Where oh where is Waldo, or should I say, Justin Trudeau?
It’s a fair question for Canadians to ask. He is our prime minister and our top elected leader. When the PM is out in public there should be a chance for citizens and even the dreaded media to see him and even ask him questions.
Anyone wanting to do that should be able to look up Trudeau’s public itinerary published on the PM’s website daily. They could, if the PM’s daily published itinerary was accurate, but it’s not and hasn’t been for some time now.
Veteran journalist Paul Wells noted this last week detailing how all through the summer, Trudeau’s itinerary would say he had no public events and then the PM would pop up somewhere unannounced. It happened in Kitchener and Scarborough in Ontario and in Hinton, Alta.
“This has become standard operating procedure for Justin Trudeau and his staff during the difficult summer of 2024: they claim in public every day that the PM has “no public events scheduled.” Even though he is in a different city every day,” Wells wrote.
This week, Trudeau popped into Sudbury to speak to the Ontario Liberal caucus, his first in-person caucus meeting since the June by-election loss. No notice was given and a request by the Toronto Sun for why the media wasn’t informed went unanswered.
It’s something I’ve been seeing for the past while and every now and again, someone will call Trudeau or his office out for being misleading, but it doesn’t get much attention. Which is odd, because some reporters demand that politicians publish a daily, accurate itinerary of where they are.
That’s what the Trudeau Liberals promised to do with great fanfare in 2015, now they don’t.
Perhaps that’s why Andrew MacDougall, the former director of communications to Stephen Harper, was a little annoyed at what Wells observed. As MacDougall noted, the press gallery was a thorn in his side and would howl at anything, now he says they are the dog that isn’t barking as Trudeau and his team lie about the PM’s whereabouts.
“No, this isn’t about the Prime Minister’s security. He has an entire team to protect him when he is in public. The Prime Minister’s Office could let the media know if the PM is meeting a fellow leader without anyone in the general public knowing,” MacDougall wrote in the Ottawa Citizen last week.
Look, security is a concern and it’s quite sad that politicians of all sorts now only give out the address of public events to journalists who register to attend — that is happening for security reasons. Claiming the PM has no public events and then posting him meeting other politicians or attending large public gatherings on social media is simply lying.
The gallery has been silent about it in a way they weren’t about Harper or other Conservative politicians. Yes, there is a built-in bias at play here, one that I observed for years as a member of the gallery.
Trudeau has been getting away with this for years with few raising an eyebrow, not that it hasn’t caused him headaches.
On Dec. 31, 2016, National Post published a story by David Akin noting that while Trudeau issued a statement and video saying as Canada moved into 2017 to celebrate the country’s 150th birthday, this was, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ring in the New Year together.”
Except he wasn’t in Ottawa, he wasn’t even in Canada.
As we would find out later, Trudeau had jetted off to a vacation on the Aga Khan’s private island. It was a vacation that would cause him plenty of political headaches in the months to come.
Longtime Liberal activist and strategist Jamie Carroll opined to me that there are no votes for anyone to be won or lost on an issue like this. Perhaps, but I’m not in the vote business, I’m in the holding governments to account business.
The Trudeau Liberals were the ones to make a big deal about his itinerary being public. They claimed they would be open when they are anything but.
That’s what we call hypocrisy.