Canadians across the country are enjoying a bit of what the Germans call schadenfreude this week—a.k.a. pleasure derived from another’s misfortune—as a group of obnoxious influencers and reality TV personalities from Quebec continue to struggle to find their way home after partying like what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calls “barbarians” on a Sunwing flight down to Mexico.
If you missed the news, last week, video footage of a group of several young men and women from La Belle Province went viral as they turned a budget Sunwing flight that had been chartered from Montreal to Cancun, Mexico into an illegal and dangerous private party, allegedly passing around an open bottle of Grey Goose vodka, vaping, dancing in the aisles, and crowd surfing bodies down the seats while completely ignoring the commands of the airline workers.
“Like all Canadians who’ve seen the videos, I’m extremely frustrated,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a news conference in Ottawa, going on to refer to the individuals as “idiots” and “barbarians” in their mother tongue of French.
On Tuesday, the federal government released a statement saying the departments of Transport, Public Safety and Health have all launched investigations into the incident. There could be fines of up to $5,000 from Transport Canada for each offence on board, it read, adding that jail time could follow if passengers were found to be endangering others, or if they provide fabricated information upon their return to Canada.
Sunwing was so unimpressed by the group’s behaviour that it outright cancelled their scheduled return flight home from Cancun on Wednesday, leaving them scrambling for another way to get back.
On Wednesday morning this week, both Air Transat and Air Canada also agreed that the group of too-cool-for-rules Quebecois should find another way home, not on any of their flights either.
Still, about 12 of them did manage to land back in Canada last night (Wednesday) via an Air Canada flight, despite what the airline had originally said earlier in the day.
Rebecca St-Pierre, a 19-year-old student from Trois-Rivieres, Quebec who was on the trip, tested positive for COVID while in Mexico and now has to isolate in a hotel room at her own expense before finding her way back home.
“The organizer just left everybody. I don’t know who’s still here,” she told The Canadian Press from Tulum in Mexico’s popular Mayan Riviera. “All the flights have been cancelled.”
St-Pierre, who says that she won the free trip through a contest on Instagram, is one of the only passengers to speak with the media about what went down on the flight.
“There was no social distancing [and] I think people were doing drugs,” she said. She also alleges that ahead of the scheduled return trip, some people put Vaseline up their noses to impede COVID tests.
