Anyone can yacht. It takes a certain boldness, though, to excoriate someone for hanging around an island in the Caribbean with a billionaire while you're yachting around the Caribbean with another billionaire.

Well, it's nice to have assistants to send out the press releases and do your Tweeting for you, I guess, when you're soaking up the sun on deck at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. 

I know, I know … Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke a rule on his way to hanging around with the Aga Khan, who is also a family friend. Whereas Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose broke no rules on her way to hanging around with N. Murray Edwards, late of Calgary, who is also a family friend.

There's no question about it: Derek Fildebrandt has slipped his leader's leash.

Fildebrandt, the Wildrose Party’s "shadow finance minister" as the Alberta Opposition pretentiously calls its legislative policy critics, has never really been what you'd call a team player.

Indeed, back in May when his social media posts started to go way over the top, Opposition Leader Brian Jean tried to fire him for an online endorsement of a homophobic slur directed at Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne … and failed.

About 178 million kilometres from us yesterday, give or take, Europe's Schiaparelli spacecraft went missing and is presumed to have come to a bad end somewhere on the Martian surface.

The lander's parachute failed to properly deploy, as the military-scientific-industrial complex loves to say; its retro-rockets turned themselves off too soon. The probability is said to be a small new crater on the Red Planet.

"The European Space Agency has not yet conceded that the lander crashed but the mood is not positive," the BBC reported with delightful understatement.

There are appropriate ways for governments to deal with epochal disruptive technological change, such as that wrought by the digital revolution, but they probably don't involve big tax-supported subsidies to obsolete and badly run industries.

A good example of such a poor use of tax revenues would be the brainstorm thought up by a coalition of newspaper publishers in Quebec who want the government of that province to establish a subsidy program "to help them shift to digital."