Justin Trudeau says new production company aims to change minds

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.”

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.

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

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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

“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.”

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.”

Trudeau announced his resignation on Jan. 6, 2025, after nine years as prime minister, amid unrest in the Liberal caucus and historic lows in opinion polls. He has most recently made news for his relationship with American pop singer Katy Perry, and continues to give paid speeches around the world.

He told the crowd he wants to create stories that invite curiosity, challenge convention and expand people’s understanding of one another.

“The time we’re in right now, the technologies we’re surrounded with, the world we’re surrounded with does a really good job of keeping people separate and disempowered,” he said.

“Technologies that were supposed to connect us to each other and empower us with knowledge and information instead end up dividing us and leaving us more isolated and feeling powerless.”

He continued: “In elections we used to say, ‘Whoever tells the best story about who we are and where we want to go wins the election.’ And those stories matter now more than ever before.”

Some of those stories are drawn from worlds Trudeau and Telford know well. The series Power Moves will be based on a novel by Australian writer Leesa Ronald, featuring an ambitious political advisor, a politician seeking reelection, and a persistent journalist.

Another series, Backchannels, is based on the book The Right Hand: Conversations with the Chiefs of Staff to the World’s Most Powerful People by another Australian, Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks, and in development with her twin sister, Chloe Saintilan.

Their plans also include some CanCon, including adaptations of Closer By Sea, the debut novel from writer and producer Perry Chafe (Republic of Doyle, Son of a Critch) and Detective Aunty by novelist Uzma Jalaluddin. Hope & Hard Work also has a partnership with Earth Tones, founded by Canadian sisters Aliya Jasmine and Aliza Sovani, which will produce documentaries and docu-series.

“These are stories that the world needs to hear,” Trudeau said at the launch.