“All he had to do was say no, but he couldn’t resist the billionaire lifestyle.” All Progressive Conservative leader Rona Ambrose had to do was say no, but she couldn’t resist the lifestyle of the sensational hypocrite.
It will trail her political career forever, like a vestigial tail.
Ambrose attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for visiting the billionaire Aga Khan’s private island on a Christmas vacation while she herself was secretly on a billionaire’s private yacht. For all I know the yacht, belonging to Calgary Flames co-owner and trice a billionaire Murray Edwards, was circling the island at the time.
I envision Ambrose peering through opera glasses, putting down her cigar and typing out her tweet, one-fingered and hard. “That’ll fix him.”
But no. I looked up St. Barts and St. Martin where her flailing spokesman said the yacht was lolling or yawing, or whatever you call sailing to nowhere while rich. It is nowhere near the Bahamas but St. Martin is coincidentally the island where I spent the only tropical vacation of my life. Oh what a terrible week that was.
I ended up in a dispute with Air Canada about the definition of a fridge. I say it’s a small box that keeps stuff cold when you have to buy bulk supermarket food because the hotel restaurant is so bad, and they said it was more of a foot locker with a breezy ambience.
As for the stained towels and having to sleep under the mattress pad for warmth, I shall say no more. I am not applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to vacations — he is on an island, she is on a yacht, I am eating Cheese Doodles in a rage — but I am tired of Conservative status anxiety.
Ambrose’s spokesman responded by spinning so badly he threw his back out. Her idyll was fine, he said, because she was “open and transparent with the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, unlike the Prime Minister.”
That is not true. Trudeau didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, but Ambrose must have known she was teetering. According to iPolitics, she only told the commissioner about her Jan. 3-14 trip on Jan. 12, the day of the tweet, possibly while she was still on the yacht. This was six days after the story about the Trudeau trip broke and the Conservatives had exploded in complaint. That’s “open and transparent” like Fox News is “fair and balanced.”
Trudeau had initially defended himself by saying he had known the Aga Khan since childhood. That remark upset insecure Conservatives. But Ambrose told the commissioner that her life partner, ex-rodeo rider J.P. Veitch, has been friends with Edwards for 33 years. And the difference is?
Ambrose once favourably compared Laureen Harper to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau because Harper was modest and quiet, unlike some girls. Trudeau travelled with political friends, Ambrose with regular ones. Veitch is a former rodeo cowboy, Trudeau the son of a prime minister.
I don’t know what this means. Well I do. Trudeau has gallons of friends in the party, Ambrose has none (she has even fewer now). Ambrose is jes’ plain folks, Trudeau is glamorous. For a Canadian. Compared to the last one.
But here is the meat of the nut. Ambrose is interim, Trudeau is … prime minister.
He defeated the nasty party, the party of MP Kellie Leitch who has 18 letters after her name and is “not an idiot,” the party that flirts with Trumpishness and nudges voters to hate everyone with a nicer couch.
Ambrose has a fine life courtesy of the taxpayer and that is as it should be. Stornoway is grand, grander than where Trudeau lives because Canadians are too tangled up in conflicted feelings about money to rebuild the prime minister’s mouldy, asbestos-ridden official residence.
Ambrose should probably not hang out with rich people. When I am in their homes, which is rarely, I think uneasily of my drapes.
The rich are equally uneasy. People with yachts hate people with islands. The Obamas have been staying with billionaire Richard Branson. What does he have, an archipelago?
Perhaps a terrible dissatisfaction raked Ambrose that afternoon as the ocean shone silvery-blue. In the water, a dark fin rose. Her bitter heart beat faster as she tweeted about the billionaire lifestyle.
“Ronalee, you might want to delete that,” Veitch may well have said protectively. I am told he is a nice man. I wish them well.
hmallick@thestar.ca
hmallick@thestar.ca
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