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PART 1 OF 2

We're waiting for Justin Trudeau outside a brown, two-storey building on rue Faillon in the northern Montreal neighbourhood of Villeray. It's drizzling and cold. And it's a Sunday morning. I suspect that most people would rather be in bed.

"Did I keep you waiting long?" Trudeau says apologetically, emerging with an assistant from a silver sedan. The interview was scheduled for ten; it's scarcely four minutes past.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada's first and only superstar politician, but his son's success relies on more than mere renown. It relies on working while others might be relaxing. Justin Trudeau was credited with rolling up his sleeves to earn his victory in the riding of Papineau during last October's general election. In a tough fight, his margin of victory was about 1,200 votes, less than 3% more than his main rival, the popular Vivian Barbot of the Bloc Québécois.

"Nobody will ever be able to say that I was handed an easy win," Trudeau says about his choice to run in Papineau.

But the riding was also more than a place to test his mettle. Trudeau clearly also very much admires the social landscape of the place.

"There's a great neighbourhood feel; rents aren't too expensive; there's lots of families; there's a great dynamic," he says.

I ask him where in the riding is his support strongest, and conversely, where is it weakest? In his reply, I get a quick lesson in local demographics and it's easy to picture Trudeau, the school teacher, a job he held in Vancouver in his early thirties. During his father's career, this riding was Italian in the east, French in the middle, and Greek at its western flank of Parc Ex. Since then, recent waves of migration have created a more diverse mosaic, with Haitians and Hispanics settling in the east of the riding, and South Asians dominating Parc Ex in the west.

Trudeau admits that his name helps him politically, especially with the older generation of Greeks and Italians. With young voters he gets by on the strength of the reputation he has forged for himself. The toughest crowd? Obviously, the sovereignists. He paraphrases the things he's become used to hearing on the street: "I see you coming with your Canadian flag... Stay away from me."

But you can't picture Trudeau fighting with his adversaries. Nor can you picture him debating at length with reporters, as his father did during the October Crisis, when he famously uttered the words, "Just watch me."

The son seems a far more careful person. I ask him about something he said to a Maclean's Magazine writer in 2002, well before he'd embarked on a political life. His quote in the published article was, "I pretty much don't do anything without being aware of the consequences."

How does that contrast with his self-proclaimed openness and candour?

There is some verbal fumbling around without any clear answer. He interrupts the interview briefly and diverts our attention to outside, where an ambulance and a police car have arrived. He's worried that when we entered the office, we might have accidentally triggered the alarm. But it turns out that the emergency - whatever it is - is occurring inside the apartment building opposite us.

"The Man helped out on that one," Trudeau jokes, a tacit acknowledgement, perhaps, that comparing his calculating side with his professed candour presents the closest thing he's encountered to a question for which there is no quick answer.

"There's always been a responsibility for me, being aware that I didn't want to embarrass the family," he says. "There are no crazy pictures or stories about me being a wild partier out there, because I did sense, even as kid, that I was representing my family, and there's a name, and I don't want to embarrass my father... There's always been a sense of consequences." {w}

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