Back when I was a classroom teacher, from time to time when lessons were done with 20 minutes to spare or I just felt like changing the pace a bit we would play a game called ask “Mr. Trudeau anything”. Questions ranged from how old the universe was (13.7 billion years) to who was the coolest famous person I met as a kid (Robert De Niro) to whether or not it was true that spiders are psychic (real question!). The rules of the game centered around them keeping the questions appropriate and me trying to provide them with useful, genuine answers (and if I couldn’t answer on the spot, I’d do some research and get back to them.) The kids were encouraged to be creative and develop curiosity about the world, and I got to hear what they were thinking about. It also challenged me to be able to explain anything that I thought I knew: big difference between simply knowing something and understanding it well enough to actually teach it.
In the past few years of speaking out on a wide range of topics across the country, the Q&A sessions at the end of my speeches have been for me a continuation of that exercise, and has also proven to be a great way to interact with people with a huge range of interests and concerns.
I don’t yet know how well this idea will adapt itself to our website, but I’m eager to try it out. Ideally, this will allow you all out there to get to know me a little better, while I get to learn about what’s on the minds of the people who visit my site. Of course, I’ll have to choose which questions to answer (I just don’t want this space to become an easy way for the media to get quotes from me), and I’m likely to pick the ones that I find either particularly relevant or just really interesting.
So send in your questions to questions@justin.ca, and I’ll do my best.
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