GUNTER: Trudeau continues to embarrass Canada on the working stage

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Seriously, when are we Canadians going to stop letting our goofy Prime Minister represent us on the international stage?

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Justin Trudeau, a man who is at best an intellectual lightweight on home soil, becomes a clown when he goes abroad.

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Just look at his photo with “male legs” as he shook hands with Kim Jin-pyo, Speaker of the National Assembly of Korea on Friday.

During the usual photo op with Kim, Trudeau bizarrely spread his legs a meter or more apart.

He looks like a gymnast who badly missed his dismount.

His pose can only be described as embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as his family’s costume tour of India in 2018, but only because the Korea blip was short-lived. The Trudeau family’s costume party on the Ganges went on for days.

The prime minister’s office’s explanation for his boss’ behavior only makes the incident more embarrassing.

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According to PMO staff, Trudeau adopted the spread-legged position to lower himself (at height). Trudeau is 20cm taller and didn’t want the gap to be so obvious in photos.

Since when is that ever worth considering?

It’s condescending and insulting, like getting on your knees to talk to a small person.

If the use of dark makeup by Caucasians is called blackface, what’s the name of Trudeau’s move? “Asian legs?”

But let’s say for a moment that Trudeau meant well. The Korean media seemed to acknowledge the prime minister’s attempt not to humiliate Kim by towering over him. Can’t we at least accuse Trudeau of being clueless for thinking his gesture wouldn’t show up in photos? That he could pull off the height-balancing stunt and he wouldn’t be on the news? That there are never full-height photos of world leaders, only waist-height ones?

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While Trudeau ended up just trying to save Kim some awkwardness, he ended up just emphasizing the couple’s size difference. Instead of eliminating inequality, Trudeau made it “the” story.

Most people may not have noticed the contact between a Canadian politician and the speaker of another country’s parliament. Trudeau’s action made everyone take notice. And not in a flattering way.

I guess at least we can be thankful that Trudeau didn’t seek out a piano in the lobby of his Seoul hotel and start singing pop music like he drew unwanted attention at his ultra-expensive London hotel over the weekend in front of Queen Elizabeth’s has funeral.

But Trudeau’s foreign policy failures go far beyond his propensity to shame our country in foreign capitals. Trudeau, too, with his weak, aimless positions, his preaching to other countries, his submissive attitude towards Beijing, and his apathy towards our military, even peacekeeping, has all but destroyed the influence we had in foreign policy.

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If you think his economic policies are bad, just look at the way he’s been dismissed internationally.

Remember how Chinese President Xi Jinping visibly threatened and abused our Prime Minister at the G20 meeting in Bali last fall? You don’t treat someone you respect or think competent like a clumsy schoolboy.

Indeed, it is Trudeau’s subservience to Beijing that accounts for much of Canada’s decline in foreign influence since 2015.

He allowed himself to be embarrassed by the Chinese communists during the free trade negotiations. Even when we talk about free trade with China, Americans (who are our biggest customers) are wary of relations with us.

Trudeau’s kindness to China has caused our allies to stop sharing defense and intelligence information with us.

And its unwillingness to send Canadians on UN peacekeeping missions cost our country a seat on the UN Security Council.

While Trudeau boasted on the night of his election eight years ago that “Canada is back in international affairs,” under him we are more marginalized than ever.