Media matters: If Justin Trudeau’s vacation itinerary was so vitally important, why isn’t Danielle Smith’s?

Do you remember the furor the National Post and all its little local Postlets ginned up about Justin Trudeau’s Christmas holiday in British Columbia? 

Hard to believe that was just three weeks ago! It feels like a year. The brouhaha has already almost completely disappeared down Postmedia’s capacious Memory Hole!

“The office of the prime minister did not immediately respond to the National Post’s request for comment on his holiday plans,” the Post’s reporter huffed just after Christmas.

Naturally, that story also revisited Mr. Trudeau’s controversial 2016 winter holiday in the Bahamas, for which the prime minister was thoroughly worked over at the time by a variety of media operations. 

Now that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been on a “family vacation” at an “undisclosed location” – not disclosed for “security reasons,” no less – yet popping up in public to engage in freelance “diplomacy” with Donald Trump, then refusing to go to Ottawa with the other premiers to devise a strategy against Mr. Trump’s planned depredations, what’s become of Postmedia’s insatiable curiosity about leader holidays? 

Given the general lack of interest, it would appear that all the hysteria about political leaders’ holidays only applies to a certain political leader, viz., Mr. Trudeau. Now why would that be, do you think?

As it happened, all Mr. Trudeau – who as we all know has been undergoing a rough patch, personally and politically that led to his decisions a week ago to step down as Liberal leader and the day before yesterday not to seek re-election  – wanted to do was to have a quiet Christmas holiday with his children, and maybe an opportunity to contemplate his future.

That, of course, is nigh on impossible when large numbers of his opposition’s supporters have been programmed to assail him obscenely in public whenever they spot him, while their friends record the assaults on their smartphones to distribute on the Internet. 

Enabling that kind of antisocial disorder, it is reasonable to conclude, may indeed have been among Postmedia’s motives in its intense interest in Mr. Trudeau’s itinerary last month. They are nowadays less a newspaper chain, after all, that a clickbait generator.

Ms. Smith, on her mysterious vacation, has actually engaged in activities that have real, current implications for the economic wellbeing of the country and perhaps even its survival. This is even true if you think, as the army of Conservative social media bots apparently does, that her freelance “diplomacy” at Mar-a-Lago was a good thing. 

If nothing else, seeing what she’s gotten up to, it is important for for the short-term economic future of the country and the state of our democracy that we know where Ms. Smith was, what her trip cost taxpayers, with whom she met, with whom she travelled, and what commitments she made to Mr. Trump and any of his minions she may have encountered.

There are even issues national security now involved in Ms. Smith’s activities, and I don’t just mean how much her own personal security cost, although that’s a relevant question too, since it’s been raised by her own staff. 

Despite the national uproar about her refusal to sign the joint statement of all other premiers, we know very little about any of this, and it would appear media doesn’t have much interest in pursuing such questions. 

So, what kind of commentary did we get from Postmedia’s A-Team political commentators in the immediate aftermath of the premier’s not-so-secret Mar-a-Lago diplomacy last Saturday?

Rick Bell: “Canada betrays Alberta if Trudeau uses oil to fight Trump … Is Alberta being set up to get the shaft again?” (The story’s URL suggests the original headline was even more tendentious.) 

Don Braid: “Smith has plan to stop feds from looting Alberta to pay for tariff crisis.”

David Staples: “Alberta’s Danielle Smith shoots down Ottawa’s threat of energy embargo on U.S.”

Well, fair enough, I guess. And to give Mr. Staples, at least, his due, he got it half right when he started his column by saying, “You can’t build a country by selling out one region in favour of others.” He should have added the caveat, though, that one region apparently always has the right to sell out the rest of the country as long as it includes Alberta. 

Imagine what would have happened if Ms. Smith had got an oil-and-gas carve-out from the president elect’s proposed anti-Canadian tariffs. Without doubt, she would have returned home waving the agreement over her head and proclaiming, “No tariffs for our time!” Or words to that effect. 

One supposes that if that had happened, and only Alberta had been spared economic devastation, the next stories from Postmedia would have been back to screaming about equalization.

We got more of the same from Mr. Braid and a double dose from Mr. Bell in the aftermath of Ms. Smith’s refusal to join the rest of Canada’s premiers in a strategy to deal with Mr. Trump’s tariff plan. For his part, Mr. Staples moved on to slagging Mark Carney, who yesterday launched his Liberal Party leadership campaign in Edmonton. 

Well, it’s not as if a media double standard about where and with whom political leaders spend their holidays is without precedent. Readers will recall the previous United Conservative Party premier’s mysterious disappearance during his three-week-long “two-week vacation” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. 

To this day, there’s never been much media interest in trying to find out where Jason Kenney was from Aug. 9 to Sept. 1 that year, what he was doing there, or with whom he was doing it. 

But then, in the media’s defence, there’s no evidence he was engaging unauthorized talks with the leaders of countries that intended to do Canada harm while he was missing in action.

Last we heard, Ms. Smith was scheduled to return to Alberta today. She may want to give it another day or two, though. By then we should have forgotten all about what she did and didn’t do.