Justin Trudeau Quotes
23rd Prime Minister of Canada
Canada has always been there to help people who need it.
Withdrawing support from globalization is taking us in the wrong direction.
At one point, people are going to have to realize that maybe I know what I'm doing.
A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian. And you devalue the citizenship of every Canadian in this place and in this country when you break down and make it conditional for anyone.
For me, I've always been Justin Trudeau, son of. All my life I've had to know I was carrying a name, and people were paying more attention to what I had to say, and I had to make a choice early on.
I am a teacher. It's how I define myself. A good teacher isn't someone who gives the answers out to their kids but is understanding of needs and challenges and gives tools to help other people succeed. That's the way I see myself, so whatever it is that I will do eventually after politics, it'll have to do a lot with teaching.
The fact is Canadians understand that immigration, that people fleeing for their lives, that people wanting to build a better life for themselves and their kids is what created Canada, it's what created North America.
If we wander around as politicians jumping at every shadow and desperately afraid of having our words taken out of context or attacks layered on in an unfair way, I think we're actually doing a disrespect to Canadians, to people's intelligence.
Openness, respect, integrity - these are principles that need to underpin pretty much every other decision that you make.
Living your life in the public eye is a greater burden than most people can imagine.
We have created a society where individual rights and freedoms, compassion and diversity are core to our citizenship. But underlying that idea of Canada is the promise that we all have a chance to build a better life for ourselves and our children.
I have no regrets.
Ours was not a normal or easy life.
Connecting with Canadians isn't about what you say, it's about what you're listening to. It's about what you understand.
CBC has a very important mandate to bind Canada together in both official languages, tell local stories, and make sure we have a sense of our strength, our culture, our stories.
Anytime I meet people who got to make the deliberate choice, whose parents chose Canada, I'm jealous. Because I think being able to choose it, rather than being Canadian by default, is an amazing statement of attachment to Canada.
I am so proud of my family, and I am happy to give them all the limelight they want because heaven knows I got more than I need.
Canadians are nice and polite. It's not just a stereotype.
The Liberal Party will not vote - no Liberal member of Parliament will vote - to take away a woman's right to choose.
You get more diversity and creativity in your problem solving, and you end up having a much better and more representative approach to solving the challenges faced by the population you serve.
Leadership is inspiring extraordinary people to step up and serve their country.
There was a perception that I'd grown up with a silver spoon in my mouth.
I think it's always been understood that Canada is not a country that's going to stand up and beat its chest on the world stage, but we can be very helpful in modelling solutions that work.
Canada was built around a very simple premise. A promise that you can work hard and succeed and build a future for yourselves and your kids, and that future for your kids would be better than the one you had.
The federal government's role is to establish a process whereby industry can pitch a project, and Canadians can be reassured that this project is worth the risk. That's at the heart of governments granting permits and communities granting permission. People understand we do need economic growth. We do need natural resource projects.
For generations, Canada has been built by hard-working people who want to make sure their kids have a better life than they did.
Gender equality is not only an issue for women and girls.
My father raised us to step toward trouble rather than to step away from it.
People are very much worried that our kids are not going to inherit the same opportunities that we inherited from our parents.
You can't run a government from one single person. What instead matters is that leadership be about gathering around extraordinary individuals and getting the best out of them.
There is no debate about whether or not climate change is happening. We will deal with it as a challenge. But we also take it as an opportunity to invest.
I trust Canadians to be able to look at the different parties, the different leaders, the plans, the teams, and make a responsible choice. And I'm very, very confident that's exactly what Canadians are going to do.
We need the middle class to feel more confident about its prospects and about its future. We need to cut down on this anxiety that sees some people succeeding and the majority struggling - having to make choices between paying for their kids' education or saving for their own retirement.
It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.
I'm not going to reduce the choices of Canadians at the ballot box by backroom deals or secret arrangements. I think that's a cause for cynicism more than anything else.
Parents are the centre of a person's solar system, even as an adult. My dad had a stronger gravitational pull than most, so his absence was bound to leave a deep and lasting void.
We need to make sure we're all working together to change mindsets, to change attitudes, and to fight against the bad habits that we have as a society.
We provide our citizens upward mobility through economic opportunity.
My whole life has been about figuring out the balance between knowing who I am and being who I am and accepting that people will come to me with all sorts of preconceptions.
We know that society is better - more prosperous, more stable, more peaceful, more cohesive - when women's rights are respected and when women are valued, empowered, and lead the way in our communities.
Indigenous lives matter.
If Rob Ford decided he wanted to run for the Liberal Party in 2015, we'd say, 'No, sorry, the way you approach things, the way you govern, the way you behave is not suitable to the kind of Liberal team we want to build.'
When I get out across the country and listen to people, the resentment that I see and the frustration that I see is that we have a generation of people who are fairly convinced that their kids are not going to have a better quality of life or a better future than they will.
Liberals will continue to put forward positive solutions that will help our economy grow and give all Canadians a real and fair chance at success.
I know and I've always felt for Canada that we recognize that diversity is a great source of strength.
We know that trade, NAFTA, the free and open trade between Canada and the U.S. creates millions of good jobs on both sides of the border.
My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.
The Liberal party has always worked with multiple parties in the House to make sure we're being governed in the best interest of Canadians.
Canada's extraordinary success is that we have bound together a vast country with a set of shared ideas and beliefs.
I have nothing against wealth; I believe that government has a role to play in creating it by supporting pro-growth policies. However, success comes with responsibility.
The Northwest Passage is Canadian. People can't just abuse it.
