I met Justin Trudeau once 30 years ago in the smoky old booze can that was the Vancouver Press Club. I was a reporter back then for the Vancouver Province, which was housed just across Granville Street in the Pacific Press building it shared with the Vancouver Sun. I had filed my writing assignment for the day and before I could be given another one, I informed the city desk that I was going “over the road” and could be reached at the club if any idiot editor had any stupid questions about my brilliant prose. Back in the days before everyone began to carry a cell phone, a reporter had better be available by landline up until press time to field any inquiries a copy editor might make before changing their story. Luckily there was a pay phone by the back door of the club, and it was on speed dial from the city desks at both the Sun and Province. Just as often, at least where I worked, the call never came and the changes were made based on assumption or omniscience without any need for checking, often with disastrous results, which is one of the main reasons I left the newspaper business.

I had no sooner settled in with my first cold beer of the day at the otherwise empty club when the bartender tapped me on the shoulder and told me that someone needed to be signed in. As a private club, you had to be either a member or the guest of a member to drink there, and while I hadn’t paid my dues in years, everyone there knew me only too well and thus assumed I was a paid-up member. I signed in the tall, dark, handsome school teacher who was meeting some friends there but was the first to arrive.

“Justin Trudeau,” he said as we shook hands.

“That’s a famous Canadian name,” I replied. “Any relation?”

“He’s my father.”

I proceeded to tell young Justin what an admirer I was of his dad and how I felt he was our greatest prime minister ever for keeping the country together during the constitutional crisis of the early 1980s. I related how reviled he was when I worked on the business desk at the Calgary Herald back in the late 1970s, which grew into almost hatred as a result of the National Energy Program he introduced in 1980 that forced Albertans to share their oil riches. Wasn’t it ironic, I added, that his father had done his best work after being resurrected from the ashes of an election defeat suffered at the hands of Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in 1979. I simply had to also mention his mother, whose family lived in toney West Vancouver. She had recently adorned the cover of the Simon Fraser University alumni magazine, for which I often wrote, to mark the occasion of its 30th anniversary. Margaret Sinclair, as she was known then, had been a charter student at the university when it opened in 1964, and the magazine’s most recent issue featured a cover picture of her wearing her cheerleader outfit. Had he ever seen a picture of his mother wearing her cheerleader outfit? “No,” he smiled. I suggested he contact the alumni office to order a copy of the latest issue.

Then I asked him the money question, which every experienced reporter knows to leave until the end, lest the interview end abruptly as a result. “Do you have any plans to go into politics yourself?” The answer welled up from inside of him as if it came from the soles of his shoes. He drew in his breath and exhaled the word forcefully.

“Yes.”

The emphasis he put on his answer left me little doubt that he would follow through, and that when he did, he would be perhaps as successful as his father was. Whether that will wind up being the case is yet unwritten, but after almost a decade in power, Trudeau the Younger is certainly following the same path as his father. The blissful honeymoon is long over and after almost a decade in power he is now facing defeat in the next election because charm and charisma can only take you so far. His insistence on regulating the Internet has blown up in his face with Facebook blocking news in Canada, and his willingness to keep bailing out the news media has many convinced he has instead bought off the news media. His high idealism, as exemplified by the carbon tax and the fact that women made up half of his initial cabinet appointments “because it’s 2015,” seems to many Canadians to be costing them dearly. It’s not 2015 any more and many of us are hurting, so Justin will likely soon be blown away by a sharp political wind shift. The good he undoubtedly did, such as keeping the economy going during the pandemic, will likely be forgotten until he is long retired.

That doesn’t mean it’s over, of course, because to fulfill his father’s legacy, or even possibly surpass it, Justin will have to first undergo a miraculous resurrection, and that will require suffering political defeat. His recent answer to the lingering question of whether he would stay on as Liberal leader in the face of a caucus revolt—an emphatic “Yes!”—reminded me of the impressive young man I once met at the Vancouver Press Club. He is nothing if not self-confident, and that will take you a long way these days.

I had forgotten our meeting, even after he entered politics and was elected prime minister. Then it occurred to me. “Hey, didn’t I meet that guy once?” It all soon came back verbatim as if I was living it again in what must be the well-known phenomenon of recovered memory. It has happened to me several times, the first on an overnight watch under a star-lit sky while sailing, when the memory of a sociology professor threatening my life after I appealed a grade suddenly floated to the surface. Then while I was teaching in Malta a few years ago, I saw a biography of Howard Hughes on television and an almost unbelievable memory came flooding back.

The old Press Club is now long gone, closed soon after I went off sailing in 1995, then back to school and on to a career teaching journalism at universities in five countries. Where the Pacific Press building once stood now sit luxury condominiums, and what few newspaper reporters are still left now work from home. Justin Trudeau is still here, however, and he may be here for a while. It would be foolish to count him out so soon, given his family legacy.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.