EDITORIALS MPs’ spending reveals attitudes
If federal Liberal cabinet ministers don’t have the sense and sensitivity to handle a few thousand dollars in expense money properly, how can they be trusted to handle competently the billions of dollars it takes to run the country? Health Minister Jane Philpott is on the firing line for spending $3,700 on two days’ worth of service from a limousine company.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna paid a French photographer nearly $11,000 to take pictures of McKenna and her staff during the climate change conference in Paris last year.
Have the federal Liberals begun to drink the $16 orange juice? Does the rarefied air of high office impair cognitive skills? It’s only their 10th month in office, but already they seem to be developing an inappropriate sense of entitlement, the kind of entitlement we thought Canadians had voted out in the 2015 election.
It brings back memories of former minister of international development Bev Oda sipping a $16 glass of orange juice in London’s Savoy Hotel in 2011. That’s where she chose to stay at a cost of $665 a night, rather than in the lower-priced hotel where her conference was being held. She was also charged $250 for smoking in a non-smoking room and hired a limousine to shuttle her between the Savoy and the conference site.
When the expenses were exposed the next year, she apologized and repaid some of the money. But it ended her political career. She resigned from cabinet and left politics, whatever accomplishments she achieved overshadowed by her indiscreet spending.
It might seem unfair that a person should live forever in the shadow of an overpriced glass of orange juice, but it’s not the $16 that matters, it’s the poor judgment and faulty reasoning that allowed someone to think there was nothing wrong with that.
Philpott’s questionable hired-car expenses are a pittance compared to her department’s budget, but if she does not know the value of a few thousand dollars, how will she regard hundreds of millions of dollars?
And $11,000 for McKenna’s photos? That seems more like an exercise in ego-stroking and less like something that will benefit Canadians.
Consider that Ottawa’s late Yousuf Karsh, the worldrenowned photographer who captured images of royalty, presidents, prime ministers and celebrities, charged only $5,000 for a portrait session.
A money-saving hint to McKenna — take selfie lessons from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It’s not the sums involved that are alarming, it’s the attitude. It’s the ease with which politicians spend public funds, the lack of respect for taxpayers’ money. It’s how quickly people in public office come to regard themselves as deserving of limousines, posh hotels, expensive meals.
They have already arranged for themselves more-than-adequate salaries, generous expense accounts and rich pensions. They should not be grabbing for more.
Public servants living high on the hog is not limited to the federal cabinet. We have seen it in Parliament, in the Senate, in the B.C. legislature, in Crown corporations.
Certain amenities are necessary. For instance, Philpott has also been criticized for spending $520 for a year’s membership to Air Canada’s executive lounge. That’s defensible if it gives her a space in which she can continue to work while she waits for flights.
No one wants our elected representatives to live on mac ’n’ cheese and stay in fleabag hotels. It wouldn’t be practical, in most cases, for them to take public transit. They deserve — and need — a certain level of comfort.
But there’s a point at which a line is crossed, and if politicians are not savvy enough to discern that line, they aren’t competent enough to run governments.