Chantal Hébert: Should Trudeau win the election, he will be a diminished figure on the world stage
(The Star Golf)

MONTREAL—Chances are the teaching staff at Justin Trudeau’s prestigious Montreal college did not blink an eye when he painted his face black to sing a Harry Belafonte song at a high school talent show in the late eighties.Inasmuch as the young Trudeau was not mocking Afro-Americans but rather purporting to honour Belafonte, it likely did not cross his teachers’ minds that he was performing a racist act. They would not have given him a dressing down for it.Fast forward to 2001 and Trudeau’s teaching stint at a private school in British Columbia and again, his browned-face appearance as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights party does not seem to have raised many eyebrows.Private schools are not in the business of circulating potentially controversial material pertaining to their activities. One of Trudeau’s Aladdin pictures appears to have found its way in the school’s newsletter. If his appearance caused a stir, it seems to have been of the positive kind.While the issue of blackfacing was already a live one some decades ago, the evidence suggests many blithely assumed the concept had more to do with the intent than with the face-painting act itself.That would certainly have been a widespread notion not exclusively in Quebec where Trudeau spent many of his formative years but in many and perhaps most parts of Canada.I attended high school and university in Toronto and raised a family in some of the most diverse neighbourhoods Ontario and Quebec have to offer. I am decently versed in Afro-American and Afro-Canadian literature.Still it was only over the last decade, as controversies over the use of black-faced actors on one of Radio-Canada’s popular year-enders and, a few years later, in the production of a play, that I really grasped the full measure of the concept.Presumably, Trudeau — even as he sincerely did not believe he was doing anything wrong at the time of his blackfacing — would since similarly have had the op ...