I’ll say upfront I really don’t care if Justin Trudeau goes to Tofino. Arguably the country would be better off if he spent more time there and less in Ottawa, but I digress.
His latest jaunt to the beachy British Columbia destination takes the cake though. Trudeau jetted out west on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day he created for the somber purpose of honouring survivors and victims of Canada’s Indian residential schools.
The trip underscores one of the leading criticisms of holiday-making, which is that people will just use it as a day off without any interest in considering the solemn reasons for the day. Now, the Prime Minister’s Office insists Trudeau wasn’t doing that – he was on the phone for the whole flight with residential school survivors, after all. Mind you, he also ignored two invitations from the Tk’emlúps band near Kamloops. He didn’t even swing by the reconciliation event in Tofino, where he was vacationing.
As someone mindful of political optics, I can’t help but plant my face in my palm at falling into such an avoidable controversy. Had Trudeau gone to some official ceremony on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation then bumped back his vacation just one day, the story would not be so embarrassing, and might not even be a story at all.
On the surface, it reveals a profound tone-deafness from Trudeau and his team, or more likely a shamelessness. Trudeau is on the heels of his third electoral win, and he has kept winning despite myriad scandals. Why should he change his behaviour when spray-coating himself in Teflon is working well so far?
Yet at the same time, there was also Trudeau’s official itinerary, which said he was in “Ottawa” for “private meetings.” Indeed, so private, even he wasn’t at them.
It was only when Toronto Sun reporter Bryan Passifiume spotted Trudeau’s plane on a fight tracking website soaring west that the PMO quietly altered the itinerary to reflect the prime minister wasn’t actually in Ottawa.
An enterprising Global reporter tracked down Trudeau on a beach and attempted to ask him a couple of questions. Trudeau continued walking silently until a couple of members of his protection detail were able to save him from the threat of accountability.
This video took on a more amusing – but again, shameless – dimension when a Prime Minister’s Office spokesperson attempted to spin a Canadian Press reporter that this was a work trip.
“He wasn’t on a beach,” the spokesperson told the reporter. It did look awfully sandy for a boardroom. Maybe those waves were just the sound of the coffee maker brewing away in the corner. We may never know.
There’s a serious point in all of this, which is that a lack of consequences for Trudeau’s behaviour amounts to a level of immunity which it is unwise to bestow on politicians. This isn’t just an immunity form political consequences, but also as we’ve seen through his numerous violations of federal ethics rules, legal consequences as well.
It’s fruitless to yammer on about the hypocrisy and bad choices, and the insult to Indigenous Canadians, and so on, because Canadians have, by and large, chosen to give Trudeau a pass.
So what else is there to say?
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
The adage would seem to apply here. I have to wag my finger here not at Trudeau, but at the enablers who made this conduct possible. Much of this is in the direction of the media, who to be sure covers his scandals, but not with the fervour that would be directed towards other leaders for the same transgressions.
Trudeau’s own team is culpable here. It’s difficult from the outside to figure out whether they are too rapt by Trudeau’s charms to realize he’s capable of error, or are too afraid to call out their leader (no doubt afraid of enjoying the same defenestration received by Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould).
No matter what, it’s clear there’s no one in Trudeau’s orbit who seems all that interested in creating a more accountable government.
Perhaps it’s time for a walk in the snow instead of one in the sand.
