The Prime Minister’s Office says Trudeau does not recall any ‘negative interactions’ during his visit to a music festival in Creston, B. C., in 2000
One day in August 2000, Valerie Bourne — at the time the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance, a small community newspaper in British Columbia’s southern interior — received a visit in her office from one of the newsroom’s two reporters.
The reporter, a woman in her early 20s whom Bourne later described as having an “awesome work ethic” and a “heart of gold,” told her publisher about an unsettling encounter she said she’d had with Justin Trudeau. Not yet involved in politics, the then-28-year-old Trudeau had come to Creston to attend a music festival raising funds to build a backcountry lodge in honour of his late brother.
“She came to me just because she was distressed,” Bourne told the National Post.
Bourne doesn’t recall the exact words the reporter used to describe the incident. However, in its edition of Aug. 14,2000, the Advance published an unsigned editorial that accused Trudeau of “groping” the reporter.
The now former reporter has declined a request for comment from the Post, which has chosen not to name her. However, both Bourne and the Advance’s then-editor, Brian Bell, told the Post the reporter spoke with them about the alleged incident in its immediate aftermath. What’s more, the reporter appears to have taken steps at the time to make the complaint public; the Post understands she wrote the editorial herself.
Bell, who was on vacation at the time of Trudeau’s visit and of the editorial’s publication, said the reporter spoke with him about the encounter when he returned to the newsroom.
“I believe that it happened,” Bell told the Post. “I know that she told me about it when I got back and I don’t doubt she spoke to the publisher about it.”
The Prime Minister’s Office gave the Post a statement earlier this month saying Trudeau does not recall any “negative interactions” during his visit to Creston that year. Presented Friday with the contemporaneous accounts from Bourne and Bell, Trudeau’s office reiterated the original statement.
The Creston Valley Advance editorial was republished at the beginning of April, verbatim and without context or comment, by Frank, an Ottawa-based political gossip and satire magazine. Earlier this month, Warren Kinsella, a consultant, political commentator, former Liberal operative and frequent critic of Trudeau, posted the editorial on Twitter, setting off a social-media storm. That led to stories about the allegation on conservative U. S. websites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, as well as columns in the Toronto Sun, a post on BuzzFeed, a smattering of coverage in the U. K. and France and a reference in The New York Times. The Post has not previously reported on its contents because it was in the process of authenticating the allegation and researching its author and context.
It has resurfaced amid an international debate about how to define and deal with sexual harassment by men in positions of authority, and in the wake of the #MeToo movement, which has seen many prominent men, including several Canadian politicians, accused of inappropriate behaviour. It is not clear, however, that the allegation fits the template #MeToo has so often exposed of a pattern of inappropriate behaviour towards women by a man in a position of power. The Post is not aware of any other such allegations against Trudeau.
The editorial has also re-emerged in a charged political environment. Though it first appeared in Frank in April, Kinsella’s tweet had it making the rounds on social media and in political circles in the days before Trudeau was to shake hands with U. S. president Donald Trump on Canadian soil for the first time.
The Times’ piece of June 8 was a standard examination of Trudeau’s relationship with Trump against the backdrop of their meeting that weekend at the G7 summit in Quebec, but it began on another note: “Hours before President Trump landed in Canada on Friday, 18-year-old allegations that Justin Trudeau once groped a reporter resurfaced on a website sympathetic to the president,” Canada bureau chief Catherine Porter wrote of Breitbart’s coverage of the allegation. “Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.”
Asked whether the theory had been floated to her that the resurfacing of the allegation was politically motivated, Porter told the Post her story spoke for itself. Frank editor Michael Bate said he couldn’t reveal his sources, while Kinsella said only that he had been given the editorial by someone “active in politics.” Kinsella had previously said on his website that it was a Canadian Member of Parliament.
As prime minister, Trudeau has earned an international reputation as an advocate of women and women’s issues, naming a cabinet containing an equal number of men and women, submitting the federal budget and other government initiatives to gender-based analysis, and pursuing an explicitly feminist foreign policy.
In his 2014 memoir, Common Ground, Trudeau wrote that while a student at McGill University he was “part of the first cadre of men trained to join the women activists in leading discussion groups on sexual assault and date rape.” In an interview with CBC Radio earlier this year, Trudeau said he had been “very, very careful all my life to be thoughtful, to be respectful of people’s space and people’s headspace as well.”
In the original statement emailed to the Post, Prime Minister’s Office spokesman Matt Pascuzzo said Trudeau “remembers being in Creston for the Avalanche Foundation, but doesn’t think he had any negative interactions there.
“As the PM has said before, he has always been very careful to treat everyone with respect. His first experiences with activism were on the issue of sexual assault at McGill, and he knows the importance of being thoughtful and respectful.”
On Friday, the Post asked the Prime Minister’s Office if its staff, or representatives of the Liberal Party, had suggested to any journalists that the resurfacing of the allegation was politically motivated. The Post also asked if, at any point since the festival, a representative for Trudeau, his family or the Liberal Party had ever communicated with the woman who made the allegation. A spokeswoman for Trudeau, Eleanore Catenaro, did not address either of those questions.
The editorial began with an apology it said Trudeau offered the reporter on Aug. 4, which it said was the day after the alleged incident. “I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward,” it quotes Trudeau as saying after learning she had been covering the festival not only for the Advance but for the National Post and Vancouver Sun (at the time all three papers were part of the same newspaper chain).
While the editorial suggests the allegation dates from Aug. 3 and the apology from Aug. 4, the actual dates of the festival were the weekend of Aug. 5-6. Tanya Oliva, the festival’s PR manager at the time, told the Post it was her recollection that Trudeau arrived in Creston on Aug. 5. The Post has not been able to reconcile the discrepancy.
The editorial then took Trudeau to task for allegedly “inappropriately ‘handling’” the reporter.
“Shouldn’t the son of a former prime minister be aware of the rights and wrongs that go along with public socializing? Didn’t he learn, through his vast experiences in public life, that groping a strange young woman isn’t in the handbook of proper etiquette, regardless of who she is, what her business is or where they are?” it asked.
The scathing editorial stood out from the usual community news stories the paper, at the time published twice weekly, covered that month: the search for a permanent surgeon, the quality of the season’s cherry crop and concerns about air quality from nearby forest fires.
The big event in town that August was the second annual Kokanee Summit, a festival sponsored by the local Columbia Brewery and featuring music, games and lots of beer. That year, however, the festival was also helping raise money for the Kokanee Glacier Alpine Campaign.
The Trudeau family had launched the campaign in the wake of the 1998 death of youngest son Michel, killed as the result of an avalanche in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. It sought to raise money for the construction of a new backcountry cabin in memory of Michel and other victims of backcountry avalanches. Justin Trudeau had come to the Summit that year to accept the festival’s donation of $18,500.
At the time, he was still a teacher in Vancouver; the death of his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, was still nearly two months away, as was the eulogy Trudeau would deliver at his father’s state funeral, earning him national headlines of his own and leading to speculation that he could follow in his father’s footsteps with a career in politics.
Coverage of the festival fell to the paper’s young female reporter, whom Bourne showered with praise.
“She had high integrity… wasn’t a gossip. Very professional,” Bourne told the Post.
As Bourne recalled it, the reporter told her the alleged incident between her and Trudeau was brief, lasting no longer than the blink of an eye. Bourne declined to be specific about the exact nature of what the reporter told her out of respect for her privacy.
Bourne said she left it up to the reporter to decide whether or not she wanted to pursue the matter further. “Staff knew I’d have their backs,” she said.
Her recollection was that the meeting ended with the reporter deciding to keep the matter between the two of them.
