Justin Trudeau causes squirms with schoolgirl 'short skirt' story
· Toronto Sun
As if the blackface photos, the so-called Kokanee grope, and “ peoplekind ” weren’t enough.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau had attendees at a women’s conference squirming as he recounted a story about teaching schoolgirls who wore their “skirts too short.”
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Trudeau, 54, recently spoke at the 2026 Women Deliver Conference in Melbourne, Australia, on stage with his former chief of staff, Katie Telford. But it was Trudeau’s turn to deliver the cringey, creepy story to a predominantly female audience that was visibly uncomfortable.
Trudeau recounted a story, during his time as a teacher, when he helped found a school newspaper. He said he met a male student who was “always getting corrected” about having his shirt untucked at school. The student then wrote an essay in the newspaper complaining of what he saw as a double standard, as female students at the school would regularly break the dress code by wearing their skirts too short.
“God forbid,” interjected Telford.
Read the room, for crying out loud
Undeterred, Trudeau dug himself deeper, replying, “No, no, you see, that was also the rule — you had to keep your shirt tucked in and then have the skirt to the knees. And he (the male student) said it was totally unfair that there was a double standard on applying these rules.”
“ He ended up writing this essay, suggesting that maybe the predominantly male teaching staff was slightly uncomfortable pointing out to these teenage girls that their skirts were too short, and it was just awkward for a male teacher to be pointing that out,’ Trudeau said, as both Telford and the audience seemed to grow more uncomfortable by the second.
Trudeau then went all-in, adding the essay was “a really interesting perspective.”
“So, I had the student publish this, and the newspaper got shut down the very next day,” he said.
No kidding.
The Kokanee incident
The self-declared feminist prime minister, now dating pop star Katy Perry, found himself in some troubl e when an editorial from the Creston Valley Advance in British Columbia resurfaced in 2018 accusing Trudeau of groping a young reporter while visiting the town 18 years before. The incident came to be known as “The Kokanee Grope.”
“I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national newspaper, I never would have been so forward,” Trudeau reportedly said.
“It’s not a rare incident to have a young reporter, especially a female who is working for a small community newspaper, be considered an underling to their ‘more predominant’ associates and blatantly disrespected because of it,” the editorial said. “But shouldn’t the son of a former prime minister be aware of the rights and wrongs that go along with public socializing?”
Trudeau addressed the allegations, saying he didn’t recall any “negative interactions.”
“I’ve been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago,” he told reporters at the time. “I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way. But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.
When asked why he apologized to the reporter, he said, “If I apologized later, it would be because I sensed that she was not entirely comfortable with the interaction that we had.
“I don’t want to speak for her, I don’t want to presume how she feels now. I’m responsible for my side of the interaction, which certainly —
as I said, I don’t feel was in anyway untoward. But at the same time, this lesson that we are learning — and I’ll be blunt about it —
often a man experiences an interaction as being benign, or not inappropriate, and a woman, particularly in a professional context can experience it differently. And we have to respect that, and reflect on it.”
Blackface and brownface
Trudeau’s past came back to haunt him once again in 2019, when old photos surfaced of him wearing blackface and brownface. Time Magazine published a yearbook photo of Trudeau in brownface makeup and a turban at an Arabian Nights-themed party in 2001.
And it wouldn’t end there. More photographs emerged, this time of Trudeau in “blackface” at a high school talent show where he sang Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” along with video footage of his face, skin and tongue painted black and an object stuffed into the front of his jeans.
“I take responsibility for my decision to do that,” Trudeau said during the 2019 federal election campaign, when he defied the odds and won a minority government despite the photos. “It’s something that I didn’t think was racist at the time but now I recognize it was something racist to do.”