Occasionally you come across parents whose life decisions are so unambiguously stupid that you feel like hacking out your own fallopian tubes and using them to choke yourself into blissful unconsciousness. Regrettably I flogged mine on the Dark Web after the birth of my fourth child, but I promise you, the urge is still strong.

Anything – and I do mean anything – to separate myself from the pair of breeder imbeciles who determined last week that the best use of their time was to board a plane in Canada with their (allegedly) uncontrollable toddler, who in turn refused to sit in a chair and allow his or her seatbelt to be fastened before take-off. The entire flight, a red eye, was cancelled as a result.

Trigger alert: what I’m about to say involves a spirited defence of a budget airline. Don’t worry, the warning is for me, not you. I swore after Jetstar announced last week’s new raft of passenger baggage charges that I’d drink acid before I said a kind word about it or operators of its ilk. #bottomsup.

Anyway, back to Porter Airlines, and the incident in question, which happened on August 6, on a flight that was scheduled to leave the Canadian city of Victoria at 10.30pm and land in Toronto at 6.04am.

Alas for all concerned – the pilots, the crew, the other 97 passengers, the ground staff and assorted other airline workers who spent the next few hours untangling a gargantuan administrative snarl – that never happened.

By the time all parties established that the toddler wasn’t for turning on the matter of wearing the seatbelt, a decision was made to return to the terminal and disembark the child and the parents. But according to a Porter Airlines spokesman, that meant that, in fact, everyone had to leave the aircraft because it was impossible to remove the family and refile the paperwork before the airport closed at 12.30am.

Insert some corporate blather about how Porter Airlines was very sorry that 97 entirely blameless people had to spend the night on horrible plastic airport chairs or wherever, but hip-hip hooray they all made it to Toronto a-bit-late-but-still the next day. Truly. Maybe I spoke too soon about defending budget airlines.

The strangest part of this episode has been the reaction it has unleashed online, and the sheer number of people willing to throw shade on the airline for not nixing the flight sooner and/or form a healing circle in solidarity with the Porter Airlines parents.

Perhaps part of the reason relates to the post-flight comments made by fellow passenger Aryeh Kozuch, who should forthwith be nominated for sainthood for his take on the situation: “[The toddler] just kept hiding under their seat. If they got forced into [being] strapped in, they just kind of slid out underneath.

“This was a child that was in a tube with 150 people … They’re obviously terrified, and their response was to try and hide under the seat in front of them. That’s so different than a kid running around and screaming.”

Different, yes. Entirely predictable, coming from an exhausted, bewildered toddler? Also, yes. To recap, the flight was supposed to leave at 10.30pm, or, to a very small and overtired person, half past why-am-I-still-awake-time-to-morph-into-a-psychopath o’clock.

There’s been no word, to date, on how he or she spent the earlier part of the evening, but the odds are it went something along the lines of: queue up through customs, eat rubbish from a diabolical cross-section of airline retailers, try unsuccessfully to nod off, terrorise managers of duty-free shops, try unsuccessfully to nod off, locate departure lounge, try unsuccessfully to nod off, board plane.

It’s weirdly tiring. I know because it looks uncannily like my pre-flight routine, and I won’t see early childhood again unless I’m reincarnated.

It’s not difficult to imagine the dialogue that led to the toddler being dragged onto the flight in the first place. You can practically draw the speech bubbles above the parents’ silly heads.

Parent 1: “It’s a night flight – [he or she] will sleep the whole eight hours!”

Parent 2: “… and that way, we’ll get a flying start on whatever the hell there is to do in Toronto at 6.04am!”

A kinder, more tolerant soul than yours truly (possibly one who’s not still smarting from a five-hour delay that resulted in a 2.30am arrival at New York’s LaGuardia Airport last month, which had nothing at all to do with a toddler) might say I’m being a bit harsh on the parents here.

But speaking as someone who can still recite every word of Paul the Police Car, years after having read it at 10-minute intervals on a trip back from Fiji with a two-year-old and a busted in-flight entertainment system, you’ve got to pick your battles when it comes to travelling with children.

A budget flight at 10.30pm is no place for the young. Or the young at heart. Or the faint of heart. Or the simple of mind. Thank you and have a pleasant onward journey.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.