I can understand ppl who have never met #JustinTrudeau forming a vision of him based in the Christ-like qualities the media framed him with last election. I also understand ppl who are now suspicious of his sincerity & honesty becuz of the media & Ethics commissioner's
"Hillary's emails"-ing his role in SNC Lavalin & racial insensitivity from decades ago, and his not coming forward w/pics himself before Warren Kinsella slipped them to Time magazine. Plus #Scheer's constant barrage of lies about the PM are bound to stick to your subconscious.
Fact is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians only know #Trudeau through these lenses. How else would you? Well, I have known him - not well, but well enough - for several years. He is neither the messiah he was painted as before nor the slippery devil he's painted as now.
He's a human being, imperfect, whose made some whopper mistakes in his past & errors of judgment in present. But as someone who has known him as more than a media caricature, let me tell you this: he is no 'phony'. His respect, as an adult, for people of colour/ethnicity is real.
His support of women is real. Firing two ppl who have been undermining your govt who *happen to have been women or Indigenous* for their actions is giving treating thm no differently than had they been white men. To do otherwise would be un-feminist & racist.
He was negotiating new NAFTA w/that madman next door & dealing w/steel tariffs, not following every movement of the SNC case. The Ethics Report repeatedly said he wasn't told about what aides were doing. That's a slam on PMO & his choice of staff, but not a mark of corruption or
bad character. There's no excuse for the blackface pictures from high school, other than he was a jerk at high school, and apologized for it. The Aladdin makeup was a different mistake, also decades ago, but made from an ignorant concept of what going full-Aladdin meant.
He apologized for that too because, as times change, and what's considered acceptable changes, hopefully so do we. I have yet to find anyone who hasn't made regrettable errors in past eras. Maybe not today considered as egregious but we were all a lot less enlightened then.
So, he's far from perfect. Bur far from perfect doesn't mean not good. And he apologizes for mistakes, unlike his opponent who still thinks comparing gay people to dogs is A-okay.
Again, I don't blame you for being confused about his nature. The media (and his campaign team) built JT up to be an impossibly perfected being and when he turned out to be human as us, I understand feeling fooled or lied to.
Again, you're seeing #Trudeau through the lens of a media concerned about profiting from salacious exaggeration & an Opposition party that throws lies like a middle-school cafeteria food fight. But that's just a microcosm of the man himself.
Few of us are as good as our best deed or as bad as our worst day. Neither is he. But having talked to him away from cameras or microphones, my impression is that #JustinTrudeau is a far better person than he's been depicted, and never was the messiah ppl clamored for him to be.
I don't know the other leaders in the same way. Like you, I judge them by the words & actions we see reported. I don't much like what I see. Some of that may be due to underfunded click-hungry media. But when someone compares gay people to dogs, that isn't the media creating it.
When someone appears to need to be pushed to denounce the glorification of a terrorist whose bomb killed 329 ppl aboard a plane, that isn't created by the media either. Elizabeth May gets a free ride from media scrutiny & has said some wacky things but does seem sincere & decent
#JustinTrudeau isn't perfect nor has an unblemished past. His being born into power & money wasn't his choice. But he did choose to run a national summer camp for kids & teach, for which he is derided, but showed a choice to be w/real ppl outside the bubble he was born in.
I think he made some mistakes in office. I think he's made some poor choices in advisors & staff. Those choices have had negative effects and he has to own them. But #Scheer's cuts are not errors, they are plans. I can't imagine, when those are his plans, what his errors will be.
I'm voting #Liberal & #IStandwithTrudeau. Not because he's perfect but because he tries & his govt has been good for Canada. You make your own choice. But if you want to know who JT is from someone who's actually known him (received not a single perk or benefit), I just told you.
