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Now, well, there’s an election on and the boss isn’t sure how many more photos might be out there of him in blackface. So to hell with all that. A lot of people in Toronto and other big cities will eat it up, after all.

This sort of approach long predated Trudeau, of course, and he has used it many times before. In so many ways, over the past four years, he has shown himself to be a conventional Liberal politician. But recent days have taken us miles past conventional.

If blacking up wasn’t spectacularly uncommon in the days of Trudeau’s youth, it must surely nevertheless be the case that the vast majority of Gen-Xers haven’t ever done it — if not because they thought it was racist or knew it could get them in trouble, then because who on earth has that much time to kill? Those costumes clearly took a ton of effort, and he made a habit of it!

Yes, he’s (sort of) from Quebec, and it’s different there. “We even laughed about it,” one unhelpful Quebec candidate’s campaign manager told The Globe and Mail. Perhaps more to the point, he grew up sheltered and privileged at a time when casual racism — or laborious racism, in his case — was more commonly expressed.

But then he took a BA at McGill, and a BEd at UBC. Those are environments when you would expect the relevant blackface controversies of the time to be hot topics — Ted Danson roasting Whoopi Goldberg at the Friar’s Club in 1996, for example. Surely it required an incuriousness out of keeping with Trudeau’s self-styled persona to be swanning around as Aladdin in 2001 at the age of 29.