or worse for their kids, we have reassure those people and make them optimistic about the future and not then at the core of the my approach for the Canadian economy and little spoiler alert – it is working well, our approach in the Canadian economy.

We have the fastest growth in the G-7, we have the lowest unemployment we have had in forty years, we have had hundreds and thousands of new jobs, we are doing it specifically – this is where I differ slightly from the American administration – by lowering taxes on the middle class but raising them on the wealthiest one percent.

We are doing it by delivering a Canada trial benefit to nine out of ten Canadian families who needed that my predecessor had, the previous government had a child benefit system that send cheques to everyone just for having kids. I said, let us send larger cheques to the ones who need it most and the middle class and stop sending cheques to the wealthiest because – you guys are in economics, you are business folks – you know that people who need the money, who get a little extra money every month to help with their kids raising their kids will spend that on school supplies, on new clothes, on childcare, on things to keep economy going and wealthier folks will sort of not change the behaviours and put it aside for the education fund, which is worthwhile but it is not having the same impact on the economy. So these are things we are doing that is delivering and we are able to lower taxes for small businesses, we are looking at the future with a real optimistic eye.

A: Again, President Trump wants a deal out of NAFTA that is going to benefit workers and his country. That is something that we want too in Canada and not just that we don’t want the benefit workers in Canada, we also want it to be good for the workers in the United States. We believe that trade deals can be win-win. In NAFTA’s case, win-win with Mexico. It is not as some game, it just means. However for us ensuring that the trade deal that you sign is specifically focused on benefits for people who historically haven’t benefited from trade deals.

Trade is good for economic growth but it has been mostly good for the one percent for multinationals, not for small businesses and for a country’s bottomline, it hasn’t – trade will create growth. It doesn’t necessarily ensure that that growth is fairly distributed. So to make sure that there are opportunities for everyone to succeed, you have to build those into trade deals. That means labour standards, that means thinking about gender issues, including pathways to success for women in the work place. It means looking at indigenous people and marginalised people and making sure that they have opportunities to succeed, small businesses have opportunities to succeed. So there are ways to make trade deals work for the people that I want to and President Trump want to help.

We are just working hard on getting to that and negotiations are always challenging.

A: We are certainly very interested in pursuing trade negotiations with a broad range of countries including India. Canada has successfully over the past years had a time where trade deals have fallen out of favour and anti-globalisation movements and worries about trade are rampant around the world. We successfully concluded a free trade deal with Europe, which is a market of 500 million people, we still have and will continue to have NAFTA, which is a trade deal with US and Mexico, we just signed on to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which captures some of the largest and fastest growing economies in Asia - not the largest but some of the fastest growing - and we are always looking for more.

We have got trade deals with South America, Canada knows and Canadians know that the trade is conducive to growth. So we are always excited to talk about trade opportunities and we are respectful of the pace and the concerns that our partners will have, we will never force a trade deal but we are always eager to talk about deepening our opportunities. Right now, the India trade is about USD 8 billion a year, which is great in goods, another USD 2 billion in services but we do USD 2 billion worth a trade every single day with the United States. So there is a lot of room to grow even given distances as a challenge and when you think of the natural connections between Canada and India, obviously there are lots of really good business ties, trade and agricultural products, Canada creates tremendous number of pulses for example which is the discussion we are busy having with the Indian government right now where there are slight challenges but there is so much more to do.

For us, the greatest potential of trade is the people-to-people connections. We have a 125,000 Indian students in our universities every single year. We want to do much more. India is the number two source of foreign students in Canada but definitely on track to be number one perhaps even later this year if the trendline continues. Gujarat itself is a significant proportion of that, they top three-two source within India. So there are a lots of great people-to-people ties and we have increased that.

We are country that is open to immigration, open to trade, there are student visas, we have a start-up visas programme. If you are an entrepreneur and you want to start-up a company, an innovative company in Canada, you can get the visa that way. We also have a global skills strategy, if big companies want to bring in engineers or senior folks from around the world, they can bring them in in less than two weeks. There are a lot of things we are doing that hold great potential for deepening the opportunities for connections between Canada and India.

