Justin Trudeau says new production company aims to change minds

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Justin Trudeau and longtime aide Katie Telford say they are “self-financing” their new production company, which aims to change people’s minds via “storytelling.”

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The two announced their new multimedia entertainment company, Hope & Hard Work, at the Lightbox’s rooftop event space during the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday. They drew a crowd of media and entertainment press and personalities.

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The former prime minister suggested that stories like the ones he and his former chief of staff will tell can get past ideological defences.

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“It’s not just that you believe the Earth is flat,” he said. “You are a flat-Earther. So changing someone’s mind is actually trying to get them to change their very identity. And people are, rightly, resistant to that need to rethink who they are.”

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He continued: “But storytelling can sneak through, get in behind people’s defences, and get them to actually feel connected to someone completely from them. And that’s what we need now more than ever.

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“And unfortunately our algorithms and our technology are getting very, very good at ginning up outrage and division and separation instead of looking at ways of actually building human connections and experiences.”

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Hope & Hard Work takes its name from a campaign slogan used by Trudeau and the Liberal party. It also seems to have taken a page from the playbook of Barack and Michelle Obama, who in 2018 launched a production company called Higher Ground. Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, also founded a production company, Archewell Productions, in 2020.

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“We got lots of advice,” Trudeau told National Post. “We took our time to really talk with all sorts of different people, including some of the ones with a similar path.”

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But he said he and Telford were not following a template. “This one we’re building from scratch,” he said. “We’re not starting with a big partnership … We’re actually self-financing.”

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This gives them the freedom to find their own projects, he added. “Doing things that we want and being in control of it is really important to us.”

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He said his fame gave him power as a politician, and will do the same in the film industry.

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“In politics I had the advantage of my last name, which everyone knows,” he told National Post. “But one of the concrete advantages that people don’t think about is it meant I didn’t have to go cap in hand to all the elders and the power brokers around Canadian politics to get their blessing to do it. I just did it, and that was how we were able to completely reinvent the Liberal party from scratch and do it without owing anything to anyone.”

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He added: “Similar approach that Katie and I want to do here, where we can come in and do the things that we want to do, that we believe in, and not feel like we have to deliver to the powers that be.”