MONTREAL — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has long cast himself as a spokesman for the world’s liberals, standing up to President Trump, supporting women’s and Indigenous rights, welcoming immigrants and fighting climate change and racism.

But that calibrated image suffered a major blow this week when photos and a video emerged of the prime minister dressing up in blackface and brownface in the early 1990s and in 2001.

With Canadians heading to the polls on Oct. 21, the revelations have rocked Mr. Trudeau’s re-election campaign, reinforcing a narrative that has dogged him throughout his political career: that he isn’t really who he presents himself to be.

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“Justin Trudeau has carefully crafted an image of what Canadians aspire to: hope, openness to the world and youth,” said Jean-Marc Léger, chief executive of Léger, a leading polling company in Montreal. “The blackface episode shatters that perfect image and casts questions on his authenticity.”

< PREVIOUS SLIDE SLIDE 1 of 4 NEXT SLIDE > Mr. Trudeau’s image suffered a significant blow in February after reports surfaced of a protracted dispute with Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister and attorney general. © Lars Hagberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Thursday morning, Mr. Trudeau’s campaign confirmed that a video posted by GlobalNews, a Canada-based news organization, showed the prime minister in the early 1990s dressed in blackface and an Afro wig while waving his hands and sticking out his tongue.

This came after the disclosure of two photographs taken when he was 29 years old and a teacher at a school in British Columbia, showing him at an “Arabian Nights” party, costumed as Aladdin in brownface makeup and a turban.

Mr. Trudeau also admitted on Wednesday to dressing up in blackface while performing “Day-O,” the Jamaican folk song, in high school.

On Thursday, at a campaign appearance in Winnipeg, he said he could not rule out the existence of more examples. “I am wary of, of being definitive about this because the recent pictures that came out I had not remembered,” Mr. Trudeau said.

He was referring to the blackface video, which he said he did not recall because he had led a privileged life that came “with a massive blind spot.”

“Darkening your face, regardless of the context of the circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface,” the prime minister said. “I should have understood that then, and I never should have done it.”



The disclosure of the images come only a few months after Mr. Trudeau’s former justice minister and attorney general, an Indigenous woman, accused him of bullying her while pressing her to settle corruption charges against a major Quebec engineering company. When she didn’t comply, he was accused of demoting her.

Mr. Léger, the polling expert, said Mr. Trudeau could still recover from the dissemination of the images because Canadians were a “forgiving people.”

But Nik Nanos, the founder of Nanos Research, an Ottawa polling firm, said that finding a way back, while not impossible, will be very difficult for Mr. Trudeau and his Liberal Party.

“This is about as bad news as you can get in a campaign,” he said. “The Liberals have to find a way to change the channel.”

Mr. Nanos said that even before this week’s news, support for the Conservative Party, Mr. Trudeau’s principal opponent, began inching upward after Conservatives ran attack ads suggesting the prime minister was “not as advertised.”

“The Justin Trudeau revelation is a validation of the Conservative attack,” Mr. Nanos said.

”Right now the election is about Justin Trudeau,” Mr. Nanos added. “And in my experience, the person an election is about loses.”

In many ways Mr. Trudeau has a strong hand as the election approaches. Canada’s economy is vibrant, with unemployment at historic lows. His move to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees was widely acclaimed and his government introduced several pioneering policies, including legalizing recreational marijuana and assisted dying.

Women constitute nearly half of his cabinet. It also includes four Sikhs and a Somali-born immigration minister, reflecting the multiculturalism and inclusiveness on which Canada prides itself.

But in Canada, he is a deeply polarizing figure. Some Canadians, especially in the western parts of the country, have seen him as an elitist do-gooder who was never up to the job.

Others see him as a symbol of a humanistic country who, in the Trump era, helped a middle-level country punch above its weight globally.

He has been taken to task for seeming inconsistencies in his policies. For example, even as he proposed a national carbon tax — following through on his promises to fight climate change — he used 4.5 billion in Canadian dollars to buy an oil pipeline, which he said would be good for the Canadian economy.

“Everything the prime minister does is a calculation about his image,” said Nicola Di Iorio, who recently stepped down as a Liberal member of parliament for a multicultural district in Montreal. “There are too many gimmicks.”

Mr. Trudeau, a talented campaigner, is used to being underestimated — and overcoming obstacles. During the last election, in 2015, his Conservative rivals mocked him as a feckless celebrity with nice hair. “Not ready” was their slogan.

