What are we to think about our former PM’s new lovelife?

Patrick Gossage • August 11, 2026
Podium on a beach with a feather boa, heart-shaped sunglasses, and a yacht in the background

Watching cringeworthy video of our former PM’s hand on popstars Katy Perry’s bum at the Tribeca film festival gave me pause about who our former leader had become. There’s more - they made their official red carpet appearance at the premiere of "Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour," in June 2026, where Perry called Trudeau "the love of my life". Later, she gushingly dedicated a song “I’m his, he’s mine”, at a concert. Then photos in People magazine: a deep smooch at their recent getaway in St.Tropez. To top it off, Trudeau made a surprise background cameo appearance in a widely seen promotional social dance clip for Perry's music.


All this love coverage fforces us to ask - who has he become? - Perhaps what he always was – a self possessed handsome guy with great hair who loves the spotlight and has found a new one?

 

This is now a classic Hollywood couple. Both must co-parent with their respective exes and both had high profile breakups; Perry shares a daughter with Orlando Bloom, and Trudeau shares three children with Sophie Grégoire. Next photo op will feature the happy mixed family!


Whatever, they are basking in the flood of coverage of their relationship. And not shy at all about inviting it. Not that his father did not enjoy dating high profile stars. Trudeau dated Barbra Streisand from 1969 to 1970. Streisand later reflected fondly on him in her memoir, describing him as brilliant, adventurous, and elegant. The future Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall called up Trudeau’s office to ask him out after meeting him at a film premiere in 1980, later calling him a total gentleman and a dream date. Trudeau was also in relationships with other notable well-known women after his marriage breakup, including actress Margot Kidder, and an eight-year affair with beautiful classical guitarist Liona Boyd. My experience with the single PM found him endlessly interested in beautiful young women, several of whom I introduced to him. So maybe it’s genetic.

 

But the elder Trudeau was madly in love with Margaret, who was stunning and 29 years younger than he. He was faithful to her, and refused to ever speak ill of her. She left him, unable to fulfill the role of wife of a heavily engaged Prime Minister. His eldest son Justin was widely rumoured to have an “open marriage” with Sophie. She said she chose "authenticity over attachment" and faced immense stress from public life and left him in 2023 after 18 years. She soon hooked up with an Ottawa Doctor who lived in her building. Justin met Katy in Montreal in 2025.


Justin, however, is now trying to be more than the bare-chested adonis hugging with his girlfriend on the beach. He has signed with the Harry Walker agency, who books the Obamas and Clintons, to speak on democracy and leadership for six-figures. He made a lot of money before getting into leadership speaking. Not covered much, he spoke at the recent Davos meeting with an adoring Katy in the front row. Will the playboy personality help get serious engagements?

 

Eric Blais, a Toronto Star columnist, in a recent piece put his finger on what bothers me about our ex PM’s public galivanting: "A former G7 prime minister is one of the few faces through which the world sees the country, so when the image it sees is the groupie boyfriend, it becomes, awkwardly, a little bit ours.” Indeed. Does he stop being the face of the country because he wants to hustle a willing star?

 

For me what it shows is something we already suspected. A lack of judgment when it comes to his personal image and reputation. We remember with regret his weeklong trip to India in February 2018 when he and his family faced intense mockery for continuously wearing elaborate, high-end traditional Indian garments. He embarrassed us all.

 

Ironically, some of his worst and most criticized decisions related to how he treated powerful women, despite his much spoken of “feminism”. He faced severe criticism regarding his treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould, the powerful Indigenous woman who served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General from 2015 to 2019. It was alleged that Trudeau and his office improperly pressured her to drop a criminal prosecution against engineering giant SNC. He subsequently removed her from office and caucus. She resigned and pulled down Trudeau veteran friend, loyalist and Principal Secretary Gerald Butts.

 

The other power woman and key member of the Trudeau team who ran head on into Justin was his Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland. In December 2024, Chrystia Freeland resigned her post as finance minister, citing disagreements with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on how to respond to incoming President Donald Trump's threat of tariffs. She said the decision came after Trudeau informed her that he no longer wanted her in the post. This was a day before she was set to give an annual fiscal government update in parliament. Five MP’s immediately called for Trudeau’s resignation. In the aftermath of Chrystia Freeland's bombshell, the Liberal Party's Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic MPs soon came to the same conclusion. In early January he resigned as Liberal leader and stayed on until a new leader was named.

 

On March 9, 2025, Mark Carney won the Liberal Party of Canada leadership race to become Canada's 24th prime minister. That summer, Justin, now free of all political obligations, met Katy Perry in Montreal. His new life began. 

 

That he chose to partner with a high profile singer and start a very public life as a consort of showbiz woman is puzzling, given his dedication to public service and progressive causes, including, feminism, indigenous needs, child poverty, lowering child-care costs, the environment, even pharmacare. He could have continued to champion these causes just as his father continued to champion meaningful constitutional reform by opposing the Meech Lake Accord after his stepping down from office.

 

As a piece in the New York Times opined: “Forget the elder statesman dispensing hard-won wisdom sparingly from the wings (the usual next act of those once elected to the highest seats in whatever land). Behold the celebrity statesman. Or the paparazzi-magnet politician. It is but one of the various incarnations Trudeau has assumed since leaving office in March 2025 (and separating from his wife in 2023). Though unquestionably the most striking.

 

One wonders what the depth of his commitments to progressive beliefs was, given that he is watching a very radical change from his priorities under Carney, and is silent. Securing one’s legacy obviously was not top of mind for Justin, as he now plays the happily-in-love partner of a singer. And he can still be talked about in the press as a very different public personality. 

Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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