Cheers &Jeers

Jeers: to tone-deaf swan songs. Mike Duffy aged out of the Senate last week when he turned 75 — the mandatory retirement age for senators — but he didn’t go quietly. In late April, he gave a virtual address to the red chamber and spent a fair bit of it criticizing the Senate for its poor treatment of him. This, from a man whose time there was tainted with controversy — a suspension without pay for claiming his P.E.I. summer cottage as his primary residence while receiving housing expenses for his Ottawa-area home; an acquittal during the subsequent criminal trial; a lawsuit against the RCMP. “The Senate is unelected and unaccountable to anyone other than itself,” Duffy said. “Sadly, that concept has been twisted to mean that senators are not permitted the procedural fairness available to every other resident of Canada.” Duffy’s leaving with a fine parting gift: a $47,000 annual pension after just 12 years’ service. Not too many other residents of Canada could hope for the same.

Cheers: to tourists’ revenge. So, the hotly anticipated trend in the coming months is “revenge travel.” What the heck does that mean? According to travel experts interviewed by Huffpost, it refers to the phenomenon of people itching to get on the move after months of public health restrictions. “(People) around the world had their vacations altered or outright cancelled last year, so they are all looking to satisfy their travel itch at the same time,” said Eric Jones, co-founder of The Vacationer travel journal and planning guide. “The term is also retribution against COVID-19 and how it is losing its power to control our lives, including cancelling travel plans.” Mike Kennedy, co-founder of the travel marketplace KOALA, put it this way: “After being confined for a year, ‘revenge travel’ is essentially a slingshot back into the world. It’s a visceral response to pent-up travel demand.” Let’s not be reckless, though, folks. Hang onto those masks and hand sanitizer and keep your distance. We wouldn’t want COVID-19 to have the last laugh. Jeers: to missing the irony. So, Premier Andrew Furey says his government hopes to release a reopening plan this week as more people get vaccinated against COVID-19 and some restrictions can begin to ease. Furey said they’re trying to get a handle on what kind of summer the province will have. “This is about a position of trying to play where the puck is going to be, not where it currently is,” Furey told reporters. “So, we’re trying to anticipate the future. If there’s anything we’ve learned about COVID-19, it is that things can move very quickly, and so we need to be flexible and dynamic in our approach.” Right. It’s too bad Furey didn’t have the foresight to read the play ahead when he dropped the election puck.