Canada’s Trudeau campaigns after blackface images deliver blow to polling numbers

OTTAWA

- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau returned to the campaign trail on Sunday in his bid for reelection in October as polls showed his Liberals took a significant hit with voters after photos emerged of him in blackface.

Trudeau has repeatedly apologized for the photos, which jarred with his oft-stated position that he wants to improve the lot of minorities in Canada and prompted accusations of hypocrisy. Trudeau was headed for the Ontario city of Brampton, where 58 percent of the population is either south Asian or black. The Liberals took all five of Brampton’s seats in 2015 and need to retain them to stand a chance of winning the Oct. 21 election. Before the photos emerged last week, surveys of public opinion strongly suggested Trudeau would beat the opposition Conservatives of Andrew Scheer, who is a legislator.

Now the polls have shifted and the Liberals are looking particularly vulnerable in Ontario, said pollster Frank Graves of EKOS Research, who said he would release his exact survey figures later this week. The day before the pictures emerged, “the Liberals were at or very close to a majority” in the House of Commons, Graves said. “That’s completely turned around and maybe the Conservatives are in majority range now.” “The Liberals’ Ontario lead appears to have evaporated almost overnight,” he added. At the end of August, the Liberals had a 15 percentage point lead on Conservatives Ontario, according to an EKOS poll. Conservatives would now win 35.5 percent of the vote and the Liberals 32.9 percent, a Nanos Research poll released on Sunday said. The theme of Trudeau’s campaign stop in Brampton is making life more affordable for Canadians, which had been one of the main thrusts of the campaign before the photo scandal.

(Reuters)