Video footage of Justin Trudeau performing a mock strip tease at a charity fundraiser is being shared after his Liberal party swept to victory in Canada’s general election.
Information about the Liberal leader continues to emerge after he was elected as the next leader on Monday. The son of a former prime minister, Trudeau did not enter politics until 2007 and interest in his backstory continues to grow. He was a high school teacher before becoming an MP, but he also dabbled in acting, appearing in the 2007 film The Great War, and boxing, winning a charity match in 2012.
In 2011, the 43-year-old raised $1,900 for the Canadian Liver Foundation by stripping to his vest at the What a Girl Wants fundraising gala for liver disease. His physical appearance has caused quite a stir since he was elected on Monday and the footage is being circulated on social media once again, along with a number of tweets declaring him a ‘pilf’.
The footage was used in 2013 to discredit him in an attack campaign advert by the Conservatives. Their video showed him in his vest underneath the headline: “Can he really run Canada’s economy?”
However, the only real effect the video seemed to have was on the Canadian Liver Foundation, who saw donations surge in the days after the advert was aired.
“It was certainly an unexpected amount of attention that we’ve received over the last couple of days,” Melanie Kearns, the foundation’s vice-president told the National Post at the time. “We would say that the number of donations that we’ve received in the last 48 hours is almost double what we would receive in unsolicited donations in a month.”
The second youngest man to be elected Prime Minister, Trudeau is a self-declared feminist who wants to legalise marijuana and protect abortion rights. He is also believed to be the only Western world leader who openly has a tattoo in the form of a large image of Earth inside a Haida raven on his arm.
“The globe I got when I was 23,” he said of the design in 2012. “The Robert Davidson raven [was] for my 40th birthday.”
