Commentary
When your government is spending
nearly half a trillion dollars a year, calling a $90 billion deficit prudence, spewing $300 billion
for frigates we won’t see for a decade, and taking $5 billion and three decades to fix a building, you might think six grand a night for a hotel room is a bagatelle. The prime minister certainly does, as he sneeringly refuses even to admit it was him.
For Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, the federal government spent $350,000 renting rooms at the super-luxury
Corinthia hotel in London for less than a week.
Including $30k so someone could spend five nights in the “River Suite,” at 904 square feet nearly as large as my cottage but, unlike my cottage, featuring “complimentary butler service” and a marble bathroom with under-floor heating, bathtub with built-in TV, and separate rain shower.
The Corinthia’s website offers “The love of life, the appreciation of the finer things and the permission to be a little decadent” to our sort, dahling. As Brian Lilley noted, London has many cheaper five-star hotels. But a mere five-star is beneath Trudeau. And while you may wish its arrogance was our government’s worst flaw, its conviction that it can treat questions about this episode, and those who ask them, as dirt beneath its feet actually constitutes a massive obstacle to embarrassing it over its other blunders.
Look at Trudeau’s scornful reaction when caught doing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” karaoke on this very hotel’s Steinway piano, while supposedly respectfully commemorating the Queen’s lifetime of dignified service. (In a classic touch, Steinway “
does not publish prices online” for one of its new grand pianos; it’s part of that if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it world. But of course when you’re spending other people’s money, it’s amazing what you can afford.)
Now I know what you’re thinking if you’re a Trudeau defender. And it’s not even “Why not the best?” or “What’s $30,000 of tax dollars from that grubby middle class and those smelly peasants jostling to enter it?” It’s “How dare you question his Majesty?”
Partly Trudeau is a permanent adolescent who thinks he’s part of the rebellion against the power structure even while sitting at its apex gobbling perks like a tax-funded private chef and $50k per year grocery budget. He even agreed, as prime minister, that Canada is currently carrying out genocide, because he believes he’s sticking it to the Man despite actually being the Man. (In that vein, a Toronto Star “Entertainment Columnist”
insisted that the Queen herself “would have loved” Trudeau taking the mickey out of her boring fussy funeral arrangements.) But the main issue is that our ruling class generally, and this prime minister in particular, have torn so free of accountability that they’re openly baffled and contemptuous when challenged.
They don’t even babble that, while they’d love to be transparent and open unlike that awful Stephen Harper, security considerations preclude revealing precise accommodation arrangements. Or that they weren’t so much slipping specific pampered individuals twixt butlered silk sheets as putting on a dignified show (with time out for decadence) on behalf of the nation, symbolically.
Speaking of symbols, the governor-general, already in the hot first-class seat over obscene expenditures jetting about gabbing, particularly $93,000 “to feed and water her entourage,” as Chris Selley put it, on a Middle Eastern trip of no possible value, as I put it, made it known that this time it wasn’t her. So it was Trudeau.
We know. He knows we know. We know he knows. He just doesn’t care. A $16 glass of orange juice could bring down a Harper Tory minister. But Trudeau isn’t even brazening it out. He’s brushing it off. The sleeping arrangements at Versailles are no business of the Jacquerie.
Nor are our sordid financial struggles. We
just learned that Trudeau confessed, at the private school in a posh, scenic locale where he taught math, that he can’t do math. “I am disnumeric,” he said, citing a non-existent disability, before explaining “I have an inability to handle small numbers, and little calculations. Those easy things that people do so well. 13 plus 14.”
So compound interest is a total mystery to him. But the fact that he socked each of us with an additional debt of nearly $2,500 last year alone means nothing to him in every sense. What’s a household budget? Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. Or whatever.
The oleaginous title of the 2019 budget was “Investing in the Middle Class.” But really, Trudeau is borrowing massively on its tab. Interest on the debt now exceeds $24 billion, is one of the largest single items in the budget and, in a ghastly replay of the 1970s and 1980s, is poised to surge upward.
He, on the other hand, is living the butlered, decadent, someone-else-will-pay life. And loving it. It’s good to be the king. Begone, impertinent paysans.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
