Transcript of Justin Trudeau's speech during his visit to Fanshawe

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: STEPHANIE LAI

The following is a transcript of Justin Trudeau's speech during his visit to Fanshawe College on September 11th, 2014. You can also download this speech in mp3 format

Thank you. What a pleasure to be here today. Thank you so much for coming out in such large numbers. It’s really great to see people taking an interest in politics, because the fact of the matter is, politics can be a tremendous source of cynicism these days. People tend to get frustrated with good reason when the focus tends to be more on attacking your opponents than on actually serving the country, on building a better consensus, on drawing people together. And that’s very much what I’ve been focused on over the past year, and that’s why I’ve been so encouraged by the response that people are giving to the way the Liberals are approaching this over the past year.

The key to politics is not just about trying to get elected. We’ve seen what happens when a prime minister focuses on just short-term election hearing and on gaining just enough votes to form government or even form majority. The politics of division, the politics of negativity, of attacks can be very affective in order to get elected if that’s your only goal.

But if you actually want to govern the country responsibly, not pit one region against another, not try and gain advantage over one group by playing up to a different group, it becomes really, really hard to govern for the whole if you’ve gone and divided people.

And that’s where for me, the way we run for office is every bit as important as whether or not we win. And that’s something I’ve heard consistently across the country, because Canadians, even though there is cynicism around politics and people throw up their hands and disconnect and choose to vote less — particularly young people — the fact is that Canadians remain tremendously committed as citizens, engaging with the world around them, supporting local causes, supporting community organizations, supporting various single-issue causes, sending money to big international NGOs, taking positions on the grand issues of our time is something that keeps coming back and that Canadians keep doing, because being a good citizen is more than just paying your taxes and obeying the law and voting from time to time. Being a good citizen is being conscious and aware that we each have a responsibility to weigh in in affecting the world around us for the better. We have the potential to do it, so we have the responsibility to do it.

And if people are turning away from politics, it’s not because they’re uninterested in making a difference in the world, it’s just because people remain unconvinced that politics can be actually a vehicle for solving some of the challenges we’re facing. That fits with how people have grown used to voting in elections, particularly at the federal level, where we’re encouraged to vote against the ones we don’t like. We’re resigned to voting for the least worst of the options out there instead of trying to pull together a vision and a set of solutions that is just going to make a difference.

The problem we’re in right now is we’re in a world — and indeed a political structure — that is very much focused on short-term benefits: on what you need to do or say to win the next election cycle, to stay in power for one more mandate. And the emphasis on longterm thinking has been very much removed from how we choose to govern ourselves. And that’s something that quite frankly we need to breakdown, because short-term thinking does not care for the longterm. The choices we make today — we have to be making with a minder how this is going to impact the next generation: What are the longterm implications? And we, as a civilization, could get a way with not thinking about that for many, many centuries. In our history as a species, if we took care of our immediate future, if we took care of our immediate surroundings, we could be reasonably comfortable that other people would be taking of their immediate future and their immediate surroundings, and in the aggregate, our society, our civilization would work.

But we’re now in a completely different model, where the impact of what we take from other parts of the world — the resources we draw on, what we discard into our atmosphere, into our rivers and streams, into our land fields — has longterm consequences and has broad consequences felt around the world.

So, we’re actually having to shift our thinking to be more responsible, more cognizant of the consequences of our choices as citizens and as individuals. But at the same time, we are empowered by knowledge, science and understanding, by communications and compassion and the capacity to understand what’s going on elsewhere around the world and understand that it matters. And we have a set of tools that allows us and therefore obliges us to began to think differently about how we organize ourselves into governments, how we make decisions that, yes, will be a benefit to us now when we need it but has positive implications for the years to come.

That’s why over the past year and for the next year, I’ve been very much focused on building the team and building the plan that’s going to offer this country a better government. Building the team means drawing in people who are not necessarily lifelong politicians: people who have been successful in business; people who have been successful in community service; people who have figured out different paths to success in their lives, who then want to offer themselves in service to their country.

