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Photo by Chris Hadfield / Twitter

Now, you can either take these political realities on board, as Stephen Harper did, and choose to limit your Christmas vacations to your hometown and Harrington Lake to lower the impact on the public purse, or you can pop off for a bit of sun and fun. But you’ve got to expect criticism for one over the other for the simple reason that one costs much more than the other.

The Prime Minister’s Office knows this. That’s why it and its talking heads will be out in full force to defend the principle of a vacation, as opposed to the costs of that vacation, which last year added up to more than $100,000 for the RCMP and Department of National Defence. They’ll try to deflect from the fact the prime minister chose the more expensive option.

True, we can be horribly small with this stuff, but Trudeau has himself to blame. The problem with ascending to power promising to be more Catholic than the Pope is that it doesn’t leave room for sin. Here, Trudeau is falling down on two fronts.

The prime minister campaigned on a pledge to middle class the middle class until the middle class was middle classing all the way to the middle-class bank. Sticking taxpayers for the additional costs of a foreign vacation is, to put this in language the PMO will care about, at odds with the government’s brand.

Second, the Canadian people took Trudeau’s pledge of total transparency seriously; he can’t be opaque when it suits, when his deeds don’t match his words.

Contrast his lofty campaign rhetoric on transparency with the Christmas debacle, when the Trudeau government: a) refused to disclose Saint Kitts & Nevis as the vacation spot of choice until TMZ outed them; b) refused to disclose who joined him on government transport; c) redacted the names of Trudeau family members and their nanny from the Challenger jet manifest when it was ATIP’ed by the Conservatives; and d) refused to release the full — and significant — cost of the vacation until a few short weeks ago. I can think of many descriptors for this year-long run of events, but “transparent” isn’t one of them.