El Scotch posted:

Cancel the sale, buy them for the Canadian forces instead.

Everyone is a winner.

quote:

Philpott bills taxpayers $520 for access to Air Canada executive lounge

The controversy surrounding Health Minister Jane Philpott's travel expenses grew on Monday as evidence surfaced that she billed taxpayers $520 for access to Air Canada's executive airport lounges in North America and Europe.

The Opposition Conservatives, who produced a receipt for her lounge membership, said she should repay the money.

"This trend of excess and entitlement on the part of this minister and the government basically is continuing," Conservative health critic Colin Carrie said in an interview.

"It is another example of the minister's lack of judgment and disrespect for the Canadian taxpayer."

Aaron Wudrick, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, also called for a refund.

"The things that are reasonable expenses are things that are directly related to their job," he said.

"I cannot see what the possible connection would be between her needing lounge access and ability to do her job."

Philpott's office said the minister will reimburse the Air Canada fee in full.

"I have already directed my office ‎to review my expenses," the minister told CBC News. "Any expense that is found to be inappropriate will be reimbursed in full. I apologize and we will take steps to ensure this does not happen again."

Last week, Philpott said she would repay $3,700 in high-end car service costs after it was revealed she billed for $1,700 on one day and more than $1,900 on another day.

The minister's department is also reviewing 20 trips to Toronto Pearson International Airport that cost a total of $3,815 to see if taxpayers were charged fair-market value.

The car service — used to take the minister between work events — was provided by a limo company owned by a volunteer who canvassed for Philpott in the last election.

Pattern of entitlement?

NDP MP Charlie Angus said he is concerned about what could be a pattern of entitlement.

"It is still early days, so we have to see whether these patterns are going to form into something," Angus said.

"What concerns me is this sense of entitlement right off the bat. She doesn't have access to the executive lounge so taxpayers should pay the $500 so she can go sit and have a free drink and get ... taco chips. I think that attitude is of concern and it raises red flags."

Angus said he is also concerned about the overall handling of the issue by the prime minister.

"He said they were going to do government differently," he said.

"We are not asking ministers to bring bag lunches but these kinds of expenses, they're really not necessary."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made his first public remarks about the spending controversy in Sudbury, Ont. on Monday.

"This situation was a reminder for all of us to be extremely careful about our expenses and about the public trust that we wield," Trudeau said standing in front of his cabinet including Philpott.

Wudrick said his watchdog group welcomes the prime minister's statement, but he said "talk is cheap" and words need to be followed by action.

Fluffy Chainsaw posted:

ECOEnergy for Renewable Power represents $1.4 billion of federal investment encompassing 4500 megawatts of renewables. If you think Canada's not doing anything, you're not looking hard enough.

In 2015, despite funding falling by 50%, Canada spent the eight highest amount on renewable energy in the world in absolute dollars 1. Given that we have the 10th largest economy in the world, we're punching above our weight, despite the decline.

If you think we're not doing anything, you're not looking hard enough.

namaste faggots posted:

holy poo poo where the gently caress do we keep finding all these fat bitches to be health minister

eXXon posted:

How much of this is the Ontario Liberals pissing away millions in guaranteed contracts to their corporate friends in Samsung and the like?

flashman posted:

It makes more sense for her to pay an assistant an hourly wage to expense a bunch of seperate food receipts, to be verified by another salaried employee, which add up to be more than the lounge access.

EvilJoven posted:

Seven Sisters just down river.

Also I'd be tempted to enlist if we declared war on Saudi Arabia as long as the Americans didn't side with the Saudis.

namaste faggots posted:

Remember all the hands winging when we invaded Afghanistan and everyone decided that it was best for Canada to become an isolationist inward looking glue eating nation

CTV, Feds spent $10,681 on photos of Catherine McKenna and her staff during Paris climate change talks posted:

The federal environment department paid a French photojournalist $10,681 to take pictures of its minister, Catherine McKenna, and her staff during the COP21 conference on climate change in Paris last year.

