In light wool trousers, dress shoes and an overcoat that was partly open, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was minimally clothed for the minus 13 degrees Celsius weather on Monday when he stepped out of his official residence to announce his resignation.
Mr. Ignatieff pulled on a Team Canada hockey jersey тАФ conveniently Liberal red in color тАФ and, mostly for the benefit of television camera crews and photographers, went for a skate with some other members of Parliament and senators from his party.
I went ahead of them and randomly stopped other skaters to ask whether they recognized Mr. Ignatieff. Few did. No one waved at Mr. Ignatieff or paid attention to him.
But when Mr. Ignatieff sat on a bench to take off his skates, I heard a commotion on the ice behind me. Mr. Trudeau had arrived тАФ and was immediately swarmed.
[Read: In Canada, Covering the Trudeau News With an тАШOrchestraтАЩ]
Two years later, I got a personal demonstration of that star power.
I interviewed Mr. Trudeau at his constituency office in Montreal for a profile that would appear just after he became Liberal leader in 2013. The office was above a drugstore, and it looked as though the furniture had been left behind by a previous tenant.
We met in a dark boardroom. When we started discussing the death of his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the crowds that lined the route of his funeral train from Ottawa to Montreal, Mr. Trudeau briefly lost his composure and had to get a box of tissues. I had never seen anything like it during an interview with a politician, and have yet to see it since.
After the interview was over, we walked in the same direction down the busy road in front of the office. It was another bone-chilling day. A man ran toward us from across the street, zigzagging through traffic. In African-accented French, he said that all he wanted was to shake Mr. TrudeauтАЩs hand.
[From Opinion: Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy]
[From Opinion: Saying au Revoir to a Trudeau. For Now.]
Even as Mr. TrudeauтАЩs popularity faded in the years that followed, the crowds never did. Nor did his apparent desire to meet people.
Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister whom Mr. Trudeau succeeded in 2015, favored tightly controlled events before carefully selected audiences. In contrast, even outside of election campaigns, Mr. Trudeau held town halls that were open without registration and that often generated overflow crowds even after being moved into larger arenas.
During campaigns, Mr. Trudeau didnтАЩt just stop for selfies and handshakes and immediately move along. If people had questions, he listened and had conversations тАФ usually to the dismay of his staff trying to keep things on schedule.
With this approach, he was sometimes working without a net. In 2017, when his image was just starting to tarnish, I attended a town hall in Peterborough, Ontario, on yet another cold day. While Mr. Trudeau clearly had fans in the crowd, the gathering became raucous.
The Ontario governmentтАЩs electrical utility had introduced steep rate increases. One woman brandished at the prime minister her monthly bill of more than 1,000 Canadian dollars. Even though the utility was not at all under federal control, Mr. Trudeau became the target of the peopleтАЩs wrath.
After he became prime minister, his interviews lost their previous candor. His replies were carefully considered.
Certainly he never again offered anything like his response in that boardroom to why he was opening himself up to the sort of vitriol that his father received as prime minister.
тАЬAm I going to make mistakes? Loads of them,тАЭ he told me in 2013. тАЬIтАЩll be apologizing, IтАЩll stumble through. But I trust my core, I trust my values and I trust Canadians. And if I blow it, it will really be because I wasnтАЩt up to the task.тАЭ
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times and is based in Ottawa. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, he covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades
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