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Whammo. The perfectly calibrated political response: hey, I’m young and cool enough to smoke pot, rebellious enough to have smoked it even as an MP, but secure enough in my identity to admit I don’t like the stuff and would rather give it a miss.

A trifecta.

Then he blew it. Not only is he unthrilled by pot, and rarely touches alcohol, but he also doesn’t like coffee. Doesn’t drink it.

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“We had a few good friends over for a dinner party, our kids were at their grandmother’s for the night, and one of our friends lit a joint and passed it around. I had a puff,” Trudeau said.

Having earlier questioned his ‘profound lack of judgment,’ Justice Minister Peter MacKay claimed Trudeau had now not only broken the law but displayed a blatant conflict between his personal life and his Commons voting record.

“It’s currently against the law to smoke dope. I think most Canadians expect that their member of Parliament will obey the law,” MacKay said Friday in Halifax.

“But this admission of smoking marijuana, breaking the law, doing so knowingly while he was a member of Parliament — the politics of this are such that there’s an element of hypocrisy of having voted on the record to increase penalties around the same time that he was lighting up. So his credibility is a little up in smoke.”

Trudeau, who was elected to Parliament in 2008, voted a year later for mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana production.

The NDP also joined the pile on, with justice critic Francoise Boivin worried about the example Trudeau was setting children: “I’m sure there will be kids saying, ‘Hey if he does it, we can do it’.”