Documents given to CTV News initially had the figure in Canadian dollars at $6,662, but that amount was actually in Euros.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) says the sole-source contract for photos issued to Sébastien Leban saved the government travels cost of sending a photographer from Canada to documents the event.

Nearly all the photos from COP21 published by the department feature McKenna herself.

She appears in almost every shot from the conference posted on her ministerial and departmental Twitter accounts, and in each of the 23 pictures currently on ECCC’s Flickr photo-sharing account.
“Photos, like press releases, social media and other communications tools, are a way to communicate to Canadians the work the government is doing on their behalf,” McKenna’s spokesperson, Caitlyn Workman, said in an email.

Because McKenna led the Canadian delegation to the conference in November and December, her ministerial Twitter account “would of course include pictures of the work the Minister was undertaking,” she added.

But the Canadian Taxpayers Federation questioned whether the contract with the photographer was a good use of government money.
“Should taxpayers really be on the hook for what are essentially vanity photos for ministers? I don’t think there’s a compelling argument there,” said CTF federal director Aaron Wudrick.
Wudrick said photos of ministers tend to promote the politician but not necessarily the policy and therefore shouldn’t be funded by government.
Quebec Conservative MP Gérard Deltell said there appears to be a trend within the Liberal government toward cavalier spending, likening the photos to recent reports that Health Minister Jane Philpott had spent thousands of dollars on limousine rides and a membership for airport executive lounges.
“When you spend thousands of dollars on limousines, on the Air Canda lodge, or on pictures in Paris, well, you have to be careful of taxpayer money,” he said.
Government records suggest ECCC was prepared to spend even more on photos if necessary. The value of the contract with Leban is listed on its website at over $19,900 and classified as “management consulting.”

The department said that figure represented the maximum value for the contract, not the amount paid.
Like prime ministers before him, Justin Trudeau has a dedicated staff photographer who travels with him to shoot both public and private events.
But other cabinet ministers must rely on their aides or hire photographers if they want the same kind of record of their public events.

Arivia posted:

Meanwhile, we have this wonderful man named Gord Downie who spent years urging Canadians to interrogate themselves and their country, and this thread is making GBS threads on him for his good works.

OSI bean dip posted:

Remind me how much did it cost for Harper's lego hair to be maintained?

Leofish posted:

Dunno, but she was apparently paid by the Party after 2010.

Whiskey Sours posted:

Oh god, Tony Clement is going to be our next Prime Minister isn't he?

quote:

Ontario Premier Wynne’s ‘chickens have finally come home to roost’ as personal popularity hits new low: poll

Ashley Csanady
Friday, Aug. 19, 2016

Have the “chickens have finally come home to roost” as Premier Kathleen Wynne’s personal approval rating hits an all-time low?

Just 16 per cent of Ontarians approve of Wynne’s job performance, according to a new Forum research poll. Lorne Bozinoff, the firm’s president, said in a statement: “It appears Premier Wynne’s chickens have finally come home to roost, and voters have started to notice the controversies surrounding her government.”

From the scandals left over by her predecessor — deleted gas plant emails, a bungled green energy act and the troubled air ambulance system among them — to more recent exposés of cozy, high-priced Liberal fundraisers, the weight of the party’s nearly 13 years in office is dragging Wynne down.

After bringing the Liberals back to majority power in the party’s fourth-straight election victory in 2014, Wynne is now as unpopular as Dalton McGuinty was before he resigned in the fall of 2012, the last time Forum had a leader as low as 16 per cent approval. (And she has openly debunked rumours she was planning her own retirement before the next vote.)

New Democrat Andrea Horwath remains the most popular leader at Queen’s Park, at 34 per cent support, compared to 26 per cent for Patrick Brown, the PC leader, which is actually a slight drop from the 29 per cent support he earned in July.

To make matters worse for the Liberals, only 14 per cent of respondents said Wynne would make the best premier, with 25 per cent preferring Brown and 17 per cent Horwath. The biggest chunk, 27 per cent, wanted someone else entirely.

