Strangers on a train

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/10/2015 (3821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I am feeling pretty excited that Justin Trudeau is going to be our next prime minister.

Unless, of course, he isn’t. It’s entirely possible that, as you read this, they are recounting ballots and no one knows the identity of our next PM.

The thing is, I personally don’t have a clue what happened, because I am writing this column Monday morning before doing something incredibly brave, by which I mean going to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned. I’m also planning to vote, too.

But that’s not today’s post-election point. The point is today feels like the perfect time to tell you about my first dramatic encounter with a young man who — assuming the polls were not wildly off base — looked poised to take over the position once held by his father.

I strongly doubt whether Justin will recall his historic first meeting with me, due to the fact he was probably just 11 or 12 at the time and I was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie reporter in my mid-20s.

I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but as I recall, this monumental moment occurred during the early 1980s, when Justin’s dad, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the first man to inspire Trudeaumania, was in his final term as one of the most passionate, yet polarizing, prime ministers in Canadian history.

The prime minister was on some manner of cross-Canada train trip, and the junket stopped briefly at the station in downtown Winnipeg. As you can imagine, the media turned out in force in hopes Pierre would hop off the train and do or say something newsworthy.

I can’t swear to it, but I believe this trip occurred around the time Pierre delivered what is easily the most famous one-finger salute in our nation’s history.

For the record, in August 1982, the prime minister, on a train trip through Salmon Arm, B.C., famously flipped the bird to each of three protesters hurling anti-French slogans as they awaited him on the train platform. Since that moment, giving someone the finger in this country has frequently been described, with a certain degree of fondness, as offering the “Trudeau salute.”

The point is, there I was, a skinny, goggle-eyed rookie reporter, eagerly clutching my notepad, standing on the train platform in Winnipeg amid a gaggle of restless media types, praying the prime minister would slouch off the train and bless us with a few of his legendary quips, or at least flip us an insouciant finger.

But that didn’t happen. We never even caught a glimpse of Trudeau Sr. Instead, after milling around for a bit, we finally spotted three moony little faces pressed up against the glass of one of the train’s windows.

These curious faces belonged to Pierre’s three boys — Justin, the oldest, Alexandre (Sacha) and Michel, the youngest (who was tragically lost when he was swept into a mountain lake by an avalanche while skiing in B.C. in 1998).

On that day, on a windy train platform in Winnipeg, you kind of got the feeling Justin and his beloved brothers were a bit bored.

I have never needed much encouragement to act like an idiot, and so, in an attempt to pass the time and elicit a few laughs from the boys, I began waddling around the platform and scratching myself like an orangutan. It is entirely possible that, at one point, I performed my famed impersonation of an elephant, wherein I use one arm as a makeshift trunk while vibrating my lips to make a loud trumpeting noise.

The highlight came when a fun-loving TV reporter — whose name, sadly, I do not recall — got into the act, rolling his eyes back in his head and then staggering around with arms outstretched in the manner of Frankenstein’s monster.

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This was before the invention of modern video games, so the brothers seemed mighty amused by our journalistic antics, at least until they laughingly scuttled away into the belly of the train.

It was a great moment in the history of modern journalism, but, as far as I can recall, I didn’t write a word about Pierre’s brief Winnipeg stopover, because no one stepped off the train.

For some reason, however, that minor moment in history has always stuck in mind, a happy memory.

And now I like to think that, just maybe, it was one of the early challenges that have helped lead Justin Trudeau to wherever he happens to be this morning. Or not.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca