Niagara Catholic board chair doesn’t get it

Larry Huibers, it seems, didn’t get the memo.

Maybe it was one of those ones that only flows down the chain of command, and not up.

Huibers, a St. Catharines trustee, is chair of the Niagara Catholic District School Board, which sent a clearly worded message to staff back on Dec. 15 advising against non-emergency travel outside of Canada over Christmas and New Year’s. It read, in part: “Staff who travel internationally over the holidays are expected to self-isolate for the 14-day isolation period upon return.”

It added that anyone who travels for non-essential reasons and needs to isolate beyond Jan. 4 — the resumption of school — “will be placed on an unpaid leave of absence for the remainder of the isolation period.”

Huibers misses the point when he explains that he did follow all the safety protocols when he returned to Canada after six days in Saint Martin, in the Caribbean. Now he finds himself the subject of an investigation to be carried out by an independent party to be selected by the board’s legal counsel.

Hypocrisy doesn’t go over well these days, and Huibers isn’t alone.

He joins a long list of other public servants paying the price for making a bad — some might say dumb — decision. Remember Tom Stewart, the former CEO of Niagara Health and St. Joseph’s Health System in Hamilton? Caught going to the Dominican Republic over the holidays and lost his jobs.

Or Rod Phillips, whose trip to St. Barts cost him his position as Ontario’s finance minister?

Then there was the Oakville police chief, the CEO of London Health Sciences, the provincial minister of highways in Saskatchewan, the director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Health.

Don’t even start on Alberta, where a slew of government members and high-ranking staff whose decision to travel put them in the fast lane to shame and contrition.

They all paid a price, ranging from doing the public walk of shame to losing their positions.

Huibers’ explanation was that he believed his trip Jan. 3 to 9 was essential, because he is the manager of a sailing club and needed to be in Saint Martin to see to some “technical things that need to be done on the boat.”

Saint Martin, so you know, is about 750 kilometres east of the Dominican Republic; temperatures have been in the high 20s all week, FYI.

On his six-day trip, Huibers also had to pick up six suitcases of gear that belongs to the club. There was “no one else” who could do it, he said.

Is that essential travel? You be the judge.

Or rather, the independent investigator and ultimately the school board trustees will judge Huibers’ actions.

Teachers themselves didn’t give the board chair high grades for his tropical travel while the rest of us were sitting at home cursing that darn coronavirus.

“I have heard concerns from other people that this occurred when staff were given a travel advisory memo,” said an Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association elementary rep.

The representative for secondary school teachers was more upset about what she called the government’s insufficient plan to make schools safe when they reopened.

As for Huibers, she was prepared to let the Niagara board deal with him according to its own policies.

When it comes to COVID-19, people aren’t in a forgiving mood anymore.

The surprising, frustrating thing in all this is that so many people who should know better just don’t get it.