OTTAWA, August 7, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — A compromising photo has surfaced from Toronto’s Pride Parade last year showing Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who is married with children, posing with a young topless woman. The photo comes just two months prior to the federal election.
While Chatelaine columnist Katie Underwood has called the photo “exactly the kind of message Canadian women should receive,” the Rebel’s Ezra Levant, who posted the photo yesterday on Twitter, says Trudeau’s choice of a photo op reveals his lack of “personal and political judgement.”
“What political message does it send about Trudeau’s views about women, and how young Canadian women should see themselves and how they should present themselves to the world, and what they should be valued for,” he said in a Rebel video released yesterday.
“Do you think that’s how a role model, someone in public life should act,” he said. “What’s Trudeau doing? Is he a serious man, or a Peter Pan who just won’t grow up?”
While columnists such as Underwood as well as Robyn Urback make light of the topless photo, arguing that there is nothing problematic with it, the ironic fact remains that both Chatelaine and National Post refused to publish the photo. Chatelaine covered up the photo of the entire woman with a cartoon, saying it was trying to protect the identity of the young woman, while National Post cropped the entire photo to above the breasts.
Last week photos emerged from Vancouver's Pride Parade showing the Liberal candidate for prime minister hugging an underdressed woman who wore a revealing top and tiny shorts. The woman had jumped onto Trudeau and wrapped her bare legs around his body.
Levant criticized Trudeau for using photo ops with young women to “[play] up his sexuality and youthfulness,” saying that Liberal supporters on Twitter tried to write off the photo as a fake because of its “power to permanently brand Trudeau as a rich kid playboy more serious about girls than about government.”
Photos of Trudeau in the 2014 Pride Parade did nothing to boost his credibility with family-value voters. One week after Trudeau appeared in Pride photos sitting beside Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Education Ben Levin in prominent front-row seats, the education bureaucrat was arrested and charged with making and distributing child pornography.