Justin Trudeau's down time

How and why I wrote about the prime minister's personal days.

Prime minister Justin Trudeau paddles to a campaign event near Sudbury, Ontario, Sept. 26, 2019. Photo by Glen McGregor.

In my not-so-brief time covering federal politics, I’ve come to learn that getting into debates about the journalism I commit is rarely productive. I prefer to let the reporting speak for itself and leave it to others to argue over it.  

The Twitter flame wars I indulged in earlier in my career taught me that responding to comments on social media is particularly ineffective. If you get into a wrestling match with a pig, the old saw goes, everyone gets muddy and the pig tends to enjoy it.

But in a time when journalism is under siege from many directions, I think reporters could do a better job explaining how they work and the decisions they make in the course of reporting a story. So I’m going to break my own rule here. 

A piece I wrote for the National Post this week, about the personal time the prime minister has taken since his Liberals formed government, triggered a significant number of negative responses online. Today, in a scolding column, the National Observer’s Max Fawcett called the story “glaringly obvious nonsense” that was “dumbing down the discourse” in a “worrying” way.

According to Fawcett’s biography on the Observer site, his “brilliant essays and opinions are read and valued by millions of Canadians.” That’s an impressive assessment and who am I to quibble with the conclusions of a brilliant essayist? Nevertheless.

I decided to write about Trudeau’s personal days after recently hearing Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre chide the prime minister, as he often does, for his expensive vacations abroad. I wondered how much time Trudeau actually took off work. Was he on the job 365.25 days a year? Or did he book off other days on top of his vacays in Costa Rica or Tofino?

I’m a data guy and like to look at the numbers. So I turned to the daily itineraries posted on the prime minister’s website, which designate some of his time as “personal.” As my story noted, Trudeau is the first leader to do this – “in the spirit of openness and transparency,” his spokesman told me. I applaud the effort and wish other leaders, past and future, did the same.

I wrote a computer program to “web scrape” the site and robotically extract the itineraries in a format that could be analyzed in an Excel spreadsheet. The job was a nosebleed, owing to inconsistent formatting and other vagaries of the website design. I had to rewrite the script multiple times and run it repeatedly to make sure it extracted every record. 

Even with the more than 2,900 itineraries downloaded, I had to spend hours manually weeding out false positives from the data – to make sure, for example, that a meeting with “personal” care workers didn’t get flagged as a “personal” day. (And, yes, I did work on this on weekends – freelance life, y’know.) 

At the end of this process, I had an answer: Since he was sworn-in as prime minister, 680 of Trudeau’s itineraries were marked as “personal” time. That figure included weekends, statutory holidays and vacations. That’s about 24 per cent of his total days in office, excluding time spent on election campaigns.

The U.S. media, which is less squeamish about the personal lives of public figures, often reports on time taken off by their presidents. But without comparable data on time off claimed by other Canadian prime ministers, I thought the story needed a baseline.

For context, I added up how many days a typical worker in Ontario might take over a year, including weekends and holidays, which came out around 34 per cent. (Thanks to all the wizards who felt compelled to show me their math and tweet versions of a calculation I had quite obviously already made.)

I wasn’t suggesting that the prime minister should work the same number of days as the average Canadian. I also wasn’t suggesting the contrary. That’s not my call.

But here’s the point that many of the responses to the story either missed or ignored: The prime minister is not an average Canadian worker. He’s not driving rivets on the line at the Ford factory. He doesn’t wheel a Zamboni around the local rink. He doesn’t spend his week processing claims for Sun Life. 

He’s the leader of a G7 economy. It’s not an average job. If someone wrote a Linkedin job post for prime minister, it would have to include the line, “must be willing to work most weekends.” 

I mistakenly believed this point was self-evident, so I didn’t write it into the story. That was a error, apparently. My bad. But I did note, as the Prime Minister’s Office also pointed out, that even on personal days, he’s often still works in some capacity. 

I’m a reporter, not an opinion writer. I don’t have a view on whether 680 days off in eight years is too few or too many. The comments on this mostly cleaved to the binary partisan beliefs of those who expressed them. Some saw it as proof of his unsuitability for the top job; others as an unfair attack on a hard-working public servant. 

That’s all fair comment, as are objections to the structure of the story — everyone’s an editor, these days. But if you believe it’s unscrupulous, inappropriate or “unserious” to report on a world leader’s days off from the job he was elected to do, I’m not sure what to tell you.

[Also, because some asked: I was once a Postmedia employee but I’m not any more. I’m a freelancer. I pitched the story to National Post on my own initiative. Ta.]