No vacancies for media at Liberals’ retreat
Despite promising openness, Trudeau’s three-day event is strictly for cabinet only
OTTAWA— No room at the inn? Well, there’s room, but the welcome mat is not out.
The Liberals have block-booked a swish New Brunswick resort hotel for a cabinet retreat and dispatched reporters to two other places in town so Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers can meet and mingle in private.
From Sunday to Tuesday, Trudeau will meet with 30 cabinet members at St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, about an hour from Saint John. Along with RCMP security staff and other aides in tow, they will occupy only about 70 of 233 rooms at the Algonquin Resort, a newly refurbished Marriott group hotel.
However, media are barred from booking any of the other vacant rooms at the request of the Privy Council Office, the Star has learned.
It’s a strange move by a government that promised relations with reporters would be different from the restricted access and tight message control of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.
When Harper took power, the Conservatives held their first summer caucus retreat inside a federal air traffic control facility in Cornwall, Ont., and limited access to reporters.
The next year, the Conservative government ordered RCMP to keep the media out of the Charlottetown hotel where their meetings were held and shooed them across the street.
For the first cabinet retreat of the new Liberal government, the PMO required RCMP security clearance forms and accreditation information be supplied by media intending to cover the meetings.
However, reporters are neither travelling with the prime minister nor staying within several blocks of him. The PMO informed reporters Thursday they’d be staying at two separate locations elsewhere in town.
Late Thursday, Kate Purchase, Trudeau’s director of communications, said that during the day, media would be allowed inside the main hotel as well as the nearby media centre to cover the retreat. She did not offer further comment. Trudeau leaves New Brunswick early Tuesday to go to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum.
It’s not clear how much the cabinet retreat will cost. In the winter season, the Algonquin Resort is closed from Sunday night through Wednesday, but is open for late-week and weekend traffic.
Hotel manager Matthew Mackenzie said the Algonquin Resort agreed to rent the facility to the government for meetings at a time when there would not have been any guests. In the winter season the resort is open only for weekend traffic and is closed from Sunday night through Wednesday.
Because no guests have been displaced, there is no “buyout fee” for the government to make use of the whole facility.
Mackenzie declined to identify the overall cost but said the Liberal government guests would pay individual room rates, starting at a government rate of about $119. They will pay for food and other services, and the government is not paying for rooms they won’t use.
He said media cannot book those rooms as it is entirely the decision of the Liberal government whom to invite to the event.
Mackenzie also added the arrival of the Liberal cabinet is a good news story for the hotel, which will give 89 of its staff a few more days’ work, and good for other local hotels that will put up about 30 members of the national media.
Trudeau promised a more open approach to media relations than the Conservatives, and his early steps reversed certain Harper government’s practices:
Trudeau held news conferences at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa whereas Harper rarely took ques- tions from reporters in Ottawa.
His office announces cabinet meetings (although there are still discussions over access to ministers after those meetings).
It began to release Trudeau’s daily itinerary (although details of meetings marked “private” are scant).
And Trudeau released mandate letters to his cabinet ministers where he wrote: “Members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, indeed all journalists in Canada and abroad, are professionals who, by asking necessary questions, contribute in an important way to the democratic process. Your professionalism and engagement with them is essential,” the letters stated.