Government spent $36M on car rentals, purchases
‘You can’t make this stuff up... unbelievable’
OTTAWA • The Canadian government spent more than $12.7 million on vehicle rentals for last year’s G7 summit in Quebec, new documents show.
That’s on top of the $23 million that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spent on new cars, only to sell them again through a government surplus website within months of the event.
Although the RCMP now says it has sold more than 500 of the 631 cars it bought, the rentals are sunk costs, part of the behemoth $600-million budget required to host foreign leaders — including United States President Donald Trump — for a major international summit in Charlevoix, Que., last June.
The new numbers come from a government response to a written question from a Quebec Conservative MP, Bernard Généreux that was tabled in the House of Commons last week.
The documents detail line-by-line expenditures related to the G7 summit, which include everything from the costs of hotel rooms and catering to the costs of fireworks ($20,000) and a Cirque du Soleil performance put on for dignitaries ($67,000).
The document provides further explanation from the RCMP on the vehicles that it purchased for the summit. “The RCMP conducted an analysis prior to acquiring the vehicles and concluded it would be more cost effective to purchase rather than lease. Based on the current trend analysis, even with depreciation, it is anticipated that there will be cost avoidance savings to the Government of Canada for having purchased versus leased,” the police service said.
“All proceeds from the sale of purchased vehicles will decrease expenditures to the G7 summit.”
As of Dec. 12, 509 vehicles had been sold for $17.5 million. The return on sales for those vehicles was 91 per cent, according to the RCMP, and leasing vehicles could theoretically have cost about twice the residual cost of buying and selling.
Another 51 cars were being repurposed for use within the Canadian government, the RCMP told the Post in November.
Nonetheless, within the RCMP’s total $222 million in spending was more than $8 million on “rental of motor and other vehicles,” according to the document. Separate from the total $12.7 million in vehicle rentals that this analysis tallied, the RCMP also spent $4.5 million on aircraft rentals and about $6,000 on the rental of “ships.”
Global Affairs Canada, the lead government department in organizing the summit itself, incurred total costs of nearly $26 million, of which almost $4.7 million went toward 28 transactions for vehicle rentals or “vehicle rentals and travel expense.”
Of those, seven transactions were with companies that had “limousine” in their name. Those seven transactions cost just under $1.5 million.
“They need to get their story straight. If they had to buy the cars because they couldn’t do rentals, why is there $12 million in rental fees as well?” said Aaron Wudrick, director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “It’s good that they’ve recovered some of the money, but now they need to explain an additional $12 million in rental fees.
“You can’t make this stuff up. That’s unbelievable.”
GAC and the RCMP didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Another G7-related question was answered through a document tabled in the House of Commons last week. Conservative MP Todd Doherty had been wondering whether the government had paid for “yoga teachers for the prime minister” during the event.
Each department and agency individually responded that they had not incurred such an expense — even the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.
“CSIS does not generally disclose details related to expenditures beyond those publicly reported,” the spy agency’s response said. “However, CSIS can confirm that it did not incur any yoga-related expenses during the G7 Summit in Charlevoix.”