In the latest incident of the PMO apparently playing fast and loose with the official itinerary, the prime minister quietly flew to Sudbury on Wednesday to speak at a Liberal caucus meeting.
Despite the PM’s Wednesday itinerary — emailed to Parliamentary Press Gallery members the previous evening — listing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the National Capital Region with no public events, publicly-accessible flight trackers showed CANFORCE ONE departing Ottawa airport just before 1 p.m.
The RCAF-owned Challenger 650 business jet took about 43 minutes to fly the 430 km from Ottawa to Sudbury, returning to Ottawa later that evening.
An updated itinerary, which included the trip to Sudbury, was published to the PMO’s website later that afternoon.
Trudeau flew to Sudbury to speak at the Liberals’ Ontario caucus meeting.
This is the latest example of the PMO’s recent tendency to leave events off Trudeau’s public itinerary.
The itinerary for July 16 originally listed “southwestern Ontario” when it was emailed to press gallery members the previous evening, with no events listed.
That morning, CANFORCE ONE departed Ottawa for a 430-km flight to the Region of Waterloo International Airport.
Later that day, the PM’s online itinerary was altered to list a single item: a 10:45 a.m. meeting with Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic.
On Aug. 4 — two days after the PM returned to Ottawa following a week-long summer vacation in Tofino — Trudeau was back in B.C., with nothing listed on his emailed itinerary.
However, Trudeau’s Instagram account — and updates to his itinerary made later in the day — showed he actually spent the morning participating in a photo-op at the Vancouver pride parade.
The prime minister’s itinerary for the next day listed only one item — a meeting with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and officials to be briefed on the Jasper wildfires.
What wasn’t on the itinerary was an unscheduled flight to Winnipeg, where pool notes distributed to the press gallery from an accompanying Canadian Press reporter showed Trudeau spent the evening shaking hands at the Filipino exhibit of a city multicultural festival.
Requests for comment by the Toronto Sun to the PMO went unacknowledged.
Perhaps the prime minister’s most notorious example of itinerary obfuscation occurred on the first Truth and Reconciliation day in Sept. 2021, when Trudeau ignored invitations from First Nations to mark the occasion and instead quietly departed for a beach vacation in Tofino.
The PM’s itinerary for that day listed him attending ‘private meetings’ in Ottawa.
[email protected]
x.com/bryanpassifiume