YOU’VE seen the pictures of the hunky new prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, but here’s a much more important question. Is his broadcaster wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, the hottest first lady on Earth?
Sophie, 40, and Justin, 43, both of them bilingual in English and French, have known each other since they were children because she was classmates and friends with his little brother Michel, who later perished in a 1998 avalanche. She recalled in an interview that when she was 12 and he was 16 and both were growing up in Montreal, it was like they were “worlds apart.” She struggled with bulimia in high school, went on to study at McGill University and the Université de Montreal, then landed a job as a TV newscaster covering celebrities. She is active in charities such as BACA, which works to educate about eating disorders, and says, “I don’t weigh myself. I don’t have a scale in the house.
When Sophie saw Justin’s picture in the papers some years ago, before he had even started his political career, she told her mother she felt they were meant to be together. Her mother laughed and said, “You and every other girl, Sophie!” The two wound up co-hosting a charity function together in 2003, but when she sent him a follow-up email the next day, he ignored it. Three months later, when they ran into each other on the street, he asked for her number. She said no because “I wanted him to work [for it],” she told blogger Erica Diamond. He got her number from her mother, then on their first date told Sophie, “I’ve been waiting for you 31 years. You’re going to be my wife. We’re going to have a family together.” They married in May 2005 and today their children, Hadrien, Ella-Grace and Xavier, are 1, 6 and 8 years old, respectively.
Despite having a knockout wife, Trudeau has been dogged by rumours of infidelity, which he denied last year in an interview with the Canadian news service CBC in which he added, “Our marriage isn’t perfect, and we have had difficult ups and downs, yet Sophie remains my best friend, my partner, my love. We are honest with each other, even when it hurts.” In the same interview, Trudeau said sometimes Sophie hates his job, and hates him for loving it.
Sophie’s take on the question about infidelity was this: “Ask if whatever happened in our lives — I’m not saying it did or didn’t — as if we would answer that,” she told Global News. “I can tell you right away that no marriage is easy,” she added. “I’m almost kind of proud of the fact that we’ve had hardship, yes, because we want authenticity. We want truth. We want to grow closer as individuals through our lifetime and we’re both dreamers and we want to be together for as long as we can. I’m happy that we had to go through that.
Even in placid Canada, being a celebrity couple can be a freak magnet. Last year, Sophie and her children were sleeping in their Ottawa home (Trudeau was away) when a drunken 19-year-old man broke into their house and left a letter deemed“threatening.” In magnanimous Canadian style, the man wasn’t charged, explaining that he thought he had entered a friend’s home, and that he wished to write an apology to the Trudeaus.
Still, Sophie, who is a certified yoga instructor and also composes music in her spare time, is as upbeat as can be in interviews. She said that 10 years ago, she made a list of what she wanted out of life, and everything had already come true. And that was before she became Canada’s first lady-elect. “I still have dreams, but instead of having them written on a little piece of paper, I live a little bit of them every day,” she told Diamond. “I used to stress out if I wasn’t attaining my goals by their due date, but not anymore.
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