I have a very difficult, high-pressured job. Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.
My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.
When my father died, I had millions of people supporting me in a very, very difficult time. I have received so much from this country. I realize that we're defined in life not by what we get from this world but by what we have to offer it, and I know that I have a lot to offer this country, and I'm serious about devoting my life to it.
I think Canadians are tired of politicians that are spun and scripted within an inch of their life, people who are too afraid of what a focus group might say about one comment or a political opponent might try to twist out of context, to actually say much of anything at all.
I trust Canadians to be able to look at the different parties, the different leaders, the plans, the teams, and make a responsible choice. And I'm very, very confident that's exactly what Canadians are going to do.
Promising something that seems popular at the time that you know you're never going to deliver - that's the kind of cynical politics that I don't want any part of.
We need the middle class to feel more confident about its prospects and about its future. We need to cut down on this anxiety that sees some people succeeding and the majority struggling - having to make choices between paying for their kids' education or saving for their own retirement.
A very powerful mechanism to get elected is to play on anger and pick those wedge issues.
Nobody knows better than I do what the pressures of party leadership can do to a young family. It tore mine apart.
People still think there's sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into. And I get wrapped up in it, too, from time to time.
People don't believe that any politician is any different from any other one.
I trust Canadians' capacity to determine who will sit in their Parliament.
The fact is, I'm opposed to coalitions.
Once Canadians no longer believe that there is any good in politics, they no longer feel we can work together to solve the challenges we're facing, and that is my fundamental motivation: how do we work together as a country to solve the big challenges we're facing.
I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments.
I have no fears that on a purely merit basis, we will have an embarrassment of riches from which to choose in order to reach gender parity.
I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.
Any decision made by my father was the result of a process that had involved many voices and which sometimes had taken weeks or months.
The back and forth between the press and government is essential to any good democracy.
A Canadian on the ground in different parts of the world, whether they're a diplomat, an aid worker, or a soldier, has an extraordinary, powerful impact.
