Trudeau & Trotting On The Rideau

On the day Justin Trudeau officially becomes the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, Trot Insider looks back at his brush with harness racing with some rare photographs profiling an iconic day in Canadian horse racing history.

On February 4, 1979, nearly 40,000 people braved the elements to witness Trotting on the Rideau in Ottawa, Ont. The event, a throwback to earlier days and traditions of transport over frozen waterways, was spearheaded by Bill Galvin, then the publicity director of the Canadian Trotting Association.

A project a year in the making, Galvin not only managed to organize a card of eight races complete with all the usual bells and whistles, but managed to secure five pages of coverage for the event in Sports Illustrated and arranged for live national coverage of the event both on television and radio. CBC provided a live two-hour broadcast, as did the CKO Radio Network. It was the first time harness racing had live TV coverage in North America.

Legendary Hall of Famer Stan Bergstein described the event as a “major promotional coup and ice racing extravaganza on the frozen canals of downtown Ottawa that made full use of the history, drama, and colour of harness racing, and staged with full civic and governmental cooperation.” Indeed, as the saying goes, this place had everything. A relay race between four local university-aged hockey players competing against a horse driven by hockey legend Bobby Hull. Dignitaries from across the country, chauffeured across the ice by sleigh-belled cutters. Eight of Canada's best drivers, representing each racing jurisdiction.

As it turns out, the day also featured a rare appearance from a Prime Minister...and a future Prime Minister.

Many newspapers across the country carried a photo of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau watching the races with son Michel on his shoulders. Racing historians cannot recall an acting Prime Minister so prominently identified at a racing event.

The photo at the lead of this story was carried in an Ottawa paper the next day. It shows a seven-year-old Justin Trudeau petting one of the competing horses of the day.

(Barb McIsaac of Cornwall, P.E.I., whose husband Francis represented Prince Edward Island in the driving competition, has kept that photo from the newspaper for some four decades, and we thank her for sharing it.)

The driver that facilitated the meeting was Renald Filion of harness racing's famed Filion racing clan.

"His father (Pierre) had to go talk to somebody and I stayed with him," Renald recalled. "I took him over to the racehorses and he petted his nose."

Now 77, Filion still vividly raised two points from that day on the Rideau Canal. It was very cold, and that the "well-mannered" boy he introduced to a horse and spent five minutes with is about to become the leader of the country.

"I said to my wife last week, it's unbelievable that I held him in my arms when he was just a little kid."

Trot Insider has uncovered rare photographs of Prime Minister Trudeau with all three of his sons taking in ice racing on the Rideau Canal.

Not only did Trotting on the Rideau help harness racing achieve an unprecedented level of exposure, it also helped put Ottawa's now-famous Winterlude on the map.

Justin Trudeau will be sworn in as Canada's Prime Minister during a ceremony at Rideau Hall on Wednesday, November 4.