Last week, the Conservatives lashed out at the Liberals for throwing a caucus retreat at the “lavish” and “swanky” Sudbury Holiday Inn.
What do you even say?
Well, perhaps we can start by quickly investigating the claims. The hotel is a three-star joint with rooms currently hovering around $250 for bookings from August 28-29 – a price that reflects the laws of supply and demand that Conservatives are always talking about, especially since word of the hotel’s luxuriousness is clearly getting around.
That said, if you’re willing to postpone the visit of a lifetime, you can manage $133 for a trip in November. A winter visit, of course, comes with the bonus of getting to visit Sudbury in the winter.
It may be worth the wait.
With over 1,300 reviews available to peruse on Google, one patron called the hotel “OK” and raved that they would “stay here again in a pinch but it is certainly an old hotel with a face lift,” adding, “I wasn't expecting the Ritz.”
Obviously they hadn’t spoken with the Conservative Party.
Buddy, you got the Ritz.
The mark of a truly lavish hotel is found in the details – the amenities, the architectural flourishes, the staff. Another reviewer gushed that the room was “good” and the breakfast “ok” and “what you would expect from the price range.”
Utter luxury, obviously. But even the best has its flaws.
“Only thing is,” the reviewer continued, “that the manager at the breakfast buffet seems to be angry at something, not friendly.” Another customer lamented, though not too much, that they wished the hotel “had a hot water dispenser on the main floor like some other holiday inns do for tea, but not a huge deal.”
A look at photos of the world-famous Sudbury Holiday Inn shows a square concrete block – with windows – featuring a kidney-shaped pool that could accommodate dozens of swimmers if nobody tried to swim. It also features the very same low-pile carpet found in literally every other hotel in the world, art you’d find hanging, forgotten, in your grandparents’s guest room, and 2009’s latest USB chargers. In-room lamps are complementary, adding a welcoming “lit” touch to rooms. Toilets are presumably fully functional, featuring a seat and a lever for flushing.
Very swanky.
As if these features weren’t enough, one reviewer boasts of staying in a “premium room on the top floor with a king bed for one night prior to our camping trip.” The eye-watering $150 price tag included a detail not often found among the world’s top hotels, as the Holiday Inn “had no problem with us parking our car with a canoe on top.”
Most of us who’ve stayed in a Holiday Inn or equivalent – and I’ve stayed in plenty of them – treat them for what they are: luxurious getaways akin to a week at a luxury French Riviera resort that happen to be conveniently located along the highway to wherever we’re going and open.
And yet one, in a more cynical moment, might doubt the sincerity of the Conservative Party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre. The blue side has been carefully cultivating an image for themselves in recent years of salt of the earth, pro-worker, working class champions. Rather than attack the Liberals for their extravagance, shouldn’t they be fighting to ensure every single Canadian has the chance, at least once in their life, to experience a stay at a Sudbury Holiday Inn?
Or, at the very least, perhaps the Conservatives could focus on something else and leave the extreme partisan-brain concerns for another day. Indeed, you’d think during a time of overlapping and persistent crises from war to affordability to climate, that we might get a bit of seriousness from the apparent government-in-waiting. But the Conservatives simply can’t help themselves; they have a message – the Liberals are corrupt and decadent – and they’ll run it on repeat until the next election has run its course, betting that partisans or casual observers won’t bother to stop for a moment to ask themselves questions like “Wait, what?” or “Where?” or “Like…are they talking about a Holiday Inn?”
And yet, we seem to be stuck with the absurdities of political messaging and partisan rabble-rousing for the foreseeable future, a cursed game in which parties pretend not to know what they’re doing is cynical and asinine and the rest of us trundle along, trying to get through the day. Meanwhile, political operatives making good money – what you might call premium-room-with-king-bed money – treat us like we’re stupid.
It’s enough to drive you to the brink of needing a getaway, a vacation, a break from it all. Perhaps a sojourn in the lap of luxury. And if that's what you need, I know a place.
Comments
Pierre "Snake oil Salesman" Poilievre, the politician that has accomplished zero in his entire political career so far and appears to have nothing better to do but make up nonsense as if this is of upmost importance to Canadians. Oh wait, Pierre tried to rig elections once with his so called 'Fair Elections Act', so I guess that counts as one disgraceful attempt to do something.
Instead of spewing his usual nonsense, maybe he can finally tell Canadians where he stands on abortion, balancing the budget, how he would solve the housing crisis, solve inflation and other things that have become unaffordable to Canadians. But instead, he side-steps every issues and makes uninstantiated claims. Every time Pierre opens his mouth, you hear a lot of talk, but never any information how he would remedy any issue.
