TEAM TRUDEAU: ALL PLAY-ACTING & NO SUBSTANCE

  WENTE, G&M:  The past two weeks have not been kind to Justin Trudeau’s image. He decked his family out in colourful costumes, dragged them halfway across India, and wound up with the worst press of any Canadian PM on any foreign trip that anyone can remember. Canada-India relations are now in possibly their worst shape ever.
   After that, he came home to introduce his relentlessly female-friendly budget (the one that made 358 references to “gender”). The best that can be said is that nobody minded it too much. Few of the females I know seemed particularly grateful for the extra-special treatment. Like the Indians, they just felt condescended to. “I’m sick of gender politics,” one friend groused to me. “What matters is that we can’t get anything in Asia right. ”
   But pandering is what Mr. Trudeau does best. He wants to be more feminist than the feminists and more Bollywood than Shah Rukh Khan. The trouble is that he’s trying way too hard. So he just comes off as opportunistic and condescending.