The survey of 1,097 was teeming with bad news for the provincial Liberals, who secured just 28 per cent support, compared to 23 per cent for the New Democrats, six per cent for the Green Party and 41 per cent for the PCs — enough to potentially take the premier’s office back from the Liberals for the first time since 2003.

“The beneficiary, however, appears to be the NDP, rather than the PCs, although a majority would be theirs if the election were held today,” Bozinoff said.

But the election isn’t today; it’s still two years out, with the vote expected to be set sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2018. The survey shows that nearly half — 49 per cent — of voters still don’t know much about Brown.

That can both work for and against him: it means the Liberals have yet to frame him in voters’ minds as another big bad Tory, but it also means he has yet to spark their imaginations. Yet, given Wynne and the Liberals’ low approval, Brown might be best to fly under the radar until election time in order to present himself as the best possible alternative.

Too much can also be made of horse-race numbers between elections. The Liberals trailed going into both the 2011 and 2014 election and emerged victorious. Ontarians are also notorious for paying too little attention to provincial matters between votes, something Wynne’s Liberals may be counting on as they embark on an ambitious, but costly and controversial cap-and-trade program. That’s going to add about four cents a litre at the pump, money the government says will be offset in other areas but that’s a tough argument to sell when a cash-strapped family sees their costs going up in such a visible way.

Wynne seems aware of the near-time pain, however, and may believe the controversies will again fade from recent memories once the books are balanced as promised in the spring of 2018, just in time for the writs to be drawn up. As she said in an interview with the National Post in June:

“I’m not surprised that there’s criticism coming at us because we’re building things that are going to have an impact on people’s lives and whenever there’s change, whenever there’s that move forward, there’s going to be people who say — kicking and screaming — ‘We don’t want to go there.’”

“The reality is we’ve put our big plan out in to the public. We’re implementing it. So over the next two years, people are going to see the roll out of that plan. They’re going to see the implementation,” she said, two years almost exactly from when the next provincial election is expected to take place. “Those building blocks that we’re putting in place, people are going to start seeing the benefits of them.”

The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Helsing posted:

Tighclops posted:

Can't wait for ontario voters to inevitably hand us over to the PCs again so they can screw us just as openly but without the wispy veneer of progressiveness

Constant Hamprince posted:

Hanging with my buds in the Canpol thread getting outraged about how much money Bardish Chagger spent on pens, good times yall.

vyelkin posted:

Canadians don't give a poo poo about a corrupt billion-dollar government contract given to the minister's childhood best friend but they will bring down the government over someone misspending $50 on a taxi.

flakeloaf posted:

This idea that Wynne is someone Ontarians actively wanted, as opposed to someone we specifically did not want (Hudak) or someone we didn't really care about (that other guy)... that's an interesting one. Where did it come from?

vyelkin posted:

Canadians don't give a poo poo about a corrupt billion-dollar government contract given to the minister's childhood best friend but they will bring down the government over someone misspending $50 on a taxi.

DariusLikewise posted:

It speaks volumes how broken our opposition parties are when the thing they decide to attack the government on is $500 to sit at a lounge rather than say becoming the world largest exporter of arms to the Middle East or the continued mistreatment of indigenous people in this country.

PT6A posted:

Yeah, I was thinking about Loungegate last night, and then it occurred to me: wait a second, if you have to pay for lounge access, that must mean you're not travelling in business class. I always assumed that federal cabinet ministers, of all people, would be entitled to business class travel and frankly I wouldn't have a problem with it.

The opposition is doing a really good job of framing these things, I have to say. If you had responsibility comparable to a cabinet minister in any private sector position and they told you to fly coach, you'd rightly tell them to get hosed. And Philpott's only trying to expense lounge access? We should thank her for her restraint.

PT6A posted:

I for one am shocked that the government is not run as if it should be a profitable enterprise!

How long has this been going on?

Ikantski posted:

You're the one who compared it to profitable enterprises dude.