Mike Smyth: Trudeau's post-blackface strategy — shut up and spend

Opinion: Justin Trudeau's blackface debacle is becoming very expensive. As the prime minister tries to change the election channel, the money taps have been opened.

Justin Trudeau’s blackface fiasco has generated a wide range of opinions to say the least.

I’ve heard from some readers who think the whole thing is a big nothing burger cooked up and inflated by the media, while others say the media deliberately underreported the blackface photos and video to protect Trudeau.

Whatever you think, one thing is for sure: Trudeau sure doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. After apologizing twice (the second mea culpa was better than the weak first effort), Trudeau now deflects questions about whether he wore blackface other than the three confirmed incidents to date.

“I’ve been very clear with Canadians on this issue over the past number of days,” he said, when he actually hasn’t been clear at all.

One major problem for Trudeau and the Liberals: The shocking blackface images collapsed the moral soapbox they were standing on to attack the Conservatives over racism. Here’s a good example: Last week I interviewed Vancouver-Granville Liberal candidate Taleeb Noormohamed and he was pitiless in attacking Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer for “tolerating racism” in the Tory caucus.

“Andrew Scheer has said it’s perfectly fine to be a racist as long as you apologize for being a racist,” Noormohamed said. That was last Tuesday. The first Trudeau blackface photo emerged the next day, so I contacted Noormohamed again.

“I’m glad he apologized,” Noormohamed said of Trudeau. “It was sincere. I’ve always believed in people’s better natures.” But can you imagine if it was Scheer wearing the racist costumes? It appears apologies are only accepted when your own guy gets caught!

It’s difficult to estimate the damage to the Trudeau campaign from all this, though some polls suggest he’s taken a hit. In a close election, it may take only minor damage to swing some close ridings. And if some disheartened Liberal supporters decide to stay home on election day, that’s just as bad for Trudeau.

As Trudeau rides out the storm, he’s reverted back to an old damage-control technique: Change the channel to a different topic. And turn on the money taps. Trudeau’s promise to ban “military-style assault rifles” seemed to come out of the blue. Nothing like a gun-control debate to distract attention from other problems.

A tsunami of other campaign promises, meanwhile, come with a massive price tag, though Trudeau is evasive on the exact cost of his commitments. Trudeau has promised a national Pharmacare program, for example, pledging $6 billion to pay for it. But the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) said in 2017 such a program would cost more than $19 billion. Where is all the money supposed to come from?

Trudeau also promised to cut your monthly cellphone bill by 25 per cent but with little explanation on how he would do it or how much it would cost. Trudeau’s new guess-the-price election game comes after his government passed a law allowing campaign promises to be independently costed by the PBO. The law was passed to help voters “make informed decisions” during elections, Trudeau said, but the Liberals aren’t living by their own words. Trudeau has made billions of dollars’ worth of promises without submitting them to the PBO for cost verification. And now the Liberals say only “big-ticket items” may be analyzed by the independent office when the party’s full platform is released later in the campaign.

This is hardly in keeping with the spirit of Trudeau’s own truth-in-politicking law. But with the blackface humiliation continuing to haunt his campaign, prepare for more expensive distractions to come.



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