LETTER FROM MONTREAL
In the heart of summer, the fire relentlessly consumed the Canadian forest, burning 15 million hectares, an absolute record. But it is another news that has monopolized the press and social networks in Canada. On August 2, the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, 51, and his wife since 2005, Sophie Grégoire, 48, made public their separation on the Instagram network. “Sophie and I want to announce that after many thoughtful and difficult conversations, we have made the decision to go our separate ways”wrote Justin Trudeau on his page with more than 4 million subscribers, specifying that, parents of three children, they remained a “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 taken up worldwide, by the so-called “serious” press, as well as by the popular press.
Because the break-up of “Justin and Sophie” is both the acme of the series “Love, glory, beauty and politics in the land of maple”, in which the couple have enjoyed each other for almost two decades, along with a serious glitch in the communication painstakingly crafted by the Liberal Prime Minister since he came to power in 2015.
Image of “Canadian Kennedy”
During this first election campaign aimed at snatching the office of prime minister from the conservative camp, Justin Trudeau played the social network card to the full, as the young Barack Obama had done a few years earlier in the United States. In a few months, he became one of the most popular figures on Instagram.
In a study published in 2019, in Communicate, journal of social and public communicationKelly Céleste Vossen analyzed the way in which the Liberal candidate used the concept of “intimacy”, this flow of information and images circulating between the private sphere and the public sphere, to forge his image as “Canadian Kennedy”. In almost half of the publications posted before the election, “His status as a husband is highlighted, either through the appearance of Sophie Grégoire (29%) or her wedding ring (18%), or through the discursive use of the first name ‘Sophie’ (10%) »notes the author of the article.
Sophie Grégoire, former television host, 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). Between them, they embodied a young, charismatic and loving couple, who found their consecration by making the “one” of the American magazine voguethe day after the victory.
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