David Ljunggren
[Ottawa, Ontario, 3rd Reuters]-September 18th. A news report from a US Time magazine report to an electoral camp of Prime Minister Trudeau Canada heading for Halifax Airport. A photo that could shake the prime minister's re-election will grace the magazine a few hours later. In 2001, when Trudeau was 29 years old, his face was painted brown at the “Arabian Night” party and dressed in racism.
The camp that moved to the airport parking lot for Winnipeg suddenly decided to delay the takeoff by 4 hours and spend the time in the plane to respond to the article. The general election is a month later.
On the plane, while the officials prepared a message of Mr. Trudeau's apology for the media, the prime minister himself called on the Liberal Democrats and ministers of minority ethnic groups from one end in anticipation of Twitter protection.
Mr. Trudeau admitted that he had apologized several times during the press conference for the nationwide television broadcast, and that there were other incidents where his face was painted dark brown.
An interview with Mr. Trudeau's aides and six staff members reveals how quickly the Prime Minister's camp took a quick and careful strategy to restore the image for the next week.
One of the people involved in the strategy planning said, “Don't run away or stretch. Do n’t let the prime minister stand out and blame the public as much as you want.”
I don't know yet if the strategy to apologize instantly has come out. According to polls, Mr. Trudeau's approval rating declined immediately after the exposure article, and has since picked up. However, several polls indicate that the Prime Minister's Liberal Party should be able to establish a minority government and lose to the opposition conservative party.
A spokesman for the Conservative Party ’s campaign camp told Reuters: “Mr. Trudeau has been telling the public about social and diversity issues for the last four years. Hypocrisy cannot be left behind. I realized I was fake. "
<Shelves the scenario>
According to related sources, Mr. Trudeau's camp had three staff members in charge of crisis management and worked with the prime minister's executives to take the following actions.
Open attitude and regret, and sincerely answer questions from the public and the media. Pause regular election campaigns. This issue will be resolved as soon as possible for the October 21 election.
Faced with the crisis, the Liberal camp was forced to temporarily shelve the original scenario. According to the scenario, the conservative party would be labeled as a rushing temple for racist, anti-homosexuality and anti-abortion candidates, and it was supposed to have a fierce election campaign.
<Apologize for 2 days and repartition>
The prime minister's aircraft took off on September 18 and the prime minister arrived in Winnipeg, headed to a different hotel from the accompanying reporters, and then took the unusual response of losing contact with the reporters for 12 hours.
Aides and others decided to cancel the announcement on the education policy scheduled on the 19th. Mr. Trudeau told his associates that he wanted to avoid returning to an election announcement immediately. “I'm really sorry about the past, but I don't want to give a speech that there is a more important story,” said one of the aides, the prime minister said.
Mr. Trudeau's press conference usually ends in 15-20 minutes when it comes to elections, but Winnipeg responded to questions from reporters for almost an hour, contrary to the usual advice of the staff.
In the next playground Saskatoon, the election rally for the Liberal Party supporters that night was canceled and the meeting was held in a public hall where anyone can ask questions.
The Liberal Party officials involved in the election campaign said, “It was a very bad situation to hold an election campaign. He (Mr. Trudeau) is in a penalty box (standby seat where foul players sit in ice hockey).” Explained.
However, after two days of apology, he was ready for a counterattack. Mr. Trudeau launched four major policies one after another in the next three days.
On July 20, the gun control policy was announced in Toronto. On the next day, the top of a major national newspaper was decorated with gun control news instead of black-faced photos.
Nick Nanos of the polling firm Nanos Research pointed out that the Liberal Party is lucky because there is still time to raise the approval rating by the election. “If this happened in the last week of the election campaign, we would have said that it would be decided by Andrew Shear (Conservative Prime Minister),” he said.