so, is he going to get away with this?

the most truthful response is that he wasn't doing that well in the first place, and if it only costs him 2%, that 2% could be his majority. so, don't be glib on the numbers - it seems to only be affecting a small number of people, but if they vote (or don't vote), it could still hurt him.

are canadians racist, then? do we need to look in the mirror.

no.

listen, i think that everybody needs to stop interpreting canada through an american filter, and that's the real takeaway from this. i posted my logic: the make-up itself isn't racist, it's only racist if accompanied by the stereotypes, the brutal performance. and, the video might have been what i'm describing, but it's not clear  and nobody seems to want to imagine it that way. that's more or less what people are saying: it's not racist. why do you think it's racist, it's just make-up. are you racist?

and the answer is supposed to be, "but, it's the history."

to which the canadian would say "in america? i'm not a fucking yankee, that means nothing to me. that's not my history. so, stop americanizing everything and put the thing in a canadian context, in the context of canadian history. that's what they teach us to do in school, right? did we have that here? so, i don't know what you're talking about."

the canadian is not done yet, she just paused. she continues..

"so, maybe if we were in the united states it might be racist, but we're not. so, i guess i don't get it, sort of; i'm not american, so it doesn't bug me. maybe if i was american...but i'm not..."

you might argue we're ignorant of history, but my imaginary canadian is actually right: whose history? it's not ours...that's not our context.

so, you could argue that we don't care, and be right.

but, maybe we're actually on to something, up here, about what we should and shouldn't care about?

trudeau's embrace of democratic-party style political correctness and identity politics might come naturally to him, because he's a member of the upper class elite. but, he's an alien in this country - impossible for the average canadian to relate to on the most basic level, and entirely irreflective of the average voter. the hypocrisy that is striking so many people as so profound is being misinterpreted because there was a general misunderstanding that we mostly agreed with him about all of these things in the first place. as a result, the number of people that are surprised by this seems to be quite small - the majority of canadians either already hated him for the hyper-pc everything, or they could already see through the hypocrisy of it, and didn't care.

again: don't think it won't cost him. it might, where it matters, still.

but, don't expect a mass movement to erupt based on a mis-step in the context of american history. most canadians don't see us in that way, and that should be the real takeaway: we're a foreign country, with a parallel history, and we will interpret things in the context of our own history, thank you.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/how-did-canadians-react-to-trudeaus-blackface-images-with-a-big-meh-polls-suggest