And for me, getting great people to come forward as candidates, as potential MPs, as potential ministers is not just about showing that the Liberal Party is ready to put together a great team and a responsible, better government for Canadians. It’s also about fighting directly against the kind of cynicism that we see in politics, of not believing that it’s a worthy endeavour, because we no longer see the best and the brightest choosing to step up and serve our country. And that’s what I’m so proud to be able to fight against by drawing in great people. But it’s also about building the plan. About understanding that the challenges we’re facing are going to require more than just sound bites and ideologically-based jingles. We’re going to need to give thoughtful, reasonable answers: complex answers to complex questions. And in order to do that, we need to make sure that we’re treating our citizenry like adults. That we are not pretending that there are easy answers to complex questions. That we frame our process through which we will develop answers and policies as a government in a lens that says, ‘OK, these are our values, these are our priorities, this is what the science and research says, these are the best practices around the world, this is the goal we want to achieve with this policy.’ And then actually leave it open for discussion. Do certain experts disagree? Do certain political parties representing different areas or certain MPs representing different areas say, ‘You know what, that’s not going to work for us, because.’ And then we get into a really interesting conversation about what the best way to achieve the goals we all share — of having a prosperous country with a sustainable environment that gives a real and fair chance for everyone to succeed. This is what we all want. How to get there is the challenge that politics should be focused on. Where are the buses going, rather than who drives the bus over whom? And that tends to be what politics is too much about these days.

So, over the past year, I’ve spent an awful lot of time crisscrossing the country, chatting with rooms like this, some much smaller, some even larger, listening to people’s concerns, having people share what they think solutions might be, talking to students, yeah, but talking to scientists, experts, listening to municipal leaders, sitting with provincial ministers and premiers. And remembering that from coast to coast to coast, for all the incredible diversity that makes up Canada, we’re driven by a set of shared dreams and hopes for the future and shared values that define us. We all want to see a better opportunity for ourselves and for our children. We want to see a land that is strong and sustainable, ecosystem services that offer us opportunities now and opportunities for our kids in the coming decades. We want to be able to be promoting peace and stability in the world and the kind of solutions that Canada has been so good at generating over the past century and a half, almost, of its existence.

And we do that by defining ourselves as Canadians differently than how many countries around the world define themselves. When you think of different countries and what a typical citizen of these countries look like, honestly, it’s often based around the language or a culture or an ethnicity or a religion or a shared history or geographic elements that impact upon it. And that’s how many countries define themselves.

Canada has the challenge of never quite being able to do that. We go through moment of angst every now and then, where we’re like, ‘Oh, there’s no Canadian identity. What are we? Well, we’re not American, but that’s not really an answer.’ Well, the Canadian identity is actually based around values that we share. Values of openness, respect, compassion, a willingness to work hard but a desire to be there for each other in times of trouble. A belief in justice, in equality, in opportunity.

These are the things that, quite frankly, all those different countries that we may of thought of like to aspire to in most cases, but we’re the country that actually defines itself through those shared values.

So, why can’t we do a better job of actually collaborating, of working together as political parties, as members of parliament representing our communities? It’s because we’ve forgotten that the centre of politics should be service. Service to your community, service to your country, service to future generations. And a big part of breaking down the very real cynicism that exists around politics is about opening up the conversation the way I’m about to do right now. Allowing people to ask though questions, ask things that preoccupy them, of political leadership. And not just seek as in some cases people won’t get the answers they want, but what I do hope is that you see through the process, the kind of lens that I think politicians should be applying to problems, which is a much more longterm lens, which is refusing to accept that there has to be a zero-sum game. Refusing to accept that we have to make a choice between what’s good for the environment or what’s good for the economy when we know full well that the only way to build a strong future for Canada is to combine both environment and economy in a fully-integrated way.

There are many things like that that are more complex than what we get in regular political discourse. And I believe fundamentally that the only way to actually tackle these problems in any realistic and responsible way is to include citizens in that discussion and particularly young people, because young people coming out to vote is not just about getting a few more ballets on the progressive side, which certainly take, but it’s also about changing the parameters of political discussion away from the immediate short term, more into what’s the impact of this decision going to be five years from now as you guys are looking to buy your first house, 10 years from now as you maybe starting a family and juggling career in that family, 30 years from now as you’re looking to retire and your kids are growing up, what’s the world going to look like there? These are things that you are all eminently capable of thinking about and indeed pressuring leadership to start thinking about. And that’s where if the class of 2015, which are voters who will be able to vote in the federal election for the first time next year, steps up in large numbers and starts basing their choices around longterm vision, responsible planning and not meagre partisanship, I know our country is going to be much better off, because regardless of the X that you put on the ballot in a year from now, what’s going to be much more important is the fact that you’re stepping forward to contribute with your questions, hopefully with some solutions and with your personal commitment to make this country a better place with more opportunity and better-shared prosperity. Thank you very much. Merci.