Records show Trudeau is routinely offered portraits of himself as gifts

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been offered the gift of his own likeness some 17 times since becoming prime minister, including once by the president of China.

The portraits and photos, along with a myriad of vases, wine bottles and Star Wars paraphernalia, are among the more than 400 gifts valued at over $200 that Trudeau has declared to the federal ethics commissioner since late 2015.

Among the representations “of myself,” as they are commonly described in Trudeau’s disclosures, are a portrait seal from Chinese President Xi Jinping and a painting on goat skin offered by Abiy Ahmed Ali, the prime minister of Ethiopia.

There is also a 3D crystal collage of Trudeau and former U.S. president Barack Obama, and cut-outs of him and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, both given by Canadian artists.

The Prime Minister’s Office, when asked, did not specifically address the question of what happens to all these images of Trudeau. For example, do any — such as the oil painting titled “Happy Moments” — hang in his residence at Rideau Cottage? They said simply that some gifts are kept or stored while others are donated or forfeited.

Roy Norton, the chief of protocol at Global Affairs Canada from 2016 until 2019, told The Canadian Press he doesn’t read anything into the portraiture trend other than a desire “to get more personal and less costly.”

Toward that same goal, Norton said in an interview, the Canadian protocol office would try to match gifts offered by Trudeau with the recipient’s tastes.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel was a Bach fan, so she got a box set of concertos performed by Glenn Gould, he said, while one of Trudeau’s gifts to former U.S. president Donald Trump was a 1980s photograph of Trump with Pierre Elliott Trudeau in New York.

“Trump likes pictures of himself, so that was a gift that was seemingly very well received,” Norton said. The president told media at the time: “What a great picture.”

Norton explained that gift exchanges are a highly orchestrated bureaucratic affair, adding that Canadian prime ministers would just as soon not receive any gifts because of the potential for negative attention.

“No leader of a democratic country is interested in being compromised or having to spend a fraction of the news cycle defending a gift received or a gift given,” he said.