As politicians, we're very, very much trained to say something and stick with it.
I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.
Vancouver is home. I spent a huge amount of time here as a kid growing up with my mom, with my grandparents who lived here.
We went through a long phase where we defined ourselves in opposition to other people and other countries.
My father found cocktail parties challenging.
One of the fundamental responsibilities of any Canadian prime minister is to get our resources to market.
We require Canadians who are collecting EI benefits to prove they are looking for work. It's only fair that we require employers looking to benefit from the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to prove they really need it.
I am so proud to be my mother's son.
Let's not pretend we're in a global free market when it comes to agriculture. Every country protects, for good reason, its agricultural industries.
I think people are looking at Canada and realizing we're a place that is building for the long term and where the world's going to be.
Any time you have a competitive situation like politics is, there are winners, and there are people who don't win, and their supporters can sometimes be very emotional.
One of the things with Canada is we're of a modest enough size that we never feel that the ideal outcome of any given deal is, we win and you lose.
I trust Canadians' capacity to determine who will sit in their Parliament.
One of the reasons why Canadians are generally positively inclined towards immigration is we've seen over decades, over generations, that it works.
The fact is, I'm opposed to coalitions.
In 2012, the Liberal Party affirmed overwhelmingly at the policy convention that we are a pro-choice party. It means that we are a party that defends women's rights, and therefore, it would be inconsistent for any Liberal MP to be able to vote to take away women's rights.
My father's values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals. But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me.
Can I actually make a difference? Can I get people to believe in politics once again? Can I get people to accept more complex answers to complex questions? I know I can. I know that's what I do very well.
We're asking those who have done well to do a little more for the people who need it.
People still think there's sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into. And I get wrapped up in it, too, from time to time.
People in the street will either call me 'Prime Minister' or 'Justin.' We'll see how that goes. But when I'm working, when I'm with my staff in public, I'm 'Prime Minister.' I say that if we're drinking beer out of a bottle, and you can see my tattoos, you should be comfortable calling me 'Justin.'
I don't feel that I or Canada has to prove anything through big, loud, overt acts.
I think Canadians have always been interested in the choices Americans make because the choices you make inevitably impact upon us... and how we make sure that we get that balance right between continuing to have a good relationship and standing for the things we believe in is what we expect of ourselves.
Who cares about winning? We should focus on serving.
If a middle-class family in Shanghai or Guangzhou is looking for a good-quality product, we want them to look at a maple leaf and say, 'OK, it's good quality.'
This is the kind of balance people expect: both environment and the economy - not one or the other.
Certainly in a world where terrorism is a daily reality in the news, it's easy for people to be afraid. But the fact is that we laid out very clearly - and Canadians get - that it's actually not a choice between either immigration or security: that of course they go together.
Politicians are constantly stuck between what is politically expedient and politically beneficial and what is the responsible or right thing to do. It's a tension we all go through.
Every day, at home, I have the astonishing and humbling opportunity - together with my wife Sophie - to nurture empathy, compassion, self-love, and a keen sense of justice in our three kids.
I think it's hard to know how one deals in situations of confrontation until you're actually in there, so I'm not going to speculate on what I would do.
I think growing an economy is a good way to help with a deficit, but ultimately, it's about fiscal discipline and responsible spending - and smart decisions.
I think I'd work on making sure that Canadians have opportunities to find good jobs, to grow, to gain stability in terms of pensions. The reality is that Canadians don't feel that our economy is working for us.
People are very sophisticated in their concerns about various parties, in their hopes for what the next government could look like. And I'm not going to prejudge any possible outcomes.
I had to learn to dismiss people who would criticize me based on nothing, but I also had to learn not to believe the people who would compliment me and think I was great based on nothing. And that led me to have a very, very strong sense of myself and my strengths.
One of the challenges that Vancouver and cities across the country are facing is that we don't have a federal partner in terms of building for transit, not in the way we need.
I think Canadians are tired of politicians that are spun and scripted within an inch of their life, people who are too afraid of what a focus group might say about one comment or a political opponent might try to twist out of context, to actually say much of anything at all.
I think people understand that if you're going to have a successful economy, you need people's potential to be realized. That means education. It means university education, sure, but it also means training, apprenticeships and various kinds of skills diplomas that we know are necessary.
I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments.
Open nominations means it is local Liberals who choose who gets to be their representative. But what that doesn't mean is that somebody can behave any which way and bully other people out of the nomination and then be the last person standing.
We're committed to making sure parents have affordable, quality early learning for their kids - there's no question about it.
I have been incredibly lucky all my life. I've had a family that has loved me and given me incredible opportunities. I've gone to great schools. I've travelled across the country.
Our child benefit goes directly to the families who need it the most.
I have a very difficult, high-pressured job. Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.
When I get passionate or worked up about an issue, I say things that the Conservatives and opponents and critics like to pounce on.
Canadians want to elect good people to be their voice in Ottawa.
I think we're pretty much where we need to be on corporate taxes.
When my father died, I had millions of people supporting me in a very, very difficult time. I have received so much from this country. I realize that we're defined in life not by what we get from this world but by what we have to offer it, and I know that I have a lot to offer this country, and I'm serious about devoting my life to it.
I think we need to price carbon; there's no question about it. The way we do it needs to be based on science and not political debates and attacks, and that's why I'm drawing on experts and best practices from around the world.
I've made the commitment to Canadians that I'm going to stay myself, and I'm going stay open about it, and I'm going to make sure that the thoughtfulness with which I approach issues continues to shine through.