Trudeau tried to exorcise family ghosts out west. His own spectre may linger

There were no F–k Trudeau bumper stickers or flags flying here and there around Alberta when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's father ran the country a couple generations ago. That may owe more to society's comparative politeness back then, rather than the intensity of the sentiments.

Because the bitterness lingered for decades beyond Pierre Trudeau's decision to leave office in 1984.

Despite all his attempts to forge success as a Trudeau out west, the current prime minister resigns as the reviled subject of foul-mouthed flags and political savaging-by-association, and it's an open question as to how long the seething will last in this second iteration.

Richard Maksymetz remembers door knocking for the federal Liberals in the 1990s in Calgary. "Somebody at every fourth or fifth door would mention the NEP or Trudeau Sr.," he said, referring to the early-'80s federal policy of oil price controls and revenue sharing that infuriated Alberta and contributed to cratering the region's economy.

Justin Trudeau wouldn't have come up at those Calgary doorsteps, he was just a university student in those days. But he certainly understood a thing or two about the residual sentiments out west about his family brand when he entered his dad's professional field.

When he launched his bid for the Liberal leadership in 2012, Trudeau was deliberate about making his first campaign stop in Calgary, at a cultural centre in the city's northeast.

He was out to plant a party flag in territory that had been hostile to Liberals even before his father's tenure. And he intended to confront the family legacy head-on.

"I promise you I will never use the wealth of the West as a wedge to gain votes in the East," he told the partisan crowd.

"It was the wrong way to govern Canada in the past, it is the wrong way today and it will be the wrong way in the future."

Showing the financial capital of oil country that this Trudeau was his own man with his own ideas and openness to that piece of the western economy appeared important. After becoming leader, he gave a speech to business executives at the Calgary Petroleum Club — to stress the importance of developing energy and natural resources, and marketing them abroad.

Trudeau's campaign received plenty of advice from pundits and "casual cocktail Liberals" to not bother devoting political resources to places like Edmonton or Calgary, says Dan Arnold, who used to blog as Calgary Grit before becoming the federal Liberals' lead research strategist and, later, the prime minister's director of research and advertising.

"Trudeau himself genuinely was committed to a breakthrough in Western Canada," he said. "And [he] was of the belief that somebody who lives in Calgary, when you're talking about demographics, values and trends, is a lot more like somebody who lives in a place like Toronto than in rural Alberta."

In that first run, in 2015, Trudeau's efforts paid off. The Liberals hadn't won a single Calgary seat since 1968, the first campaign Pierre Trudeau led; nearly a half-century later, two seats in the city turned red, along with two in Edmonton.

Now, this still wasn't quite urban-Calgary-as-Toronto; Liberals swept the Ontario capital, while the two pickups in Cowtown came against eight seats that remained Conservative, most of them comfortably so. But Trudeau had created a Liberal beachhead in his rivals' heartland, and had seemed to exorcise the ghosts of the NEP and his father.