www.zerohedge.com Justin Trudeau has overcome a raft of scandals, ranging from the juvenile and relatively benign (the ‘blackface’ scandal that erupted last month after Time magazine published photos of Trudeau wearing brown face paint at a costume party in 2001), to the blatantly corrupt (he and his aids tried to impede the criminal prosecution of SNC Lavalin, an engineering firm based in Quebec), and won a second term as Canada’s prime minister.
The final results were released late Monday evening: Despite losing the national popular vote, Trudeau’s Liberal Party won 156 seats, giving them a clear plurality of the vote. However, Trudeau’s government will lose its outright majority, meaning that Trudeau will need to rely on votes from opposition parties to pass his agenda (the threshold for a majority in Canada’s House of Commons is 170).
The Liberals had 177 seats when Trudeau dissolved Parliament 40 days ago at the start of the official campaign season.
Though he has established himself as an icon of liberal values and multiculturalism, Trudeau’s ostensible commitment to feminism and bolstering the rights of minorities was exposed as cynical political posturing by the series of scandals that marred the final year of his first term.
His party lost its lead in the polls during the final weeks of the election, as several images of a young Trudeau wearing blackface surfaced, leading the PM to embark on a national apology tour that featured this cringe-worthy moment where Trudeau tries to explain what he did and apologize to a group of kids (because “what kind of monster lies to a child?“).