section_path: Early life/Childhood
section_name: Childhood
paragraph_text: Childhood
  
  Trudeau's parents announced their separation in 1977, when he was five years old; his father was given primary custody. There were repeated rumours of a reconciliation for many years afterwards. However, his mother eventually filed for a no-fault divorce which the Supreme Court of Ontario granted in 1984; his father had announced his intention to retire as prime minister a month earlier. Eventually, his parents came to an amicable joint-custody arrangement and learned to get along quite well. Interviewed in October 1979, his nanny Dianne Lavergne was quoted, "Justin is a mommy's boy, so it's not easy, but children's hurts mend very quickly. And they're lucky kids, anyway." Of his mother and father's marriage, Trudeau said in 2009, "They loved each other incredibly, passionately, completely. But there was 30 years between them, and my mom never was an equal partner in what encompassed my father's life, his duty, his country." Trudeau has three half-siblings, Kyle and Alicia, from his mother's remarriage to Fried Kemper, and Sarah, from his father's relationship with Deborah Coyne.
  
  Trudeau lived at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, the official residence of Canada's prime minister, from his birth until his father's government was defeated in the 1979 federal election. The Trudeaus were expected to move into Stornoway, the residence of the leader of the Official Opposition, but because of flooding in the basement, Prime Minister Joe Clark offered them Harrington Lake, the prime minister's official country retreat in Gatineau Park, with the expectation they would move into Stornoway at the start of July. However, the repairs were not complete, so Pierre Trudeau took a prolonged vacation with his sons to the Nova Scotia summer home of his friend, Member of Parliament Don Johnston, and later sent his sons to stay with their maternal grandparents in North Vancouver for the rest of the summer while he slept at his friend's Ottawa apartment. Trudeau and his brothers returned to Ottawa for the start of the school year but lived only on the top floor of Stornoway while repairs continued on the bottom floor. His mother purchased and moved into a new home nearby at 95 Victoria Street in Ottawa's New Edinburgh neighbourhood in September 1979. Pierre Trudeau and his sons returned to the prime minister's official residence after the February 1980 election that returned him to the Prime Minister's Office.
  
  His father had intended Trudeau to begin his formal education at a French-language lycée, but Trudeau's mother convinced his father of the importance of sending their sons to a public school. In the end, Trudeau was enrolled in 1976 in the French immersion program at Rockcliffe Park Public School. It was the same school his mother had attended for two years while her father was a member of Parliament. He could have been dropped off by limousine, but his parents elected he take the school bus albeit with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) car following. This was followed by one year at the private Lycée Claudel d'Ottawa.
  
  After his father's retirement in June 1984, his mother remained at her New Edinburgh home while the rest of the family moved into his father's home at 1418 Pine Avenue, Montreal known as Cormier House; the following autumn, he began attending the private Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, his father's alma mater. The school had begun as a Jesuit school but was non-denominational by the time Justin matriculated. In 2008, Trudeau said that of all his early family outings he enjoyed camping with his father the most, because "that was where our father got to be just our father – a dad in the woods". During the summers his father would send him and his brothers to Camp Ahmek, on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, where he would later work in his first paid job as a camp counsellor.
  
  Trudeau and his brothers were given shares in two numbered companies by their father: the first containing a portfolio of securities, from which they receive regular dividends, up to $20,000 per year; and the second which receives royalties from their father's autobiography and other sources, about $10,000 a year. As of August 2011, the first numbered company had assets of $1.2 million. The Trudeau brothers were also given a country estate of about 50 hectares in the Laurentians with a home designed by the esteemed Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, and the Cormier House in Montreal. The country estate land was estimated to be worth $2.7 million in 2016.