Thread by @sunlorrie

Contrary to some media outlets trying to suggest that the guy who released the Trudeau blackface pic to TIME was somehow in the wrong, the real issue is how did we in the Canadian media miss the story for so many years? #cdnpoli

After all, as Robert Jago writes in Canadaland here: canadalandshow.com/second-photo-o… the other now-infamous pic of Trudeau in blackface at the same event, with his arms around two men who appear to be Sikhs, has been available online for over 15 years here: web.archive.org/web/2004012516…

As Jago writes:
'By now we have all seen the photos of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in brownface from a school yearbook and in blackface from his high school days. Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown has asked why no Canadian media had found these before ...'

'— and there really is no excuse, other than that we thought we already knew everything there was to know about Justin Trudeau, who’s been a celebrity since the day he was born."

'I earned notoriety in the last election for being an independent blogger who was able to dig into the social media pasts of candidates, several of whom were forced off the ballot because of it. But I never looked into Trudeau, not because I was particularly supportive of him ..

'(I’ve written a detailed criticism of him in the pages of The Walrus.) But because he was a lifelong celebrity, I’d no sooner look into his background than I would the backgrounds of Prince William or a Kennedy — people about whom all is apparently known.'

'With the first revealing brownface picture, though, it made me understand that I knew far less about him than I thought. So I took a second — or maybe a first, critical — look at Trudeau’s past, which is when I discovered an as-yet-unseen photo of him in brownface ...'

'from the April 2001 newsletter of the Vancouver private school at which he taught.'
Exactly. No conspiracy here. No foreign media outlet improperly interfering in a Canadian election. The truth is no one in the Canadian media did a deep dive into Trudeau's background ...

because we all thought we knew all about him, which would be particularly true of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. But as it turned out, we didn't know everything. And when it came to his repeated racist episodes of blackface continuing into adulthood, we didn't know him at all.

Why? Because the image of Trudeau as Canada's 'woke' prime minister, which he carefully cultivated aided & abetted by a Canadian & international media that gave him one the longest political honeymoons in Canadian political history, lulled us all into a false sense of who he was.