There’s a new outrage brewing on horizon to the east. No, not Ontario. Further east. Not the Maritimes, either. Across the pond, over in France is the epicentre of this storm of indignation. The federal government is catching heat for the enormous amount of money it has dropped to attend the COP21 climate change talks in Paris.
Canada was represented earlier this year by an exceptionally healthy crew of politicians, staff and bureaucrats—a total of over 300 of them in fact. A number that was significantly higher than the attendance of officials from other countries, with Canada having more than double the number of U.S. officials and almost triple the number of officials from the U.K. in attendance.
When asked about it, minister of the environment Catherine McKenna wasted no time alluding to the fact that Canada had no representation, when Stephen Harper was in charge. It was like she thought if she mentioned how far the pendulum swung in one wrong direction when the Harper Conservatives were in power, it would somehow soften the blow, and make it all right that a gratuitous excess of money and resources was used to over-represent Canada at the COP21 talks.
We've already gotten a general picture of how much it has cost Canada to send its populous delegation to the conference, and it's not a pretty one. Around $200,000 just for accommodations, almost $106,000 for meals and incidentals and $200,000 slated for "other" expenses. Another $121,000 or so is going to youth, non-government organization, aboriginal and opposition delegates who tagged along for the fun, too.
Do we really need to send all those representatives to the COP21? Can we not keep a few of those 300+ people home, and maybe have them Skype into the conference, or something? It's troubling, to say the least. It’s 2016, after all. Video conferences are an option.
A lot of this wild spending by the Liberal government has raked old wounds. Last year, one of the most startling expenses emerging from the climate talks in Paris was the amount McKenna's department paid a French photographer for taking photos of everything that went on at the events: an amount over $6,500.
There has been a lot of chatter from the department recently about how they could do better. The premise we were supposed to take away from it all is that McKenna's going to be “reviewing” expenses. I have a suggestion. How about instead of a review, we get a direct, unequivocal promise to see her ratchet those expenses down by several thousand dollars?
But that wasn’t even the worst of it. It doesn’t really come as that much of a shocker that they had an expensive photographer immortalizing every moment that they had at last year’s conference, those image-conscious Trudeau Liberals. However, the photographer is only one example of the kind of excessive spending for the sake showing that “Canada’s back” that has been going on.
Lavish spending for the sake of looking serious compared to Harper, at a series of prestigious talks with the noble end in mind of fighting global climate change couldn't have come at a worse time. The heat has barely died down from the other, far more incensing recent Liberal spending outrage. Health Minister Jane Philpott has issued apologies, after being given hell for availing herself of fancy executive airport lounges and limousine services from an old political pal, to get to and from appointments, at the airport in Toronto.
Along with apologies, what resulted was another generic promise for a review of expenses to calm the plebes down, and Philpott agreeing to pay back the egregious costs of those services herself, as she should have done to begin with.
But that only happened after the public and opposition grilled her for it, and it became public knowledge what sort of indulgences she was availing herself of, at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer. Spending thousands of dollars to get a limo company to drive you around, and treating it like a necessary expense for the job is an absolute load of crap. Take a cab and get off your pedestal, Minister Philpott.
The federal Conservatives and NDP rage on about entitlement, and although I won't ever jump to quite the level of their dramatic, calumnious rhetoric, I really have to ask myself: Are these really the kinds of patterns of expense claims we want to see, in a government that wants to ferry the country through several years of an anticipated national deficit in the billions?
