OTTAWA, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- Justin Trudeau's blackface images released ahead of next month's general election could imperil his attempt to obtain a second term as Canada's 23rd prime minister, polls showed on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, global polling company Ipsos reported that Trudeau and his Liberal Party is now trailing the official opposition Conservative Party by 4 percentage points following the release of two photos and one video last week that show the 47-year-old prime minister in brownface and blackface dating back to 2001 and before.
If the Canadian election were held now as opposed to on Oct. 21, 36 percent of decided voters would choose the Conservative Party while 32 percent would opt for the Liberal Party, according to the Ipsos poll that was conducted for Canadian media network, Global News.
Meanwhile, another survey conducted by Canadian public opinion researcher the Angus Reid Institute and released on Monday, found the governing Liberals 5 percentage points behind the opposition Conservatives.
The release of images of Trudeau wearing dark makeup, which made international news headlines and was pilloried on U.S. talk shows, was "too big to not have an effect,"said Darrell Bricker, chief executive officer of Toronto-based Ipsos Public Affairs.
"The damage done is to his credibility as a leader and his fitness for office, not whether he should be forgiven for what he did," said Bricker, explaining why public support for Trudeau and his party is slipping.
Ipsos found that 60 percent of Canadians disapprove of the Trudeau government's performance and 64 percent believe it's time for another political party to form the next government -- four years after the Liberals ended the Conservatives' near decade-long run in office.
However, only 20 percent of respondents in Ipsos's poll believe the prime minister should resign over what Trudeau himself acknowledged to be racist behavior before he first won a seat in Canada's Parliament nearly 11 years ago, 45 percent felt his apologies last week were sufficient.
Trudeau's own popularity has suffered too since the brownface-blackface issue surfaced. Last week, Trudeau enjoyed a seven-point lead over lower-key Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer as the preferred choice among Canadians for prime minister, according to Ipsos. This week, Trudeau leads Scheer by only two points: 33 percent-versus-31 percent.
Bricker, who briefly served as director of public-opinion research in former Canadian Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's office, expects more conservatives than progressives will vote in the October election because they will be "enthusiastic" to topple Trudeau.
The reverse was true in 2015 when more liberal-minded voters turned out at the polls because they saw Trudeau as an agent of change, said Bricker, who sees the turn against the prime minister the broader result of a "confluence of bad things that have happened to him since January."
In his first interview since the controversial images emerged last week, Trudeau told Global News on Tuesday that he has not darkened his skin since 2001 when he appeared in a photo as a brownfaced character from Alladin, which Time magazine published Wednesday. But the Canadian Liberal leader declined to answer a question as to whether he has any other "skeletons in the closet."
"We've all done things that we're unhappy with and things that we learned from. I'm no different than anybody else," Trudeau told Global News' national anchor Dawna Friesen. "People know I'm not perfect. But people also know what I stand for."
