Tapped by Trudeau to steer foreign affairs, Melanie Joly now his possible successor

Joly is at the center of Canada's greatest diplomatic crisis in recent years: accusations that the government of India and its diplomats worked with criminal gangs to intimidate and even kill Canadian citizens who are supporters of a separate Sikh state.

Montreal: The offer was as enticing as it was unexpected for a relative political newcomer. Three years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Mélanie Joly to become foreign affairs minister, among the most prestigious and highest profile portfolios in Canada's Cabinet.

But Joly, who at the time held a significantly less influential ministerial role, turned him down flat.

Her refusal wasn't because of the fact that she lacked foreign policy experience. She said no because she feared the travel involved in the globe-trotting job would force her to abandon her yearslong quest to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization.

But Canada's leader refused to give up.

Trudeau offered to make whatever arrangements necessary to maintain Joly's treatment anywhere in the world. "'If you become pregnant,'" she remembers him telling her, "'it would be a fantastic message you would send to the world.'"

After consulting her husband, parents and siblings, Joly relented, becoming Canada's top diplomat.

Like her counterparts around the world, Joly has since had to grapple with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Then there are the diplomatic stresses specific to Canada.

She is still trying to heal a rift with China that developed after that country jailed two Canadians in apparent retaliation for Canada's arrest of a Chinese executive at the request of the United States.

Now she's at the center of Canada's greatest diplomatic crisis in recent years: accusations that the government of India and its diplomats worked with criminal gangs to intimidate and even kill Canadian citizens who are supporters of a separate Sikh state.

And the return of President-elect Donald Trump, and his threat to impose large tariffs on Canadian goods, poses so many diplomatic, economic and immigration issues that Trudeau has revived a Cabinet committee on U.S. relations that includes Joly.

Her handling of all these challenges has brought Joly, 45, both praise and criticism.

But what is less open to debate: The high-profile job has placed her among the likely successors to Trudeau, whose political popularity has cratered over the past year.

Like all members of Trudeau's Cabinet, Joly is publicly supportive of the prime minister. But other members of the Liberal Party have urged him to resign to let a new voice lead the party into elections that must be held by next October.

Trudeau has rebuffed these calls to quit as party leader, which would also mean resigning as prime minister. But speculation in the Canadian news media about who his successor will be -- whenever that time comes -- invariably includes Joly.

"I've known Trudeau for a long, long time, and he has my hundred-percent support -- period," she said. "But the middle class is hurting, and Canadians expect us to be there for them."

She added: "We need to be able to adapt."

After graduating from law school, Joly landed a position at Stikeman Elliott, one of Canada's largest law firms.

"I didn't like it -- period," she said. "I was a litigator and I love, I love, being able to debate. But at the end of the day, I was debating for money and I wanted to have more impact on my community."

Before quitting the law, Joly submitted a letter in 2007 to La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, condemning a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment then sweeping much of Quebec. Immigration, she wrote, "is not just a necessity, but an enrichment."

After a brief stint in television journalism, Joly moved into public relations. Among her clients was a scion of the Bronfman family, which made its fortune with Seagram's whisky, during the heir's unsuccessful bid to buy the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.

That sort of work raised Joly's profile to the point where she launched a bid in 2013 to become mayor of Montreal, her hometown, running on an anti-corruption platform. Despite having zero political experience, she finished second.

Through her fundraising for the arts, Joly met Alexandre Trudeau, a filmmaker, author and brother of Justin Trudeau. He invited her into a group that led his brother's successful bid for the leadership of the Liberals in 2013.

Two years later, Joly was not only a newly minted member of Parliament, representing a district in Montreal, but also part of Trudeau's first, gender-balanced Cabinet. Her open and friendly manner fit with the new prime minister's promise of a "sunny ways" approach to governing.

Her first position was also high profile: the minister responsible for cultural matters. But a deal she struck with Netflix to invest in Canadian film productions created outrage in Quebec because it included no commitments to French language programming. She was soon demoted to tourism minister and then held a series of other minor posts.

Joly had studied international law as a graduate student at Oxford but never practiced it. If she had been harboring an interest in global affairs as a lawmaker, she never made it public and was largely focused on domestic policy issues before accepting the foreign minister role.

Within a month of her promotion, there was another life-changing event: She was pregnant.

"So the two main dreams of my life were happening at the same time," Joly said in her modest walk-up apartment in Montreal's bohemian Plateau neighborhood. "When you're pregnant, you feel empowered. I felt empowered."

But before she even had much time to settle into her demanding new job, she suffered a miscarriage.

She has continued with her IVF treatments since, including meeting with physicians as she travels the world.

"There is a second room that is still under construction that could be ready for a baby," she said, gesturing to the other side of the apartment, before briefly losing her composure and excusing herself for a moment.

From her first day on the job, Joly faced the same fundamental issue that has confronted all her predecessors: defining a place in the world for a middle-sized power with a relatively large economy, huge landmass and relatively small military.

Joly's answer is what she calls "pragmatic diplomacy," which includes the idea that "we need to work with countries that we don't see eye-to-eye with."

Joly recently said that the government's previous experience with Trump, as well as its efforts to develop relationships with members of his new administration, have made it something of a model of how to deal with his White House.

"If there's a country in the world that understands the United States, it's Canada," Joly said this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru. "That's why there are so many delegations, so many countries, coming to see us."

Under Joly, Canada did try to work with India, if unsuccessfully, before ultimately expelling six diplomats.

While relations with China have slid further following intelligence leaks indicating that it attempted to interfere in Canadian elections, Joly went to Beijing in July to meet her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.

"There's that movement -- which I am profoundly against -- which is if you don't engage with countries, you're sending a message that you're strong," she said. "I think that to be strong is to be able to have the tough conversations."

Not everyone agrees.

Lawrence Herman, a fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute, a policy group, wrote in The Globe and Mail newspaper that the trip to Beijing was "one of the most ill-conceived and self-defeating Canadian foreign-policy initiatives in recent memory." By traveling to China, he wrote, Joly "makes Canada look like a supplicant."

But Joly insists diplomacy is no different from any other part of life.

"For me, international relations is, first, about human connections and, second, it's about being able to understand the different interests at stake," she said. "What I've learned through my professional life is how to look at very complex situations and make them simple for people."

While there are already skeptical voices about the prospects of her still-hypothetical leadership campaign, Joly has encountered similar doubts before.

"It's been the story of my life, you know, being underestimated," she said.