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There were a number of first-class opportunities missed on the Prime Minister’s costume tour of the great democratic state of India. The merest child, let alone the wizened sages of the PMO, could have told them that there should have been elephants, with Justin and Sophie doing yoga stands inside the howdah. How much more striking is a namaste from the back of a shrieking pachyderm.

Most likely his planners were just careless, or what is the same thing, not up on their Kipling, as they very well should be.

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Well, he’s back in Canada now, but as with every good vacation, the memory lingers on. So much indeed, that in this week of Canada’s first full feminist budget (almost scoured clean, as Andrew Coyne has noted of, well, economics) it was the trip not the budget that summoned the eyes and ears of every Canadian.

Now while debacle, mess, embarrassment, disgrace, waste, stupidity and gaucherie have earned their standing as descriptors of the eight-day folly, the term “odd” has not quite got the exercise it seriously deserves. Above all, the trip was just plain old-fashioned odd — odd, not as opposite to even, but as kissing cousin to weird.