Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

If Justin Trudeau and the Liberals lose this election, they will have only themselves to blame.  Of course, they would have required a time machine to avoid one of the big scandals--Trudeau's awful behavior that got in the news this week.  Blackface/brownface has been wrong forever.  Emmett Macfarlane pointed out that a pivotal cultural moment was a 1975 All in the Family episode where a noted bigot, Archie, felt awkward about being in blackface, teaching a lesson about what was and was not acceptable more than forty years ago.

So, JT has done it three times at least at the time I am writing this.  There has been lots of coverage today, but I was in a workshop (see blog post tomorrow) so I am writing this without having read most of the coverage.  The news suggests a level of cluelessness and privilege that is both breathtaking and unsurprising.  How dumb, immature, and insensitive must you be to keep on doing this?  He said he likes to dress up to a fault, essentially.  WTF?!

Other folks can explain this better than I can, but obviously being a privileged pretty boy meant not thinking too hard about stuff even when much of society had agreed that blackface/brownface is damned offensive.  And before folks say that this is an American problem--that Canadians don't have the same racial politics--please.  Canadians get enough American cultural products, and Canada has had enough of its own history of racial discrimination (remember, JT admitted Canada committed genocide against its First Nations) that, yeah, any semi-aware person would know not just now but way back in 2001 that blackface is wrong.

I will move onto whether this matters.  Well, it already has.  That is, JT's bad judgment in this area affected the trip to India, where he dressed up Bollywood-style, embarrassing Canada and giving fodder to those who wanted Canada to look bad (that would be Prime Minister Modi).  Back at home, the bigger scandal, seeking to protect scandal-ridden SNC-Laval meant pressuring the Attorney General, who happened to be an Indigenous woman.  Which then undermined his rep as being a feminist and being better on the treatment of First Nations.  So, we have a pattern of JT taking for granted the feelings of non-white folks, not just in the past but in the present.  Yes, he did some good stuff for First Nations peoples, including the commission to look into the missing women and improvements in access to drinkable water.  But it does seem to be the case that whenever it gets mildly inconvenient for the Liberals to do right by the First Nations, they go the other way.  It is easy to apologize (although I don't want to trivialize some of the meaningful apologies Trudeau has given over his term in office), but harder to do stuff when it conflicts with other interests.

That the talk and the action do not match up, as Hasan Minhaj pointed out on his show, is not that new (Stefanie VH and I discuss JT on that show on this week's podcast).  Folks are profoundly disappointed.  Are they still going to vote for the Liberals?  Probably, but perhaps not as much turnout and some party switchers, which then means that, yes, the Liberals, who had an easy election due to the other major parties having lousy leaders, may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

How will I vote in my first election in Canada?  Kind of like I have in some elections in the past: holding my nose.