Justin Trudeau: Virginia Feels Your Pain

Oh Canada, we feel for you. We Virginians, that is.

Now that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s traveling minstrel show has been discovered, it seems your blackface problem is a lot like our blackface problem.

And liberals in that polite little country to our north who voted for this charismatic hypocrite will have to find ways to pardon the prime minister’s racist behavior just as Democrats in Virginia did with Gov. Ralph Northam.

They’d better be quick. Canadian elections are just a little over a month away. Trudeau is the leader of the majority Liberal Party. If not quashed, this latest scandal could send them back into the minority.

I’m here to help.

After all, it’s only been eight months since the governor of Virginia’s medical school yearbook page was unearthed and the public got a gander of a photo on Northam’s personal page showing someone in blackface and someone in a Klan robe.

Yet Northam - a liberal like Trudeau - remains in the Governor’s Mansion. I hear he even ventures out during daylight hours now. Still, it’s unlikely many Democratic candidates will beg him to barnstorm with them this fall. Instead he’s quietly cutting them checks and sending his wife to pose for pictures.

While Virginia Democrats at first pretended to be outraged by Northam’s racist picture and demanded his resignation, they quieted down once they realized the alternative would likely be a Republican.

If Trudeau follows Northam’s example of stubbornness he, too, could survive.

First, Trudeau needs to apologize (which he did). Next, he needs to retract that apology, as Northam did. Then he should raise questions about the authenticity of the photos. After all, facial recognition technology isn’t advanced enough to see through shoe polish or makeup, as Northam learned to his immense relief.

So far there are three photos of JT prancing about in blackface. Time Magazine found the first on Wednesday. The other two appeared Thursday. Trudeau doesn’t know how many others are out there.

That’s problematical. Northam only had one other incident of blackface to worry about, when he’d moonwalked as Michael Jackson. No photos of that escapade ever emerged.

A little Virginia history: The commonwealth’s Democrats were stunned in 2014 when incumbent U.S. Sen. Mark Warner was nearly beaten by moderate Republican Ed Gillespie. Warner held on with a margin of less than one percent of the vote.

Three years later, when Gillespie entered the governor’s race against Northam, the party was taking no chances. They painted the mainstream Gillespie as a raging racist. It worked. Northam won by a margin of almost nine percent.

Of course, when Northam’s blackface history emerged, the governor looked like a honking hypocrite.

Trudeau has a similar problem. His campaign has been slamming Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer as a homophobe for a 2005 statement opposing gay marriage. (Of course, 2005 really was a different time. Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believed marriage should be between one man and one woman 14 years ago.) Plus, members of the Conservative party are accused of coddling white supremacists.

Yet no blackface photos of them have surfaced.

Funny how that works.

Trudeau is staring at blackface photos of himself from 2001, when he was a 29-year-old teacher. And can’t explain it away other than to blame it on white privilege.

Columnist Robyn Urback of the Canadian Broadcasting Company scolded Trudeau yesterday for his hypocrisy.

“When you run on sanctimony, govern on arrogance and expect perfection, you find yourself in an awful quandary when you fall short of your own standards,” she wrote.

After all, the smug Trudeau presents himself as a tower of progressive thinking. This is the woke prime minister who once corrected a woman who used the word “mankind.” It’s “peoplekind,” he told her.

Trudeau, who said yesterday, “I am pissed at myself” for repeatedly donning blackface, now has to convince Canadians that he had no idea blackface was racist.

In 2001.

If the white privilege excuse doesn’t fly he should phone Ralph Northam for advice.