No Need to Call Him Justin 'Castro' - as a Trudeau He is His Father's Son

Trudeau senior also had great admiration for communism and tyranny

As much as I dislike Justin Trudeau and his policies, I don’t find it amusing when I hear those who share that dislike call him Justin ‘Castro’, jokingly implying that he is the ‘love child’ of Margaret Trudeau and the Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro. Or worse yet, have serious pundits propagate the ‘theory.’

Margaret and Pierre Trudeau got married on March 4th, 1971, and Justin was born on December 25, in the same year—10 months later. There is no evidence that Margaret Trudeau met Fidel Castro during this period.

It might make for a good laugh among those who are frustrated or angered by Justin Trudeau’s authoritarian behaviours and policies, of which there are many. These include introducing a series of government bills limiting freedom of speech, stubbornly hiking the carbon tax against the wishes of the majority of Canadians and introducing vaccine mandates to force Canadians to get COVID 19 vaccines or lose basic rights. Then there was his decision to invoke the Emergencies Act on the Freedom Convoy, thus declaring Martial Law across the country, and seizing the banks accounts and in some cases the assets of convoy participants, not to mention jailing and prosecuting those he viewed as their leaders — a trademark of dictators.

Another troubling red flag is his reluctance to look into what should be viewed as conclusive intelligence and evidence, from his own intelligence services, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seriously interfered in the last three elections that made him Prime Minister. This, together with the supply and confidence deal he made with the NDP to keep him in office, despite having a minority government, provide ample evidence of his autocratic nature and his drive to hang onto power at all costs, something that all dictators are well known for.

Then, of course, there is that answer he gave when asked the question… what country he admired. “You know, there is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green, we need to start, you know, investing in solar, There is a flexibility that I know Prime Minister Stephen Harper must dream about: having a dictatorship where you can do whatever you wanted, that I find quite interesting.”

But, it would seem the elder Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, had similar views when it came to lauding the ‘efficiencies’ of communism that he expressed some 50 years ago, wherein he said, “Under certain conditions, a one-party state would be the ideal government. I wouldn’t be prepared to think I would be successful in arguing that for Canada at the present time,” he said. “But such times might come, who knows?” 

Then there were the comments he made during his 1973 visit to China to commemorate the renewal of diplomatic relations between Canada and China – something he, as Prime Minister, had initiated. Trudeau senior had some very complimentary remarks for his hosts after meeting with CCP Chairman Mao Zedong for several hours. He spoke of Zedong’s genius in creating a system that “in comparison to previous Chinese social systems is striving to provide for human dignity and equality of opportunity for the Chinese people.” This would be the same Mao Zedong  – who during his ‘Great Leap Forward’ was responsible for creating a famine lasting from 1958 to 1962, which killed upwards of 45 million people, many of whom were tortured first or later died in his labour camps.

To say both father and son have a somewhat troubling admiration for communism would be an understatement. Or perhaps, rather fittingly, as the Chinese say, “Tiger father begets tiger son.” 

Photos of a youthful Pierre Trudeau, beside a younger Justin, indicate a significant familial resemblance.

Trudeau the Elder’s interest and admiration for all things communist began at quite a young age. While he was studying political economics at Harvard University he pursued a dissertation examining communism, Marxism and Christianity. But prior to that he had already exhibited such leanings. In his youth he joined an underground organization in Quebec and rioted in the streets with other like minded revolutionaries in an effort to overthrow capitalism. Throughout the 1950’s Trudeau further demonstrated socialist leanings with his close ties to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunner of the NDP, of which he was a supporter and member. He only joined the Liberal Party in the 1960s when it became clear to him that the CCF/NDP did not have the supporters nor the ability to become the ruling party of the country.

So, the joking references to account for Justin Trudeau’s communist leanings by insinuating he is Castro’s spawn, belie the fact that his biological father, papa Pierre, also had many communist leanings. With Trudeau’s senior’s affinity for socialism and the communist regimes of both China and the USSR, along with his admiration for Castro, I think it is fair to say that – little Justin may well have received a thorough schooling in the doctrines of communism, Marxism, authoritarianism and Fascism at his father’s knee.

In fact, in 1989, just months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, a 17 year old Justin, along with his 15 year, old brother Alexandre, (Sacha) accompanied their father on a private family visit to China (fully supported by the Chinese state) where they were introduced to Chairman Mao. During their visit the elder Trudeau took great pains to avoid criticizing China’s actions during the Tiananmen Square protests. He made it clear that China was to be viewed as a friend of Canada whose methods or actions were not to be criticized. 

It should be further noted that long before his visits to China in 1973 and 1989, Pierre Trudeau had visited the country on a number of other occasions. In 1949, Trudeau, as a student, backpacked through China just as communist forces were consolidating the country — sweeping through the major cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. He visited China again in 1960 with his travelling companion, Jacques Hebert, a journalist from Quebec. The CCP at the time, was trying to court political recognition and had offered up a state-sponsored visit with few takers until Trudeau and Hebert took up the offer.

This visit took place in the midst of the Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward which caused the deadly famine that killed millions, yet Trudeau reported that the country was ‘a model of central planning’. This may be due to the fact all the suffering and starvation and labour camps were hidden from the pair. Their Communist Party ‘tour guides’ instead took them on a carefully staged excursion of smoothly run steel mills and fully stocked department and grocery stores as party officials rhymed off propagandized economic figures. Strange how it never occurred to either of them that such a state sponsored visit would be intent on hiding the uglier side of its ‘progress’.

