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TOP STORY
It’s a comment that mostly escaped notice in the mainstream political press, but on Wednesday Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre obliquely referenced one of the most persistent and insidious Ottawa rumours against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
During a Question Period argument with Trudeau, Poilievre slammed the prime minister as having been a “high school drama teacher.”
“Yes, I was a high school teacher before getting into politics, and I am having a little trouble remembering what exact job the Leader of the Opposition had before getting into politics,” replied Trudeau in a snide reference to the fact that Poilievre never actually had a non-political career before winning election to the House of Commons at age 25.
To this, the Conservative Leader replied, “Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister left right in the middle of a semester, and I am having trouble remembering why.”
In the words of one political reporter, “no way Poilievre just made that joke in QP.” Careful observers would note that Scott Aitchison and Michael Chong, two of the more temperate members of the Conservative caucus, seemed to react to the comment with expressions of cringe. In an op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen former Stephen Harper staffer Andrew McDougall noted that Poilievre had said something that deftly escaped the notice of ordinary Canadians but delighted an “online fringe.”
The basic outlines of the rumour are this: That Justin Trudeau’s brief career as a high school teacher was cut short in the middle of a semester due to an incident of sexual misconduct that has since been covered up.
It’s an unsubstantiated story known to virtually every MP, staffer and political journalist in Ottawa. And ever since it started hitting conservative news blogs during the 2019 election, the story has been chased down by no shortage of Canadian political reporters – including an investigative team from Postmedia.
But after four years, not a single scrap of credible evidence has emerged to support it. No documentation. No accusers. And absolutely everybody who would have privy to details of such a thing has denied anything happened.
While skeptics maintain this is all due to an elaborate Trudeau family cover-up, it’s worth noting that the West Point Grey Academy community has not previously been shy about releasing information that could damage the reputation of the prime minister.
It was during the 2019 election that West Point Grey alumnus Michael Adamson leaked the school’s 2000/2001 yearbook to Time magazine. Inside was the now-infamous photo of Trudeau in brownface at a school gala, and its publication would soon prompt the release of many more images showing a young Trudeau in ethnic makeup.
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And if the Trudeau family really did have some all-powerful machine to quash sexual misconduct allegations, it’s notable that they missed a pretty big one from around that same time.
In 2000, the Creston Valley Advance – the local newspaper in Creston, B.C. – published a front-page editorial criticizing the behaviour of then 28-year-old Trudeau during the latter’s visit to the Kokanee Summit festival.
The paper denounced Trudeau’s “inappropriate handling” and “groping” of one of the paper’s reporters when she tried to interview him at the event.
When the editorial resurfaced in 2018, the woman at the centre of the allegation did confirm the details with reporters and even issued a statement.
“The incident referred to in the editorial did occur, as reported. Mr. Trudeau did apologize the next day. I did not pursue the incident at the time and will not be pursuing the incident further,” said Rose Knight in a 2018 release to media.
The National Post also spoke with two editors of the Creston Valley Advance from that era, who both confirmed that the reporter returned from her Kokanee Summit festival assignment with a detailed account of having been sexually harassed by the son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
“I had no reason to doubt what the reporter told me about what happened when I returned, nor to doubt the credibility of the editorial that was written about it,” Brian Bell said in 2018. “And I do not have any doubts now that there was some sort of physical contact that was unwelcome and improper according to the standards of the day.”
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Trudeau’s reaction to the incident coming to light was to say that after careful reflection, he had concluded that he had not “acted inappropriately in any way.” “But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently,” he said.
It was a very different story in 2019 when Postmedia and other reporters were similarly calling up West Point Grey alumni from the 2000/2001 school year to figure out why “Mr. Trudeau” had left mid-semester. The response was either “no comment” or an adamant claim that whatever motivated the departure, it wasn’t unseemly.
Clive Austin, the headmaster from that era, issued a statement to CTV in which he dismissed any claims that sexual misconduct motivated the mid-year departure.
“I can tell you with complete certainty that there is no truth to any speculation that he was dismissed,” wrote Austin.
Meanwhile, reporters at the time also asked then Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer if his party – and in particular one of their consultants-for-hire, Warren Kinsella – had any hand in spreading the West Point Grey rumour around the internet.
Ultimately, the rumour appears to be extrapolated entirely from the fact that Trudeau did indeed leave his employ at West Point Grey Academy in the middle of a semester.
And Trudeau’s foils have dug up a few specific references in the aforementioned West Point Grey yearbooks. The 2001 grad pages include a class-wide poll as to which student had the “Biggest Crush on Mr. Trudeau.”
In an Oct. 2019 column for the conservative outlet True North, editor-in-chief Candice Malcolm wrote that one student in the 2001 graduation class included the following in her grad statement, “JT … thanks for making my life at WPGA a lot more interesting/amusing!”
“There are no other students with those initials in the graduating class that year,” wrote Malcolm.
And – much as is the case today with the prime minister’s habit of constantly hugging caucus members – the yearbook appears to show a teacher who’s a bit touchier than usual, particularly by the standards of a high-end B.C. private school.
The infamous brownface photo shows Trudeau grasping the arm and shoulder of a fellow teacher. A 2000 yearbook shows Trudeau posing among a group of female teachers while striking a pose as James Bond.
Several photos of Trudeau as coach of the school’s ultimate frisbee team similarly show him with arms around his male charges.
Trudeau mentions the circumstances of his departure from West Point Grey Academy in the memoir Common Ground, which was published five years before the emergence of any internet rumours that he was dismissed from the school.
Trudeau wrote that he parted ways with the school after a dispute with the “conservative West Point Grey administrators.”
As Trudeau describes it, a student named Wayne was constantly getting called out for wardrobe violations, which he decried as a “double standard” because female students were constantly wearing skirts that were shorter than regulation length without incident.
So, Trudeau encouraged Wayne to write about it in the school’s in-house newspaper, including the student’s theory that “the predominantly male teachers felt uncomfortable pointing out to teenaged female students that their skirts were way too short.”
The response from administrators, according to Trudeau, was to discipline and shut down the student newspaper.”
The incident “convinced me that West Point Grey was not the best fit for me as a teacher, nor I for them.”
IN OTHER NEWS
It’s mostly escaped notice in English Canada, but Quebec has started implementing the provisions of Bill 96, the supercharged version of Bill 101, the infamous “language police” legislation that, among other things, required French text on public signage to be larger than non-French text. Bill 96 takes the province’s language regulation quite a bit farther by requiring the mandatory speaking of French even within large swaths of the private sector. Starting this week, small Quebec companies must now begin fulfilling a Bill 96 requirement to inform the provincial government of the precise number of their staff that is “not capable of communicating in French.”
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