Chris Selley: Yes, it matters where and how the prime minister vacations

Prime Minister Mark Carney drinks a local beverage during a visit to a small fruit farm in Saguenay, Quebec, on Aug. 6, 2026. He's currently in Tuscany. Photo by Francis Vachon /Postmedia

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The Carneys are living their best vacation lives in Tuscany. And back home, some of us are again debating a prime minister’s vacation choices. Or not so much debating as, mostly, kvetching, in roughly equal parts about the vacation itself and about anyone who would be so gauche and unworldly as to question the vacation. “Lots of Canadians go to Caribbean all-inclusives, right? So why shouldn’t the PM go to Tuscany?”

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Tellingly, that sort of absurd comparison — we’re all prime minister, really; Tuscany isn’t much different than that 2.5-star resort in Punta Cana you saw on the Air Transat package-vacations website — is the only card most “none of our business” people know how to play. “Oh, so you think the PM and his wife should dress in sackcloth, don crowns of thorns, and camp out on East Hastings?”

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If you genuinely don’t care, that’s fine. We certainly have bigger fish to fry, and there’s only so much room in the national fryolator. But this is self-evidently our business, and no one should apologize for thinking so.

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We pay for it, first of all. There’s no official hourly cost for getting one of the Challenger jets into the air, but various reports suggest it’sat least pushing $10,000. (PMs using the jets on vacation, which we are constantlytold they mustbecause of security concerns, owe the treasury the commercial value of the equivalent economy-class tickets. That would be around $4,300 per passenger on Air Canada to and from Rome, last-minute in August, or around $2,700 on Air Transat.)

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Secondly, the federal government regulates Canada’s sclerotic, despised airline industry, among other things forbidding foreign-carrier competition on domestic routes. The transport minister never has to put up with anything less than commercial business class. As long as ministers are in office they’ll never have to worry about “air-passenger rights,” which no doubt partly explains why Canadian air passengers enjoy far fewer rights (to compensation, rebooking on other airlines, hotel rooms, etc.) than Americans, Europeans or Brits.

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That’s not because Air Canada and WestJet donate lavishly to political parties, which would be illegal. It’s just to keep all the toy soldiers in the Laurentian sandbox fat and happy in the bar at the Château Laurier: MPs, ministers and would-be ministers, lobbyists, strategists, consultants and unidentified appetizer-grazers. For that reason alone, we should insist the PM endure commercial air travel on personal business. And in economy.

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I absolutely loathe the idea, often heard in Canada, that “G7 leaders can’t fly commercial.” It speaks to the hermetically sealed box inside which most Canadian political thinking occurs. And to my ears all it really means is, “I am someone who likes to pretend that Canada and its prime minister are much more important than they actually are.”