‘Time to write a new chapter’: Justin Trudeau’s leadership victory speech

Justin Trudeau was named the new Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada on Sunday, capturing 80 per cent of vote that saw more than 104,000 party members and supporters cast ballots from every riding across the country.

This is the speech that Trudeau gave Sunday night in Ottawa:

Thank you, my friends, thank you

Normally I'd start by thanking family and friends for putting up with my absences, with the long weeks on the road and the campaign, but that's exactly not entirely right in this situation.

Never before in a leadership has family and friends been such an integral part. Family was never something I had in spite of this race. It was at the very root of why this race was so important to me. We did this together.

Sophie, darling Sophie. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your patience. Even when you were impatient with me. Thank you for your wisdom, even when you were frustrated with me. Thank you for being a great dance partner in all its different ways.

Thank you for having supported me. Thank you for having given me everything I needed during this campaign, and in the coming years.

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Thank you Xavier and Ella-Grace. You are young, but you already understand just how important it is what we are doing. What we are doing as a family. My big guy and my little girl, daddy will never be very far from you in all the work we have to do in the coming months.

To my colleagues, Deborah, Karen, Joyce, Martha, Marc, Martin, Marc, George and David, and to the thousands of Canadians who supported you, I want to thank all of you. I would like to say now, we are not opponents. We are allies. Your courage, your intelligence and dedication will continue to do the party proud.

For the work that has been done to keep our party healthy. I have to thank for the bottom of my heart my friend, my colleague and a great Canadian Bob Rae. We continue to need your leadership, your wisdom and your unparalleled commitment to this country and to this party.

This has been a great campaign. We are fiercely proud that it has been fueled by volunteers. More than 12,000 Canadians stepped up. Thank you for your dedication to making this wonderful country even better.

Like every effective organization, this one has had principled, brilliant, and generous leadership. Katie Telford and Gerald Butts. My friends and compatriots. Thank you for what you’ve done, what you’re doing and for what we are still going to be busy doing together. Rob and Jodi, George, Aidan and Ava, thank you for lending us your loved ones.

My fellow Liberals, it is with great respect for those who have stood in this place before me, and great resolve to do the hard work required in front of us, that I accept, with humility, the confidence you have placed in me. Thank you. All of you. For your trust. For your hope. For choosing to be part of this movement that we are just building.

And on this lovely spring evening in our nation's capital, I am honored to stand with you, proud to be the Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Je suis fier d’être le chef du Parti libéral du Canada.

My friends, this is the last stop of this campaign. But it is the very first stop of the next one. Over the past six months, I have been to hundreds of communities from coast to coast to coast. I’ve met, talked with, and learned from thousands and thousands of Canadians.

And because of your hard work, more than 104,000 voters have sent a clear message: Canadians want better leadership and a better government.

Canadians want to be led, not ruled. They are tired of the negative, divisive politics of Mr. Harper's Conservatives. And unimpressed that the NDP, under Mr. Mulcair, have decided that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them.

Well, we are fed up with leaders who pit Canadians against Canadians. West against East, rich against poor, Quebec against the rest of the country, urban against rural, and any other division that you can find in this country.

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Canadians are looking to us, my friends. They are giving us a chance, hopeful that the party of Wilfrid Laurier can rediscover his sunny ways.

Hopeful that positive politics has a fighting chance against the steady barrage of negativity that you and I both know is coming soon to TV screens across right across the country. Our volunteers actually tell us that the phone messages have already started.

To adapt a sentiment from the great American President Franklin D. Roosevelt: never before in this country have the forces of negativity, cynicism and fear been so united in their hostility toward one candidate.

So the Conservative Party will now do what it does. It will try to spread fear. It will sow cynicism. It will attempt to convince Canadians that we should be satisfied with what we have now.

For at the heart of their unambitious agenda is the idea that “better” is just not possible. That to hope for something more from our politics and from our leaders, more humanity, more transparency, more compassion, is naive and inevitably will simply lead to disappointment.

And they will promote that divisive and destructive idea with passionate intensity. They will do so for a simple reason. They are afraid.

But I want to make something very, very clear. My fellow Canadians, it is not my leadership that Mr. Harper and his party fear. It’s yours. There is nothing that these Conservatives fear more than an engaged and informed Canadian citizen.

My friends, if I have learned one thing in this life, it’s that our country is blessed with countless numbers of activist citizens from all walks of life, and of all political views.

They have come out by the thousands over the course of this campaign. They’ve gathered by the hundreds in places like Ponoka, Alta., and Oliver, B.C., Prince Albert, Sask., and Île-des-Chênes, Man. Canadians who thought they were sending community leaders to be their voice in Ottawa, but instead got only Mr. Harper’s voice back in their communities.

We’ve seen the hopeful faces in crowds of Canadians gathered in Windsor and Whitby, Mississauga and Markham. Middle-class Canadians who are putting much into the economy and getting too little in return.

We’ve seen hard-working Atlantic Canadians from Edmunston to Halifax, from Summerside to St John’s, who have decided that this is a government that does not share their values.

And, to my friends in Labrador, I look forward to seeing you soon.

