LETTER FROM MONTREAL

In the middle of summer, the fire relentlessly devastated Canada’s forest, burning 15 million hectares, an all-time record. But it’s another piece of news that has monopolized the press and social media in Canada. On August 2, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 51, and his wife since 2005, Sophie Grégoire, 48, made their separation public on the Instagram network. “Sophie and I would like to announce that after many thoughtful and difficult discussions, we have made the decision to go our separate ways.”Justin Trudeau wrote on his page with more than 4 million subscribers, specifying that they stayed as parents of three children “Close family, with deep love for each other”.

“Shockwave in the population”headlined the Quebec news site a few hours later VAT News. The information was deemed important enough to be picked up by both the so-called “serious” press and the popular press worldwide.

After all, the separation of “Justin and Sophie” is both the culmination of the series “Love, fame, beauty and politics in the country of the maple”, in which the couple loved each other for almost two decades, and a serious failure in communication , which the Liberal prime minister has carefully crafted since taking office in 2015.

Picture of Canadian Kennedy

In that first campaign aimed at wresting the prime ministership from the conservative camp, Justin Trudeau played the social media card to the full, just as the young Barack Obama had done in the US a few years earlier. Within a few months, he became one of the most popular characters on Instagram.

In a 2019 study published in Communicate, journal of social and public communicationKelly Céleste Vossen analyzed the way the Liberal candidate used the concept of “intimacy”, that flow of information and images that circulates between the private and public spheres, to shape his image as “Canadian Kennedy”. In almost half of the publications published before the election “His status as a husband is highlighted, either by the appearance of Sophie Grégoire (29%) or her wedding ring (18%), or by the discursive use of the first name ‘Sophie’ (10%)”notes the author of the article.

Sophie Grégoire, a former TV presenter from a middle-class family, fed a more “popular” component the bourgeois image of Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, himself Prime Minister of Canada (1968-1979 and 1980-1984). Together they embodied a young, charismatic and loving couple who found their passion in becoming the American magazine’s “One”. Fashionthe day after the win.

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