Trudeau and Herbert, posing with a monk, and the cover of their book, "Two Innocents in Red China"

Trudeau would later co-author a book with Hebert rather fittingly titled — Two Innocents in Red China — that praised Mao’s revolution. In it they described visits to a Railway Ministry sleeping-car factory and to an agricultural commune where they watched people smelting pig iron to fashion farm implements. They both concluded, “We are convinced that we are witnessing the beginning of an industrial revolution.”

Trudeau senior was equally enamoured with the USSR. At the age of 32 he travelled to the USSR with four prominent members of the Canadian Communist Party to attend an ‘economic’ conference. This was in 1952, when Joseph Stalin was still ruling the USSR with an iron fist. At this conference that Trudeau told the wife of a senior US diplomat that he was a communist, a Catholic and was in the USSR to criticize the US and praise the Soviet Union. This remark was shrugged off by Canadian diplomats who assured the Americans  that Trudeau didn’t have much common sense and made the remarks in an ‘infantile desire to shock.’ 

It would seem in his desire to praise the USSR, under Stalin, young Pierre had forgotten the Soviet famine that killed somewhere between six to nine million people between 1930–1933 as a result of Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture. It was part of his First Five Year Plan that included forced grain procurement and ordering the liquidation — in other words, murder of the kulaks, who were the land-owning farmers. This massive state persecution of kulaks included arrests, deportations and executions, which drove some kulaks to kill their livestock and destroy crops designated for consumption by factory workers—adding to the death toll.

On his official visit to the Soviet Union in 1971, Trudeau visited the Siberian city of Norilsk, a nickel mining centre built by Soviet slave labour, where he lamented that Canada had no comparable city. It was a Soviet dissident who later reminded Trudeau that Norilsk had been built by gulag prisoners of whom 16,000 didn’t survive.

In 1981, when the communist backed government of Poland imposed martial law to end the wave of strikes across Poland where millions of citizens united in the ‘solidarity’ movement, Trudeau supported the decision of the Soviet authorities saying, “If martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I can say it is not all bad.” Trudeau also showed little sympathy for Soviet dissidents. He referred to Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov as “hooligans.”

And now we return our attention back to Cuba, and Trudeau. A little known fact is that in 1960 Trudeau senior and two friends set off for Cuba from Key West, Florida in a canoe in an unsuccessful attempt to paddle to Cuba. The trio apparently paddled in shifts, but were swamped about 50 kilometres out from shore and were towed back to Florida by the Coast Guard and Trudeau was sent back to Canada. This failed trip coincided with the revolution in Cuba that installed Castro as the leader of the country. Whether Trudeau had plans to join Castro and help him set up his government in the aftermath of the revolution in which he had overthrown the government of Fulgencio Batista or to congratulate him is unknown, as reports of this failed voyage are few and far between. It is, however, ironic that in the years to follow, thousands of Cubans attempting to flee the island dictatorship would die sailing in the opposite direction. Then, after finally making it to Cuba in 1964 Trudeau remarked to a friend, “When you see mass rallies with Fidel Castro speaking for 90 minutes in 100 degree heat you wonder what is the need for elections.”

In 1976, Pierre Trudeau returned to Cuba, becoming the first leader of a NATO country to visit the country since the 1960 American economic embargo. And he did indeed bring his wife Margaret along, as well his youngest son Michel who was just a baby. That’s the baby in the famous photo where Castro is pictured playing with the child — often mistaken for a baby Justin, who would have actually been five years old by then. Trudeau was greeted in Havana by 250,000 cheering Cubans and a 30-foot poster of himself. Trudeau would famously shout at the love-in. “Long live Prime Minister Fidel Castro!”

So there really is no need to imply that Justin Trudeau may be Castro’s son because of his admiration for communism or his authoritarian tendencies. Such claims whether joking or not, disparage the fact that Justin Trudeau comes by his autocratic and communist leanings quite honestly. They are likely a combination of genetics coupled with a pretty healthy dose of tutelage in these ideologies from his father. 

And his brother Alexandre (Sacha) is further proof of this. In 2005, Sacha travelled to China for the re-release of the book, ‘Two Innocents in Red China,’ written by his father, for which he had penned a 33-page introduction. While there he expressed a fascination for the country and was invited by authorities to write his own book about the changes occurring in the country. He took them up on their offer and was given free rein to travel the country to interview artists, migrant workers, business people, city dwellers and farmers to get their views on the Chinese culture and economy. Throughout the journey he was accompanied by a young Chinese journalist named ‘Vivien’ to act as his translator. The resulting book is titled ‘Barbarian Lost: Travels in the New China’.  

To take a quote from an article published in Macleans Magazine back in 2018 title The Trudeau Family’s Love of Tyrants. “Having a soft spot for tyrants prompts multiple blind spots, whether on democracy, the economy or, more recently, on the environment. All have been on display in the Trudeau family’s ongoing infatuation with tyrannies and autocracies. In the comments from Alexandre, Margaret and Justin Trudeau we see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants. But the problem started with Pierre.”

And one final note to remember about what else father and son have in common — Pierre Trudeau and Justin Trudeau are the only two Canadians Prime Ministers, in Canada’s history, to have invoked the War Measures Act or its reformed equal, the Emergency Measures Act, on the country during peacetime.

Materials for this article are based on excerpts from the book The Truth About Trudeau by Bob Plamondon, the book Young Trudeau by Max and Monique Nemni,