We’ve met young aboriginal leaders from all across this country, from Tk’emlups to Whapmagoostui, who are simply tired of being forced to the margins of this country. With the courage to walk 1,600 kilometres through the teeth of a Canadian winter to make the point that they will be Idle no More.

Francophones who live in Shediac, Sudbury, St. Boniface and all across this country who want their children to live and thrive in French, your determination inspires me, it must continue to inspire the whole country.

Quebecers, from Gatineau to Gaspé, who want to re-engage with this country. With their country. Who have no time for the divisive issues of their parents’ past, but want to work with Canadians who share their values to build a better country for all our kids.

I want to take a moment to speak directly to Quebecers. What you said to me over the past few months and your support moved me deeply. I have learned so much from our conversations and our meetings.

I take nothing for granted. I understand that trust must be deserved. And I want to earn your trust. I am confident about the future, and I will tell you why. Quebecers have always been builders. From Champlain and Laurier to the present day, you have actively participated in shaping our country, together with so many other Canadians.

Our work is not complete. We face huge challenges We have to help the middle-class make ends meet. We have to reconciling economic growth and environmental protection. We have to play a positive role once again in the world. Those are our challenges.

To meet those challenges we have to be brave and we must be ambitious, my friends. We always have to be brave and ambitious.

Lets be clear. We will not convince everyone. There will always be skeptics. People who say that our country is too big and too full of differences to be properly goverened, or for everyone to be properly represented. I think they are wrong.

I don’t claim that it will be easy, of course. There will be obstacles on the road. We will not have to make some compromises. Of course we will.

Canada is a grand, yet unfinished project. And it is up to us, together with all Canadians, to build the country we want. It is time for us to write a new chapter in the history of our country.

Let’s leave it up to others to continue with to the old quarrels and old debates that lead to discontent. Let’s leave to others to partake in unfettered rhetoric and petty politics. Let’s leave the personal attacks to them.

Quebecers, let us be builders again. Let’s build Canada together again. So that our country can meet the dreams and ambitions that are shared across this country. Let’s leave to our children a better world than the world that we inherited from our parents.

My friends, the Liberal Party will win the trust of Canadians again when it proves that it is here to serve them. This is the job we have to do now. This is what will guide me as Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

To the new generation of Canadians and to all those young people who do not feel involved, who feel disenfranchised. I have a very simple message for you.

Your country needs you. It needs your energy and your passion. It needs your idealism and your ideas, also. The movement that we have build over the past six months, it is your movement. It belongs to you. It is the movement with which we will change politics.

It is the movement that will allow us to reform our political institutions, to make reconciling the environment and our economy a real priority, and to play a positive and constructive role in the world.

My fellow Liberals, Canadians are looking to us. This campaign has been their campaign, more than just ours.

They want something better. They refuse to believe that better is not possible. They see the country their parents and grandparents worked so hard to build, and want to hand an even better country to their children.

Canadians share deep values that cannot be shaken, no matter how hard this Conservative Party may try. Optimism. Openness. Compassion. Service to community. Generosity of spirit.

We want to believe that change can happen. We want to believe that we can have leadership that will shape our best instincts into an even better country.

But Canadians will not suffer fools gladly. Canadians turned away from us because we turned away from them. Because Liberals became more focused on fighting with each other, than fighting for Canadians.

Well, I don’t care if you thought my father was great or arrogant. It doesn’t matter to me if you were a Chretien-Liberal, a Turner-Liberal, a Martin-Liberal or any other kind of Liberal. The era of hyphenated Liberals ends right here, right now, tonight.

From this day forward, we welcome all Liberals as Canadian Liberals. United in our dedication to serve and lead Canadians.

Unity not just for unity’s sake, but unity of purpose.

I say this to the millions upon millions of middle-class Canadians, and the millions more who work hard every day to join the middle-class. Under my leadership, the purpose of the Liberal Party will be you. I promise that I will spend every day, from beginning to end, thinking about and working hard to solve your problems.

I know that you are optimistic about us, but cautiously so. You are, after all, Canadians.

You know that hope is a fine thing, but that without an equal measure of hard work to back it up, it will be fleeting.

So I know that you will judge us by the tenacity of our work ethic, the integrity of our efforts, and, come 2015, the clarity of our plan to make our country better. That is as it should be.

I have been lucky in my life. Lucky, most of all, to have learned so much from so many Canadians. To learn that, above all else in this country, leadership means service.

I love this country, my friends, and I believe in it deeply. It deserves better leadership than it has now.

So let us be clear-eyed about what we have accomplished. We have worked hard and we have had a great campaign. We are united, hopeful and resolute in our purpose.

But know this: We have won nothing more and nothing less than the opportunity to work even harder. Work even harder to prove ourselves worthy of leading this great country.

We should be deeply, deeply grateful for that opportunity. As your leader, I fully intend to make sure we make the most of it.

Change can happen. Canadians want leadership that will work with them to make it happen. So be hopeful, my fellow Liberals. Work hard. Stay focused on Canadians. We can lead the change that so many people want.

A better Canada is always possible. Together, we will build it. Thank you.

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