A: First of all, I am a feminist and anyone in this room – and many years wondering whether or not I could call myself a feminist because it is a word that has certain connotations and certain loaded meanings - there can be very complicated elements to it but at the very root of it, it is very simple.

If you think man and woman ought to be equal and ought to have the same opportunities and if you recognize that they are still a lot of work to do to get there, then guess what, you are a feminist too. It is that simple and understanding that empowering women and giving them opportunities to succeed isn’t just the right thing to do or the nice thing to do, it is the smart thing to do and is extremely important.

We are underperforming as communities, as societies because we are not giving women the opportunities to contribute, we are not allowing them the opportunities to fulfil their entire potential and you cannot have a successful society or economy if you have 50 percent of the population that is not contributing as fully as they can.

When we allow and continue to accept that there are barriers to women success built-in to our system, some of them are overt, sexism, discrimination, some of them are more subtle, just the fact that women have an expectation laid on them that they will be much more involved in raising kids that challenge of you are looking at two CVs, one of a man, one of a woman will lead to different decisions by a manager whoever is doing the hiring, which is one of the reasons why yes we are moving forward on pay equity legislation but we are also looking at other things.

I have talked about – not just maternal leaves but parental leaves with potentially leave that can only be taken by the second parent, in most cases the father. So it is either a use it or lose it. And as soon as you are creating a leave opportunity that use it or lose it, the second parent or the father in many cases or the second partner in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) marriage or whatever format you have that path is removing some of the barriers and the obligations and the expectations that hold women back in the workforce.

So there is a lot of things to do and we are going to have -- last federal budget in Canada was one of the first ever in the world to have inexplicit gender lens put on it, we are going to do more in the upcoming budget that we are putting forward in just a few weeks but there is always going to be much more to do.

You mention the G-7. One of the things we are doing as host of the G-7 this year – G-7 is a group of seven highly industrialised nations that come together every year to discuss how they are doing and how we can positively impact the world. Every G-7 there is a couple of themes that are put forward by whoever is hosting it that are unique. There is always discussions on jobs, on the economy, on security, this time I am adding two themes, one theme on oceans where we are going to talk about the state of our oceans and particularly plastics and pollution in the ocean but the other one is gender and instead of just looking at it - okay now we are going to turn to the gender discussion, we have a discussion on that - what we have done is we have made gender a horizontal theme to all the G-7 so the discussion on jobs, the discussion on the economy, the discussions on security, the discussions on oceans, discussions on anything we have will also have to it applied a gender lens because it affects things differently.

To give a perfect example of a gender lens. It is easy if you talk about a programme on parental leave or childcare that is easy to talk about gender lens to a certain extent, it is built-in but what would you have a gender lens be on pipeline, which was something you brought out, what is a gender lens do when you are thinking about moving a pipeline? If you think about it, when you are building a pipeline through a remote area, which is where usually they go, you are talking about a whole bunch of construction workers, who descend on – mostly men – on a unpopulated or low population area and that brings with it, social and societal impacts around all sorts of things that do need to be thought about.

So any policy decision can be thought about with the Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) which is gender but the plus is also other intersectionalities whether it is minority rights, whether it is indigenous, whether it is a broad range of issues that come in and layer on barriers to people’s success. That is something that was very much focused on. Not just because it is a nice or progressive thing to do, in some ways, it can be an unpopular thing to do but also – fundamentally because it is the only way to build a fair and successful society later on the economy in the future when you fold-in all those things.

A: Yes, I had things run against me saying that I have nothing but nice hair that I was too fashionable to be smart or whatever it was and there were articles of oh is this just an example of discrimination the same way women goes through it. Let me be very clear. No, it is not. Any comments about how a man looks is not even an eyelash worth of the kind of systemic discrimination that women face every single day in any workforce.

If I can contribute to the conversation by spurring a conversation about it, that is fine but as a man in politics and business, I have had loads of advantages that I never had to work for, that I never had to deal with and I am happy there is a conversation about how you look and how you dress and how that impacts but I didn’t go to anything near the kind of intrinsic and entrenched discrimination and sexism and superficiality and judgements that women go through on a daily basis.