Then we have Pierre with his army of social media bots that mirror his tag lines and claims, yet denies they have anything to do with the conservative party or Pierre himself. Unless you were born under a rock, it is pretty clear this is just another ploy by Pierre to undermine the election system that his bogus 'Fair Election Act' bill he tried to pass.
Pierre Poilievre == ZERO TRUST
Vote anyone but Conservative!
Poilievre is just drenching in cynical spin and divisive dribble.
As they say outside the right-wing bubble that he has carefully shrink wrapped himself into - "Pierre Poilievre is all hat and no cattle."
Still waiting for the rest of the country to wake up to his and the the right-wing media's self-serving sham.
This story contrasts nicely with the recent story The Breach did about Poilievre and Conservatives fundraising at the mansions of the super rich.
https://breachmedia.ca/pierre-poilievre-mansion-fundraisers/
Is there a Moscrop-CNO article in there somewhere? Are we in the summer doldrums of political reporting or something? I'm paying for a satiracle lead story on the Holiday Inn that happens to have the word Liberal in it? Why not just take August off, close the office and save subscriber's money for better stuff in fall?
The Conservatives and Poilievre are dishonest. There can never be too many articles demonstrating this. Most of the media give them a free ride.
I thought it was funny.
We commenters don't shut up for August, we put out more copy than they do, in the CNO. How can they close up?
;-)
Extreme consistent criticism of the party in power is as shallow as na-na-na. It is too lazy to find out the facts.
I can hardly wait. Such luxury I couldn't stand! Working lights, with 25 watt bulbs, an actual working toilet, and USB! My goodness, the lap of luxury.
But hold it this is Pierre Poilievre speaking, the idol and Pied Piper of the working class. YET, I have not ever heard him say an accurate statement, one that isn't embellished, overblown taken out of context or just a plain simple lie.
And I truly appreciate the articles irony and way of saying this. Quite frankly Canadian voters have no idea of big hole we are going into by electing these bunch of right wing believers in an ideology that is not only out of date but has screwed almost every society's working class that it has been active in, meaning most of the countries in our world
We had one occasion to stay in Winnipeg's Portage Ave Holiday Inn for a couple of nights to attend a funeral years back. We chalked it up to a bad experience between the thin walls, the drunken wedding party animals next door trying to get into our room through an adjoining door, the grumpiness of the desk clerk when we asked him to find us a quieter room on another floor, and the broom straw stalks in the immense vat of congealed scrambled eggs in the cafe buffet table.
As far as I know there were no Liberals staying there.
My guilty pleasure this week was bingeing on the DNC. Yes, yes, I know, there's lots of stage management going on, but it highlighted the pitiable mediocrity of our federal and provincial leadership.
I agree that the unexpected and sweet surge of hope at the DNC is absolutely binge-worthy, but it's also a result of the go big Americans having initiated (seemingly unwittingly with their ubiquitous trademark aw shucks religiosity) an ever more religious and counterintuitively (for some) but truly more EVIL and destructive right 5wing, with catastrophic results they're still trying to rein in and contain somehow.
So Canada still being "mediocre" by comparison for many reasons has its merits, i.e. we still have time to forestall the crazy con cult guys.
So the Americans blocking them decisively in November will really help since the GOP playbook (operating manual for the derivative CPC) is being irretrievably linked to the truly psycho, 900-page Project 2025.
As Harris pointed out at one point, "can't believe they wrote this sh*t down," but they're pent up and out of patience after decades of effort.
Fortunately, it's the Achilles heel of these guys; they're the definition of EXTREME, i.e. they ALWAYS go too far.
Ditto here re binging. On top of the happiness, there are the most respected and historically accurate US pollsters who have gone beyond the general much wider averages and dug down into individual swing districts and are finding it is possible for Kamala to attain close to a super majority. The key is to maintain momentum -- and to nail MAGA fraudsters who have infiltrated state level vote counting organizations.
PP is just one more multimillionaire trying to cry blues he believes are what the working classes think.
Mr. T, should save his country and his party the same way Mr. Biden did. That's kind of ironic, given what Mr. Biden did for his country, which Mr. T has not, and Mr. Biden's character, which is so unlike Mr. T's.
There must be a Mr. Clean out there, somewhere!
Love this! Always good to find the humour, no matter how sad things look