At least three provincial ministers and officials lost their posts and several federal and provincial members of parliament from different parties were dismissed from their party posts – for one reason – during the past Christmas and New Year’s holidays, despite the government’s new travel guidelines for the epidemic period.
Staff raise the Canadian flag in front of the Supreme Court building. (March 21, 2014)
Politicians’ overseas travel stirs outrage
When Ms. Yuan, who lives in Vancouver, Western Canada, heard the news, her first reaction was, “These people are hypocrites, they say one thing and do another.”
Ms. Yuan herself has been in extreme grief for the past ten months. At the end of March last year, Ms. Yuan suddenly received a phone call from her brother, whose mother, who had been in good health living at home in China, was admitted to hospital in an emergency and died the next day.
Many people in Canada are also facing extreme emotional and psychological trials as Ms. Yuan did during the pandemic.
Currently, a second wave of the epidemic is raging in Canada. In the past week, there have been more than 7,000 new infections per day. The total number of infections in Canada has reached 630,000, with nearly 17,000 deaths.
On the eve of Christmas and New Year, several Canadian provinces have introduced stricter community quarantine measures. The government advised people not to party, not to visit friends or relatives, and to avoid “non-essential travel” for the sake of community health, so as not to overload the health care system with a spike in new coronavirus infections after the holidays.
But after Christmas, the media first broke the news that Rod Phillips, the finance minister of Ontario, Canada’s largest province, was vacationing in the Caribbean – an island he and his wife had arrived on in mid-December.
More implausibly, while on vacation, Phillips also posted holiday greetings on social media and attended office work meetings via the Internet, giving the illusion that he was working from home.
After the incident came to light, Phillips cut his vacation short and returned to Canada, admitting in a media interview that it was a “very, very stupid decision” to go on vacation at this time.
But the pressure from the public did not slow down, and on the last day of 2020, he tendered his resignation to Premier Ford.
In a statement, Ford said, “The people of Ontario have sacrificed a lot for the epidemic …… Phillips’ resignation shows that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
The media has now broken the news that at least 15 Canadian political figures are traveling abroad or attending to personal matters during the epidemic, and 10 of these people belong to conservative political parties.
The western Canadian energy province of Alberta was the hardest hit by the earthquake, with six Conservative MPs, including Minister of Municipal Affairs Tracy Allard and the Premier’s Chief of Staff Jamie Huckabay, ignoring government guidelines on the epidemic and taking vacations abroad.
Initially, the governor, Jason Kenney, tried to take responsibility for the lawmakers and senior officials, saying that “he did not make it clear to his ministry that they were not allowed to travel.
But the local public anger has been difficult to quell. This week, Kenney finally gave in and sacked Huckabees and accepted Allard’s resignation.
The government cannot disqualify elected members of parliament at any level, but most of those involved in the controversy have been punished by being removed from their positions within their political parties. Moreover, the incident will somewhat affect their votes in the next election.
Canadian political commentators have even criticized the behavior of a dozen politicians, saying they set a bad example that will directly affect the public’s trust in the government’s quarantine measures and, by extension, the public’s overall efforts to fight the epidemic.
One current political commentator wrote mockingly, “What these dozen politicians are doing is telling us that you only need to follow the policies I set and not pay attention to how I do it.”
Eventually, even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came out and said he was “very disappointed” that these politicians had violated the epidemic’s guiding agenda.
Why is the public so angry?
There are more than 1,000 federal and provincial members of parliament in Canada, and those who go on vacation abroad represent a very small percentage of the population, but they have sparked a huge wave of criticism.
Underneath the media reports, you can see a lot of angry comments. The most frequently mentioned were the front-line health care workers. They questioned who needed the holiday more than the health care workers who have been working at full capacity since the outbreak.
Other people said that their loved ones are in the same city, but they can’t get together, so why don’t the politicians follow basic government guidelines?
According to Dr. Jingwen (Jenny Liu) Liu, a researcher at the West Toronto Hospital in Canada, “2020 is a very tough year, and the beginning of 2021 is not a quiet few days, either politically, socio-economically, health-wise, or psychologically for individuals, there are a lot of tough times. This event is happening during the epidemic period, and the psychological tension and anxiety that we all have been experiencing for a long time will affect our mental health very seriously. Therefore, one should allow an outlet for one’s anxiety, anger, and sadness.”
And Lixia Yang, a professor of psychology at the University of Wyalusing in Canada, believes that people’s anger stems from anxiety and worry.
She says, “We have this mentality that it would be nice if everyone followed the rules. But in reality, we have no control over how others react.”
She also said that proportionally, the number of officials who do not follow the outbreak guidelines platform is, after all, a minority.
She said, “Officials are in the public eye and look just out of place. And, in fact, there are ordinary people among them who don’t follow government rules.”
According to a new Canadian survey, 48 per cent of people admitted to violating the government’s community segregation guidelines to varying degrees during this year’s Christmas and New Year holidays, most of whom visited family and friends.
With Canada’s long winters, a high percentage of people have traveled to sunny beaches for the Christmas and New Year holidays in previous years. This year, however, the majority of people stayed home due to travel restrictions and fears of an epidemic.
Recent Comments