Justin Trudeau Trivia: 35 interesting facts you didn’t know about the Canadian Prime Minister!

Justin Trudeau is a Canadian politician. He is the 23rd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about him!

1.His full name is Justin Pierre James Trudeau .

2. He was born December 25, 1971.

3. Trudeau 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 (February 8, 1869 – January 28, 1933). Trudeau’s younger brothers Alexandre (Sacha) (born December 25, 1973) and Michel (October 2, 1975 – November 13, 1998) were the third and fourth.

4. Justin Trudeau is predominantly of Scottish, French Canadian, and English descent.

5. His grandfathers were businessman Charles-Émile Trudeau[14] and Scottish-born James Sinclair, who served as minister of fisheries in the cabinet of prime minister Louis St. Laurent.

6. Trudeau’s maternal great-grandfather Thomas Bernard was born in Makassar to an Anglo-Dutch colonial family and immigrated to Penticton, British Columbia in 1906 at age 15 with his family.

7. Through the Bernard family, kinsmen of the Earls of Bandon,Trudeau is the 5th-great grandson of Major-General William Farquhar, a leader in the founding of modern Singapore; he also has 1/256th ethnic Malaccan] and Ono Niha.

8. Justin Trudeau was christened 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.

9. His parents publicly announced their separation on May 27, 1977, when Trudeau was five years old, with his father having custody.

10. 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 federal election on May 22, 1979.

11. The Trudeaus were expected to move into the residence of the Leader of the Official Opposition, Stornoway, at 541 Acacia Avenue in Rockcliffe Park, 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.

12. 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, MP 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. Justin 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.

13. His mother purchased and moved into a new home nearby at 95 Queen Victoria Avenue in Ottawa’s New Edinburgh in September 1979.

14. The Trudeaus returned to the prime minister’s official residence in February 1980 after the election that returned his father to the Prime Minister’s Office.

15. His father had intended Trudeau to begin his formal education at a French Lycée, but Trudeau’s mother convinced his father on the importance of sending their sons to a public school.

16. In the end, Trudeau was enrolled in 1976 in the French immersion program at Rockcliffe Park Public School, the same school his mother has attended for 2 years when her family relocated to Rockcliffe Park while her father served as a federal Cabinet minister.

17. 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

18. 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[57] where 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.

19. Trudeau, then 28, emerged as a prominent figure in October 2000, after delivering a eulogy at his father’s state funeral.

20. Trudeau has a bachelor of arts degree in literature from McGill University and a bachelor of education degree from the University of British Columbia. In his first year at McGill, Trudeau became acquainted with his future Principal Secretary Gerald Butts, through their mutual friend, Jonathan Ablett and Butts invited Trudeau to join the McGill Debating Union

21. They bonded while driving back to Montreal after a debate tournament at Princeton University in which the Princeton team included Ted Cruz, a candidate for the U.S. Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016.

22. After graduation, he stayed in Vancouver and he found substitute work at several local schools and permanent work as a French and math teacher at the private West Point Grey Academy and was roommates at the Douglas Lodge with fellow West Point Grey Academy faculty member and friend Christopher Ingvaldson.

23. From 2002 to 2004, he studied engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, a part of the Université de Montréal.

24. He also started a master’s degree in environmental geography at McGill University, before suspending his program to seek public office.

25. In 2007, Trudeau starred in the two-part CBC Television miniseries The Great War, which gave an account of Canada’s participation in the First World War. He portrayed Talbot Mercer Papineau, who was killed on October 30, 1917, during the Battle of Passchendaele.

26. Trudeau supported the Liberal Party from a young age, offering his support to party leader John Turner in the 1988 federal election Two years later, he defended Canadian federalism at a student event at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, an elite high school which he attended.

27. Trudeau and the rest of the Cabinet were sworn in by governor general David Johnston on November 4, 2015. He said that his first legislative priority was to lower taxes for middle-income Canadians and raise taxes for the top one per cent of income earners after parliament was reconvened on December 3, 2015.

28.Trudeau first publicly expressed an interest in the legalization of marijuana while speaking at a rally in Kelowna, B.C. on July 24, 2013. He told a crowd, “I’m actually not in favour of decriminalizing cannabis. I’m in favour of legalizing it. Tax it, regulate. It’s one of the only ways to keep it out of the hands of our kids because the current war on drugs, the current model is not working. We have to use evidence and science to make sure we’re moving forward on that.

29. Trudeau identifies as a feminist,[198] having stated, “I am a feminist. I’m proud to be a feminist.” Trudeau has also stated that “the Liberal Party is unequivocal in its defence of women’s rights. We are the party of the Charter.” After being sworn in as Prime Minister, when asked by a reporter why he felt gender parity was important when naming his cabinet, he replied simply, “Because it’s 2015.”More recently, he has similarly answered to feminist organizations on social media that “On behalf of the Government of Canada, I am writing back to let you know that I wholeheartedly agree: Poverty is Sexist

30. Trudeau first met Sophie Grégoire when they were both children growing up in Montreal; Grégoire was a classmate and childhood friend of Trudeau’s youngest brother, Michel.

31. They reconnected as adults in June 2003, when Grégoire, by then a Quebec television personality, was assigned as Trudeau’s co-host for a charity ball; they began dating several months later. Trudeau and Grégoire became engaged in October 2004, and married on May 28, 2005, in a Roman Catholic ceremony at Montreal’s Sainte-Madeleine d’Outremont Church.

32. They have three children: Xavier James (born October 18, 2007),[235] Ella-Grace Margaret (born February 5, 2009)a nd Hadrien Grégoire (born February 28, 2014).

33. In June 2013, two months after Trudeau became the leader of the Liberal Party, the couple sold their home in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal

34. They began living in a rented home in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park, the neighbourhood near where Trudeau resided as a child during his father’s time as prime minister.

35. Trudeau has a large Earth inside a Haida raven tattoo on his left arm. The tattoo is based on a design by Robert Davidson, a Haida artist whose grandmother ceremonially adopted Pierre Trudeau as an honorary member of the Haida tribe during a 1976 trip to what was then called the Queen Charlotte Islands.