Alexandre Trudeau

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Alexandre "Sacha" Trudeau (born December 25, 1973) is a Canadian journalist, and the son of Canada's former Prime Minister, the late Pierre Trudeau, and Margaret Trudeau.

The second of three children born to Pierre and Margaret Trudeau during Pierre's term in office, Sacha Trudeau was a media sensation, just like his brothers, when he was born. However, Pierre and Margaret tried as much as possible to protect their children from the public eye, and after Pierre retired as Prime Minister in 1984, he raised them in relative privacy in Montreal. He graduated with a philosophy degree from McGill University in 1997.

He was named after Alexander Yakovlev, and thus given the nickname "Sacha" (the Russian diminutive of Alexander). Yakovlev was the Soviet Union's ambassador to Canada in the 1970s and early 1980s and later the architect of Mikhael Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika.

While attending McGill, Sacha enlisted with the Canadian Forces Reserve Officer Training Program in 1996 and trained at CFB Gagetown, New Brunswick. His parents joined others at the private graduation ceremony at the end of the summer. Sacha was posted to the Royal Canadian Hussars in Montreal upon being commissioned as a Second Lieutenant.

When Pierre Trudeau died in 2000, both Alexandre Trudeau and his older brother Justin Trudeau returned to the public eye. Although Alexandre was visibly more reserved and quiet than his brother, his heightened public profile brought new attention to his work as a journalist. In the next few years, he produced documentaries for Canadian television. Alexandre Trudeau attracted controversy in August 2006 for an article he penned praising Fidel Castro's Cuba. [1]

In 2003, he was one of the highest-profile Canadian journalists covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq, producing a 60-minute documentary film for the CTV program W5, Embedded in Baghdad.

Trudeau is also a director of Canada World Youth, and of the Trudeau Foundation for excellence in social sciences and humanities research and innovation.

In June 2005, Trudeau focused attention on what he said were the implication for civil liberties in the Canadian government's use of security certificates to detain indefinitely, without trial, suspected terrorists based on secret evidence.

Trudeau offered to be a surety for Hassan Almrei, a Syrian refugee held in a Canadian jail for four years without any charges being laid ([2]). Trudeau's appearance in court in support of Almrei resulted in front page coverage in the Toronto Star and National Post and major media attention being given to the security certificate issue for the first time.

Currently, Trudeau is President and Chief Producer at Jujufilms as well as a contributing editor at Maclean's magazine. He and girlfriend Zoë Bedos became the parents of a son, Pierre-Emmanuel Trudeau, on December 22, 2006.

He was one of several children of former Prime Ministers who became Canadian media personalities between 1998 and 2001. The others were Ben Mulroney, Catherine Clark, and his own brother, Justin.