Raymond Muise, an 81-year-old retired electronic technician living in Dayton, N.S., was catching up on news online last week when his phone rang and a familiar voice said: “Happy New Year.” It was Justin Trudeau, calling about a letter Muise had written to the prime minister after General Motors announced the shutdown in Oshawa late last year. For the next 25 minutes, Trudeau and Muise spoke on the phone about everything from the future of the auto industry to the lack of transportation options around nearby Yarmouth, N.S. “It was a good experience for me and I hope it was a good experience for the prime minister,” Muise says. “I don’t remember any other prime minister doing this and I commend him for it.”The prime minister has been doing a flurry of phone calls to random citizens over the past couple of weeks and has another session planned next week after he shuffles his cabinet. While a lot of attention is being paid this month to the series of town-hall meetings that Trudeau is holding across Canada, these phone calls are a lesser-known method of trying to keep the prime minister in touch with people outside the political bubble. It’s really the opposite of mass communication — a form of niche marketing, you might say, by this prime minister.However effective this one-vote-at-a-time approach may be, Trudeau and his team believe they won the election outside the bubble in 2015, and this ramping-up of town halls and cold calls can also be seen as early rehearsal for the 2019 campaign. Read more:Man at B.C. town hall asks Trudeau to push Trump ‘off a cliff’Opinion | Tanya Talaga: Trudeau’s ‘less than ideal’ comment doesn’t begin to capture the concerns of Indigenous communitiesOpinion | Susan Delacourt: Cabinet shuffle may be in the cards for Justin TrudeauThe calls don’t come totally out of the blue — as it was with Muise, Trudeau makes them in reply to Canadi ...
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