He presented himself, though, as a change-maker after a decade of leadership under the Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper. He went on to give Liberals a stunning victory, expanding the party’s number of seats in the House of Commons to 184 from 36.

Mr. Trudeau maintained his popularity for much of his term, even as critics complained that his colorful socks, shirtless runs, frequent apologies for historical wrongs and bouts of tears sometimes gave the appearance of an actor playing a prime minister rather than actually being one.



On a disastrous state trip to India last year, he attracted ridicule for wearing, along with his family members, flashy traditional Indian clothing, supposedly as a sign of respect for Indian culture. In Canada, which has a large immigrant community from India, he was criticized for cultural appropriation and widely mocked.

But Canadians liked the way he fended off Mr. Trump’s domineering handshake on a visit to the White House in February 2017. Mr. Trudeau’s body language was dubbed on Twitter “the biggest display of dominance in the history of Canada.”

The prime minister later acknowledged that he and Gerald Butts, his top political adviser and close friend, had strategized about the handshake on the plane to Washington — an example of how he has used optics to shape his image.

“That handshake — the image of that handshake — if you ask people what they remember of the past four years, that’s something they remember,” Anna Gainey, the former president of the Liberal party and an architect of Mr. Trudeau’s political rise, said before the blackface and brownface images emerged.

Now, with just weeks to go before the election, voters may instead remember these new images. They are being replayed over and over again on news channels in Canada, where minority voters increasingly form a large block of the electorate.

The Conservatives, too, have issues with race and identity in this campaign. Several of the party’s candidates have posted racist, homophobic, anti-French and anti-Muslim comments online — all much more recent than the pictures of Mr. Trudeau in blackface and brownface.

Over the weekend, Andrew Scheer, leader of the Conservatives, said such people can remain as Conservative candidates provided they take responsibility and apologize.

“I accept the fact that people can make mistakes in the past and can own up to that and accept that,” Mr. Scheer said.

In February Mr. Trudeau weathered a serious crisis when he faced the accusations of bullying by his justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould.

He wanted her to allow SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering corporation, to resolve corruption charges with a hefty fine rather than a criminal conviction. The prime minister said he was concerned about job losses at the company if it was criminally convicted and lost out on government work.

But a broad perception emerged that he and his mostly male staff had ganged up on an Indigenous woman, clashing with his image as a self-proclaimed feminist and champion of minorities who promised a new “sunny” and collaborative approach to politics.

In August, the federal ethics commissioner found that Mr. Trudeau broke the conflict-of-interest law. His approval rating tumbled to about 30 percent.

Mr. Trudeau’s opponents were not able to capitalize on the episode for very long though. Mr. Scheer did not experience a corresponding rise in his popularity as Mr. Trudeau’s sank.

Many Canadians are unclear what Mr. Scheer stands for, analysts say. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the left-leaning NDP party and the first nonwhite contender for prime minister, has also struggled to resonate.

In the summer, Mr. Trudeau and his party’s approval ratings began to recover, and the Liberals have been running neck-and-neck with the Conservatives in polling.

Mr. Trudeau’s political fate largely rests on his ability to win over fickle voters in Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous Canadian provinces. Both have large ethnic minority communities whose support has been essential for the Liberal Party, analysts said.

In majority-French Quebec, Mr. Trudeau’s Francophone roots give him an advantage, while his pro-immigrant stance as prime minister has won over many immigrants.

Then there are the young voters. Mr. Trudeau must energize them again, just as he did in the previous election, in particular those under 35, said Ms. Gainey, the former party official.

Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, a nonprofit polling group, said progressive young voters, an important target for Mr. Trudeau’s campaign, are likely to be most offended by the new pictures and video.

Still, Mr. Trudeau wins praise as one of the most talented retail politicians of his generation and most effective when under pressure.

In an interview before the latest revelations, Stephen Bronfman, the chief fund-raiser for the Liberal Party and a member of one of Canada’s wealthiest families, recalled that at first it was hard to convince some members of the business community to embrace Mr. Trudeau, whom they regarded as a tax-and-spend liberal.

But Mr. Trudeau’s talent at connecting with an audience converted many of the skeptics, he said.

“I had chills on the back of my neck,” Mr. Bronfman said, recalling a talk Mr. Trudeau gave to a group of business people in Toronto. “It was so pure. You could hear a pin drop.”

Dan Bilefsky reported from Montreal, and Ian Austen from Ottawa.