It looked like Justin Trudeau was finished on September 19.

A third blackface or brown face image of him had emerged on Global TV in the midst of the federal election campaign. This time, the grainy video showed a young Trudeau appearing to mock people of African ancestry.

At the time, it seem like the most devastating political gaffe of 2019.

Aboard his campaign plane, Trudeau fumbled on his first attempt to defuse the controversy after the first image appeared in Time magazine. He expressed words of contrition, but without any deep feelings.

And he only admitted to one other instance of wearing brownface, not two.

So he tried again to exercise damage control at a subsequent campaign stop in Winnipeg. And this time, he said it with more feeling out in public where any passerby could stop and watch.

"Darkening your face, regardless of the context or the circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface," the Liberal leader said.

He fessed up to hurting racialized Canadians who shouldn't have to face intolerance and discrimination because of their identity. And he kept fielding questions until all the reporters were done asking them.

There are many Canadian who still can't fathom how Trudeau could have done this, given his education and his age at the time of the second and third events.

But his news conference in Winnipeg still helped staved him off an electoral disaster.

The Liberals managed to win enough seats on October 21 to form a strong minority government.

However, the Liberal incumbent in Winnipeg Centre, Robert-Falcon Ouellette was soundly defeated. Ouellette, who's of French and Cree descent, was among those standing behind Trudeau when he delivered his remarks.

Andrew Scheer not as advertised

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer was hoping to make the 2019 election a referendum on Justin Trudeau.

To drive that point home, Scheer often claimed that the prime minister is "not as advertised". In other words, Trudeau was a hypocrite who couldn't be trusted.

But then the Globe and Mail reported that Scheer had engaged in some resumé inflation by purporting for many years that he had been an insurance broker.

In fact, this man who aspired to become prime minister had only been an insurance clerk. He never passed the provincial licensing exam to become an insurance agent.

So it turned out that Scheer too was "not as advertised".

Not long afterward, he looked downright evasive when it was revealed that he was a dual American-Canadian citizen—and he hadn't told voters about this, either.

By the time Scheer was dodging questions at the end of the campaign about a secret party operation to discredit the People's Party of Canada's leader, the election had become a referendum over the Conservative leader.

This time, there was no recovery.

Scheer will step down from his position as soon as his party chooses a successor. 

Andrew Wilkinson's wacky memories

B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson stepped in political dog shit big time on February 27 when he called being a tenant a "rite of passage".

"I was a renter for 15 years. I lived in a dozen different rentals," the former doctor and lawyer stated in the legislature. "It was challenging at times, but it was fun. It was part of growing up and getting better. We’ve all done it. It’s kind of a wacky time of life, but it can be really enjoyable."

When the NDP pounced on him for being out of touch with the challenges faced by today's tenants, Wilkinson quickly backtracked with four tweets.

In this series of messages, the Rhodes Scholar made a big deal about having a low-paying job and working hard while dealing with student loans.

He also stated that some people are renters by choice before declaring that everyone is helped when there's an ample supply of units.

https://twitter.com/j_mcelroy/status/1100998562681249792

But by then, the damage was done.

In the minds of several millennial journos who cover him, Wilkinson was just another homeowning West Side elitist.

Prince Andrew's dreadful interview

Newsnight interviewer Emily Maitlis said there was a moment when she realized that Prince Andrew was not going to apologize in response to allegations that he had sex with a teenager trafficked by billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

According to Maitlis, this came when she asked the Duke of York if he regretted his whole friendship with Epstein. The prince didn't. And his decision to go on TV ranks as one of the Royal Family's greatest gaffes of this century.

He also denied knowing Virginia Roberts Giuffre, even though there is a photo of him with his arm around her when she was 17 years old. Prince Andrew claimed the photo was doctored.

Then there was the prince's claim that he didn't sweat due to a peculiar medical condition.

Therefore, he insisted that Giuffre's comments about him sweating on the dance floor had to be false.

She called that B.S. and not long afterward, Prince Andrew "stepped aside" from any royal duties amid reports that he had been fired by the Queen.

Scott Morrison's ill-considered holiday

Australians were furious when their tone-deaf prime minister, Scott Morrison, decided to jet off to Hawaii in the midst of a monumental wildfire crisis.

That action, along with other deeds by his government, led to more than 100,000 people signing an online petition demanding that the governor general dissolve Parliament and order an election.

Morrison's Hawaiian holiday has also been memorialized in a mural by artist Scottie Marsh.

Moreover, the prime minister was on the devastating end of a tweetstorm by one of the world's best-known climate scientists, Stefan Rahmstorf. He's head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

https://twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1209967662304038914

As of today, around 50,000 square kilometres have been scorched in Australian wildfires this year. That's more than double the combined area of land burned in British Columbia's record-breaking wildfire years of 2017 and 2018.

Touchy-feely Joe Biden

The former U.S. vice president was in deep trouble in April. He was about to launch a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, but a bunch of women were accusing him of invading their personal space.

Former intern Vail Kohnert-Young made some particularly damning comments to the Washington Post about an encounter at the White House that began with a Biden handshake.

“He then put his hand on the back of my head and pressed his forehead to my forehead while he talked to me," Kohnert-Young said. "I was so shocked that it was hard to focus on what he was saying. I remember he told me I was a ‘pretty girl’."

To contain this issue, Biden decided to release a video, in which he said that he's always tried to make a "human connection" during his career.

"I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say 'you can do this'—and whether they're women, men, young, old, it's just the way I've always been," Biden explained. "It's the way I've showed I care about women. I listen."

Politics, he claimed, wasn't cold or antiseptic; it was about connecting with people.

But he also acknowledged that social norms have shifted and boundaries about protecting personal space have been reset.

"I get it, I get it," Biden stated with as much assurance as he could muster. "I hear what they're saying. I understand it. I will be much more mindful."

The spin seemed to work. He's currently leading the polls among the 15 remaining candidates for the Dems' presidential nod. And he pulled this off without ever having to say he was sorry.