Common Ground Quotes

“I would agree that encyclopedia’s could teach me facts, but only a great story could transport me into the mind of another person. These stories taught me about empathy, about good and evil, about love and sorrow. My tastes covered many different genres, but the books I loved most proposed the idea that ordinary people (not to mention hobbits) are born with the capability to do extraordinary, even heroic things. The realization came as a sort of code to all the lessons my parents had taught me about looking beyond wealth and appearances, and appreciating the worth of everyone I met.
It’s a lesson that sticks with me to this day. No real leader can see the people around them as static creatures. If you cannot see the potential I the people around you, it’s impossible to rouse them to great things. That may be one of the reasons why, even now, I always make time for a novel or two every month, amongst the mountains of serious works and briefing notes. Facts may fuel a leader’s intellect. But literature fuels the soul.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Their approach is to exploit divisions rather than bridge them. Perhaps that’s an effective political strategy, but it’s lousy way to govern a country, especially one as diverse as ours. Once you’ve divided people against one another—East against West, urban against rural, Quebec against the rest of Canada—so you can win an election, it’s very hard to pull them back together again to solve our shared problems.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“My idea of freedom is that we should protect the rights of people to believe what their conscience dictates, but fight equally hard to protect people from having the beliefs of others imposed upon them.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“O Great Spirit whose voice I hear in the winds, and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me. I stand before you: one of your many children, I am small and weak; I need your strength and wisdom. Let me walk in beauty, and make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset, Make my hands respect the things you have made, my ears sharp to hear your voice, Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people, Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock. I seek strength, not to be greater than my brothers, but to fight my greatest enemy, myself. Make me always ready to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes, So when life fades, as the fading sunset, my spirit may come to you without shame.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Many immigrant families I met in Papineau brought with them lingering animosities from their country of origin, but they accepted that Canada was a place where people come to escape old-world feuds, not to nurture them. So what does multiculturalism mean to these people—and to me? It means a presumption that society will accommodate forms of cultural expression that do not violate our society’s core values. These include the right of a Jew to wear his kippa, a Sikh to wear his turban, a Muslim to wear her headscarf, or a Christian to wear a cross pendant.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“our modern Canadian identity is no longer based on ethnic, religious, historical, or geographic grounds. Canadians are of every possible colour, culture, and creed, and continue to celebrate and revel in our diversity. We have created instead a national identity that is based on shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity. And while many of the almost one hundred countries I’ve travelled through in my life aspire to those values, Canada is pretty much the only place that defines itself through them. Which is why we’re the only place on earth that is strong not in spite of our differences but because of them.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“A menudo me he preguntado cómo hubiera reaccionado mi padre al uso generalizado de los ataques personales por parte de algunas personas del contexto político actual, que prefieren eso a plantear un serio debate relativo a las cuestiones que hay sobre la mesa. No me cabe duda de que le repugnaría y, sí, se sentiría decepcionado por todos nosotros, y de que encontraría el modo de expresar su opinión con la fuerza de una tonelada de ladrillos cayendo, pero sin necesidad de recurrir a los mismos ataques personales que estuviera condenando.”
― Justin Trudeau, Todo aquello que nos une: Mi autobiografía (Deusto)

“These Conservatives are not interested in building on the common ground where we have always solved our toughest problems. Their approach is to exploit divisions rather than bridge them. Perhaps that’s an effective political strategy, but it’s lousy way to govern a country, especially one as diverse as ours. Once you’ve divided people against one another—East against West, urban against rural, Quebec against the rest of Canada—so you can win an election, it’s very hard to pull them back together again to solve our shared problems.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Michel’s death made my father question his faith, but it had the opposite effect on me. Amidst all the searing emotional pain I was feeling, I had a moment of revelation: despite all the torment and confusion we suffer in this valle lacrimarum, a divine sense of the universe exists, one we cannot comprehend. With this revelation came an oddly empowering sense that my life, like everyone else’s, is in God’s hands. This awareness hasn’t absolved me of the need to struggle for a better world and a better self, but it has helped me deal with things I cannot change, including death. It also helped reaffirm the core of the Christian beliefs I retain to this day.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Simply put, the emphasis was therefore on maintaining a society of farmers and lumberjacks, with a small cadre of lawyers, priests, doctors, and politicians to oversee it. Money and business were left to les Anglais. This situation grew untenable, of course, by the mid-twentieth century, and a number of thinkers, artists, and writers (of whom my father was one) fomented the Quiet Revolution, making education, urbanization, and secularism key pillars of modern Quebec.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“The response, in the rallying cry that Preston Manning would make famous, was “The West Wants In.” It says something profoundly optimistic about westerners and encouraging about Canada that the slogan wasn’t “The West Wants Out.” In the entrepreneurial fashion that has come to rightly typify the West, the local response to a political movement that excluded them was to create one that couldn’t live without them, and to build that movement until it governed the whole country. When you take a step back and think about it, it was an awesome achievement, maybe unparalleled in our political history.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“I think that the NDP’s predisposition is to be suspicious of growth and economic success, and that their policy orientation reveals this, no matter how they try to hide it rhetorically. Liberals understand that economic growth is the foundation for all else we want to achieve in areas of social policy.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“In their enthusiasm to oppose Mr. Harper and the Conservatives, I think they’ve been getting the big things wrong about this country. For example, Canada’s prosperity depends upon our ability to develop our natural resources and get them to world markets. Every prime minister in our history would agree with that. Today, that means we have to create more environmentally sustainable ways of getting this job done, but it serves nobody to suggest that western Canada’s resource wealth is a “Dutch disease” that weighs down the rest of the economy. My party learned that painful lesson under my father’s leadership. Using western resource wealth to buy eastern votes is a strategy that, ultimately, impoverishes all Canadians.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“Since the early 1890s, when Wilfrid Laurier implemented the most ambitious immigration expansion the country has ever seen, we have always understood that immigration is essentially an economic policy. The argument that this is a conservative innovation is frequently made by those don’t know the country’s history very well. The economic value of immigration has always been recognized. We wouldn’t have much growth without it.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“For a year I had a weekly segment on French radio with CKAC, covering current events (and being their official 2004 Olympics correspondent from Athens), which gave me the chance to get to know the Quebec media and cultural scene from the inside. It also taught me how powerful radio can be as a means of connecting with people. You can’t be phony on radio: your voice and tone will give you away. And people don’t care what your name is after the first ten seconds. All that matters is what you have to say, how you say it, and that you’re speaking to people, not at them.”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground

“The irony was that despite having modernized Canada’s divorce laws in the 1960s, his personal faith held that “what God has joined, let no man tear asunder.” He even apologized to me once, years later, for not ever being able to provide his teenage sons with a maternal presence in our lives in Montreal: he simply felt that he could never remarry. I of course reassured him that it was of no matter to us, but the lesson he taught me about the distinction between private faith and public responsibility was one that would later guide my own thinking about leadership.)”
― Justin Trudeau, Common Ground