IT’S 2017: Should you know WHERE YOUR prime minister IS?

On Boxing Day in an alternate universe, Justin Trudeau and family headed off on vacation to the Bahamas — just like in this universe, only they flew Air Canada and not on a government jet. To satisfy Canadians’ apparently bottomless appetite for shirtless photos and lifestyle pieces, a few enterprising reporters and photographers found themselves on the flight. Hacks left behind, working bitterly through the holidays, demanded to know why Trudeau had chosen to ring in Canada’s sesquicentennial new year in a foreign country and not here at home.

This looks something like the real-universe United Kingdom, as fictional cabinet minister Nicola Murray wearily explained in the political satire The Thick of It: “We wanted to go to Florida but (political party enforcer) Malcolm ’suggested’ that we go to Suffolk. So the kids were miserable, the weather was miserable and Malcolm phoned to shout at me for looking miserable.”

British prime ministers often fly commercial, but perhaps that’s a case of optics over common sense: luxury prime ministerial holidays are to Fleet Street as a marrow bone to a Rottweiler. The culture of the British political press is fiercely adversarial on principle, and some argue it goes too far — not me, however, because here in Canada we have gone too far the other way.

Exhibit One: The Prime Minister’s Office thought it could avoid telling us in what country the Trudeaus were vacationing. “Nor would his aides say what continent or even hemisphere he will be in,” the National Post’s David Akin reported. Only later did the PMO grudgingly concede the Trudeaus had flown to Nassau — and assuming we get details of costs and flight manifests later on, that’s all we need to know.

Were the Trudeaus cruising the West Indies on a disreputable Russian oligarch’s yacht? Keeping constant vigil at Fidel Castro’s graveside? Gunning down charismatic megafauna on the Zimbabwean plains? Of course not. Odds are they were having a regular rich people vacation in an uncontroversial location.

HOW DO YOU SUPPOSE IT’S HANDLING THE EXPLOSIVE STUFF?

And that seems to be the case, which is all the more reason to be irked the PMO would default to secrecy: if this is how it handles totally anodyne information, how do you suppose it’s handling the explosive stuff?

In a healthy political system, the PM’s people would never have thought they’d get away with this. And yet many Canadians seemed totally fine with it. Knowing the location would be a security risk, some tweeted. We in the media would just find something else to complain about. The Trudeaus deserve privacy just like everyone else. (For heaven’s sake, we weren’t asking for their room numbers.) And, my favourite: “Why do you care so much?”

The difficulty of accessing basic information about the Canadian government is a long-running scandal; Trudeau promised to do better on this front, and “where the Prime Minister is” is about as basic and routine as information gets. That’s why the media care, and that’s why you should care too.

To the extent the defence of secrecy wasn’t just partisanship, it was of a piece with the infuriating exhibitionist tendency of bien-pensant Canadians to sneer and roll eyes at what they see as unworldly complaints. Jane Philpott pays highly questionable sums to a campaign volunteer’s car service? “Oh, I suppose she should take the bus.” Bev Oda stays at the outrageously-expensive-even-by-London-standards Savoy, where orange juice costs $16? “Let’s make cabinet ministers sleep on the floor at the embassy and eat at Burger King.” The National Capital Commission now thinks renovating 24 Sussex Drive might cost an unthinkable, patently insane $38 million? “Hoot hoot, let’s just rent the Prime Minister an apartment.”

As for prime ministers aloft, while there may well be a cost-benefit case for the government jets, it’s simply bizarre that we’ve accepted our leaders must never fly commercial when no one involved has any incentive to argue otherwise. We can only have concluded there’s something serious we don’t know about the global security situation — something that never changes over time or with prime ministers, and that somehow doesn’t apply to the prime minister of a much more important country with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and a much bigger terrorism problem than ours.

I, for one, want to see that cost-benefit case. Demanding to know what the government is doing, like demanding to know what it’s spending, can never be a piecemeal undertaking: we’re entitled to know all of it, and no good can come from letting it off the hook.