Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau attend a Canada Day event in Ottawa, on July 1.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters
J.D.M. Stewart is a Canadian history teacher and the author of Being Prime Minister. He is currently writing a new history of Canada’s prime ministers.
A person close to former prime minister Kim Campbell once told me that the only place a PM gets any privacy is when they go to the bathroom.
Even as far back as the days of Wilfrid Laurier, prime ministers have craved some semblance of a life that is not completely open to the public. In Laurier’s genteel time – the turn of the 20th century – he was concerned about a magazine that wanted to know the name of a book he was reading. He turned them down: “I do not want my daily life to become public.”
We live in a much less circumspect world now, where many of us choose to share things far more intimate than the books we are reading. And this applies to the country’s leaders, too.
The issue of privacy for public figures is back in the news after Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, announced the end of their marriage, along with a call to respect the privacy of their family. But exactly how much privacy can a prime minister really expect, bathroom visits aside?
The answer is: not much, though the quest for time away from prying eyes has been a constant goal for the country’s leaders over the decades.
”Where, oh where, is Brian Mulroney?” began one Toronto Star article in 1984, inquiring as to the PM’s whereabouts. No one seemed to know the answer, but Mr. Mulroney’s assistant press secretary, Michel Gratton, said, “We believe this is his own time and that he definitely deserves this kind of privacy.” (It turns out Mr. Mulroney was in Miami, a fact discovered when a photo of him sitting beside Ontario‘s then-premier Bill Davis at a Dolphins game showed up in an American newspaper.)
In the current circumstances, many observers have looked at the history of the Prime Minister’s father, the only other PM to experience the dissolution of a marriage while in office. But the two men and their circumstances are demonstrably different. Pierre Trudeau was a very private man, telling The Globe and Mail in 1969: “I suppose some of you have different views on the life of a Prime Minister than I do, but I want to make it quite clear, as far as I am concerned, if I am a public figure, I’m not public property.” Unfortunately for him, he served in a highly public office. His marriage and family life penetrated the Canadian psyche like no other, with three children born while they lived at 24 Sussex. They were “folk heroes,“ according to Globe columnist Dick Beddoes: “It was a bit as though Bobby Orr had married Anne Murray.”
For his part, Justin Trudeau has never seen a crowd or a camera he didn’t like. Requests for family privacy were followed shortly after with social media posts from the Prime Minister featuring him at the movies, separately, with two of his children.
Indeed, he is more like his mother. Last week, Ottawa journalist Dean Beeby tweeted a 1977 memo from Jim Coutts, the principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau, in which he briefed his boss on conditions in the aftermath of his separation. In it, Mr. Coutts noted that Margaret Trudeau “appears to be a person who wants both privacy and attention.” Chalk one up for genetics.
And then there are the children. The Trudeaus, Harpers, and Mulroneys all had (or have) growing families while in office, which creates conundrums for the media. In 2014, paramedics were called to 24 Sussex to attend to an 18-year-old woman who was believed to have alcohol poisoning. This was during an 18th birthday party for Ben Harper, the son of the PM.
Commenting on the report of the incident for CBC’s Power and Politics, host Evan Solomon said that “one of the things this raises … is that line between the private and the public, what is in the public interest, what if anything should we know about the activities of the prime minister’s family and there’s a culture where you just don’t ask about it.”
Lester B. Pearson loved his privacy as much as any PM and longed for a life with “more leisure, some privacy and no autographs.” But he also noted that “When you’re in politics – and you choose to be in politics – you have to give some things up, and one of them is privacy. It’s irritating for the press to pry, but it’s more irritating if they don’t – if they just don’t care.”
It is not easy being prime minister. But in the end, history shows that privacy has to be cultivated by the office-holder.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Ben Harper’s age in 2014.