Michael Higgins: Trudeau feels your pain — while lounging in the lap of luxuryAfter acknowledging 'Canadians are facing tough times,' the PM jetted away to a resort that costs more for 9 days than most earn in a year
Michael Higgins
Published Jan 05, 2024
Justin Trudeau and his family — plus an assorted cadre of staff and bodyguards — travelled to Jamaica recently to stay at a luxurious resort owned by Peter Green, who also happens to be a donor to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. PHOTO BY PROSPECT-VILLAS.COM
Article content“I understand how tough it is right now” for Canadians, said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau only days before leaving for a free Jamaican vacation at a $9,300-per-night resort.
The prime minister, in an interview with the CBC, sympathized with people who were having trouble buying groceries and paying bills and said he hoped young people could still “aspire” to buy a home. “Canadians are facing tough times,” he said. “But we are doing what we always do as Canadians: we roll up our sleeves.”
Second plane sent to bring Trudeau home from luxury Jamaica vacation after breakdown
ISIS spokesman calls for global attacks on Jews: 'Kill them wherever you find them'
He then jetted off to the Caribbean to stay at a villa that is fully staffed by “butlers, cook, gardener, housekeeper/laundress,” according to the resort’s website. (Note: butlers, plural.)
It’s not that prime ministers don’t deserve vacations, even nice ones. The problem is that Trudeau pretends to empathize with the difficulties of ordinary Canadians when he is clearly out of touch with them.
It would be nice to have friends willing to put you up for free for nine nights at a resort that would have cost an ordinary person $84,000 — more than the average Canadian makes in a year — but Trudeau should not be shocked if he is then called out for being an entitled elitist and a hypocrite.
Where should he vacation, his supporters might cry? Well, if he truly cared about Canadians and their plight, he might show solidarity by vacationing in this country. How about spending some cash on the ski hills out West? How about putting money back into the coffers of Canadian companies?
No one truly expects Trudeau to start acting like an ordinary Canadian. He’s not about to catch a late-night Sunwing flight to Jamaica, or to stay at a roadside motel. But for all of Trudeau’s talk about understanding Canadians, empathizing with them and working to help them, he lives in a bubble created by wealth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the difference succinctly in his 1926 essay, “ The Rich Boy.”
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves,” wrote Fitzgerald.
Trudeau doesn’t even make any effort to practise solidarity or understanding. Last month, Argentinian President Javier Milei travelled commercial and engaged with other passengers. Other world leaders, including former British prime minister Boris Johnson and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have also experienced flying with the hoi polloi.
Would Trudeau even know how to get to economy class? He doesn’t have to since he flies aboard a government jet.
“As per long-standing government policy and for security reasons, the prime minister must travel on government aircraft, whether he is on official or personal business,” said the Department of National Defence in answering a question about Trudeau’s last Jamaican vacation a year ago.
(That trip cost taxpayers $160,000 for security and other reasons. His previous trip to Costa Rica cost taxpayers $200,000. If this “free” trip costs a similar amount then the prime minister’s last three vacations will have cost taxpayers about $500,000.)
Clearly, other world leaders don’t feel that they “must” travel in such luxury. If Trudeau wanted to change government policy, he could.
Then there is the — let’s be generous here — obfuscation surrounding the trip. Before Trudeau, his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, and their children departed, the Prime Minister’s Office assured the public that the family would cover the cost of the trip.
Only after the National Post started making inquiries did the PMO make a “clarification.” The family were staying “at no cost at a location owned by family friends,” the PMO finally admitted.
That isn’t a clarification, it’s a complete 180-degree turn.
It was revealed that the Trudeaus were staying at Frankfort villa, a secluded beachfront enclave that is part of the Prospect Estate resort. “When only the very best will do, Frankfort is our answer,” proclaims the resort’s website.
The six-bedroom, 17th-century, 5,000-square-foot house is owned by the family of businessman Peter Green, which has donated in the past to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
Meanwhile, food banks in Canada are recording record numbers of people visiting them as families go hungry. Last March, the latest data available, almost two-million Canadians visited a food bank, an increase of 32.1 per cent from March 2022 and a whooping 78.5 per cent rise from March 2019.
“With the cost of food, rent, gas and other essentials at a 30-year high, families across Canada are struggling. Food banks are being stretched to their limits — just as families need them more than ever,” wrote Food Banks Canada in a plea for Christmas donations.
Trudeau may feel Canadians’ pain but in Jamaica he had the benefit of doing so while lounging in a “luxurious swimming pool” or in the “eight-person hot tub” while overlooking “a spectacular three hundred foot, powdery white sand beach, widely hailed as the best stretch of private beach in Jamaica,” before returning to “perhaps the most desirable north coast villa in Jamaica.”
Yep, these are tough times indeed.
National Post |
