Ontario, Canada is locked in by Covid. Your finance minister has just been arrested on vacation in St Barts.

In a video posted to Twitter on Christmas Eve, the finance minister of Canada’s most populous province was shown sitting by a fireplace wearing a sweater with a gingerbread house and a small Christmas tree, sipping punch from egg.

“I want to thank each of you for what we are doing to protect our most vulnerable,” Rod Phillips said of Ontario residents staying home and avoiding non-essential travel due to the pandemic during the Christmas holidays. .

Except Phillips was enjoying a Caribbean vacation at the time on the French island of St Barts, a popular spot for the rich and famous. His Twitter account had suggested he was in Ontario for weeks, but the truth has since come to light that he has been in St Barts since December 13.

Now Phillips has been ordered to return to Ontario, where Prime Minister Doug Ford said he will have a “very tough conversation” with Phillips tomorrow. Opposition parties and health officials are calling for Phillips to be fired from the cabinet.

Ford claimed Phillips “never told anyone” he was leaving, but Ford said he knew Phillips was out of the country “shortly after he arrived.”

“I should have said ‘Put your ass in Ontario’ and I didn’t do that,” Ford said.

Phillips said in a statement that he “deeply” regretted traveling and shortened his vacation.

Ontario began a province-wide lockdown on Dec. 26 and Ford has been blaming travelers for bringing the new coronavirus to the province. The national government of Canada and the government of Ontario have repeatedly asked Canadians not to travel abroad during the pandemic.

“This is a devastating blow to the government and to Ford personally because, as he has admitted, he knew Phillips was at St Bart’s and did not reprimand him or order him to return immediately. Ford only did so once the news of the absence of Phillips was released yesterday, “said Nelson Wiseman, professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

Wiseman said Phillips should resign. “That would be the most honorable thing, but honor is rare these days in the political world,” he said.

Already the Ford government was coming under fire for stopping vaccination operations during the holidays and for delaying the shutdown of the entire province until the day after Christmas.

Ontario set a new daily record for cases today at 2,923, with just over a third of them in the nation’s largest city, Toronto.

“Ford is also suffering from the slow launch of the vaccine, the slowest in Canada,” Wiseman said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national government announced today that passengers must have a negative Covid-19 test within three days before arriving in Canada. More details are expected to be released tomorrow.

Canada already requires those entering the country to self-isolate for 14 days and has banned all flights from the UK due to the new variant of Covid-19 spreading there.