About a year ago, just as Faith Goldy’s mayoral run was beginning to make headlines, I wrote a column pointing out something rather obvious: That based on some unfortunate decisions on her part as well as some of the people she had chosen to associate with, her name would become profoundly toxic to anyone who associated with her.

It appears that I was understating it a bit. The Liberals are determined to force Goldy’s name into every news cycle for the duration of this election, clumsily using any past association they can uncover to push the slanderous idea that Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party is teeming with white supremacists.

One of the reasons this is so ignorant and defamatory is that the Liberals know very well that nearly all of the associations referred to were formed well before the ideological migration that resulted in Goldy finding herself in the company she currently keeps.

Just a few years ago, Goldy was ubiquitous on the political scene—between campaigns, political events, Sun News Network, and The Rebel pre-Charlottesville, she met and hung out with pretty much everybody. The Liberal mudslingers are fully aware of this, which is why the mud is being slung selectively. I doubt you’ll see a hit piece demanding that Michael Coren explain why he appears to be clumsily attempting to flirt with her on his cringe-worthy Sun News show.

But the Liberals, of course, were livid with righteous indignation when Andrew Scheer told the press corps (who were again obediently asking him questions about Goldy that could have been written in the Liberal war room) that if this was the sort of thing we were going to be talking about, then he also looked “forward to Justin Trudeau’s response to the allegations that he took Faith Goldy out for drinks.”

This allegation was put forward by Goldy herself, who sent out a tweet with the coy question: “Only one federal party leader has bought me drinks at Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier. Any guesses?” The Conservative Party snarkily tweeted out a screenshot of her question: “Factcheck this one for us.”

The Liberals ping-ponged back and forth between outrage and denial. The prime minister, they assured the public, had not taken Goldy out for drinks, and furthermore, it was an outrage that the Conservative Party was taking anything Goldy had to say seriously.

Questions about associations with Goldy were very important one moment and ridiculous the next. They settled, as they always do, on sanctimony, attempting to assert that the whole discussion was a disgrace and that the Conservatives should obviously be ashamed of themselves. They had no time for this sort of thing—not when the 47-year-old prime minister could be attempting to cuddle up to a 19-year-old tennis star.

But this morning, the National Post revealed that the Trudeau-Goldy story might hold some weight:

Goldy did not respond to invitations to comment on Monday. In an earlier interview with the National Post in April 2019, however, she described having drinks with Trudeau and two of her female friends in Ottawa in about 2010. She could not recall a specific date, but said it was at a biennial convention when Michael Ignatieff was the leader and Trudeau widely known to be a contender.

After Trudeau tried and failed to get them all into a suite party, the four went instead to Zoe’s Lounge, at Trudeau’s invitation, Goldy said.

“He invited us out for drinks,” Goldy said.

One of her friends was a Liberal supporter. Goldy herself was not yet notorious as a white nationalist. At the time, she was a University of Toronto political science student and what she described as the token young person on Sun TV, but she was at the conference as media from a school journal she edited.

“Once upon a time I was part of polite society,” Goldy said. She described how the conversation over drinks turned to abortion, and that her friend expressed a pro-choice view, which Trudeau strongly and vociferously agreed with, even rising to stand with one foot on a winged chair in a pose she compared to the Captain Morgan rum logo.

The National Post was unable to independently verify this account. One former senior Liberal who Goldy said was present in the lounge at the time declined to comment. Efforts to reach her friends were unsuccessful.

Even though the events described occurred nearly a decade ago, before Trudeau was the Liberal leader or the prime minister, he and his team have to deny them with sneers and self-righteousness. The Liberals have decided that this election should be fought over whether people should be driven from public life based on the life decisions of people that they once knew.

This, of course, is tricky business—and perhaps Trudeau’s team is now doing a bit of background on his own past to ensure that they don’t accuse someone of associating with a person he once allegedly invited out for drinks. As the news item revealing that he had groped a young female reporter years ago indicated, there is probably a lot of available material.