Taxpayers billed $4,000 to break Ambrose lease
OTTAWA — Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose is denying a media report that says she claimed additional accommodation expenses while she was also living at Stornoway, the taxpayerfunded official Opposition leader’s residence in Ottawa.
“This report is completely inaccurate,” Ambrose said Friday in a telephone interview from Jerusalem, where she was accompanying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the funeral of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.
Ambrose was responding to an early version of a story published online by the Huffington Post, which cited House of Commons records showing Ambrose, who became interim Conservative leader last Nov. 5, had claimed $9,692 in secondary residence expenses from January to March, a period when she was already residing at Stornoway.
Ambrose refused to say anything more on the subject during the interview.
The Conservatives provided a breakdown of the interim leader’s expense claims for a secondary residence — common for MPs and senators who represent ridings far from Ottawa but need to be near Parliament Hill throughout the year. In the case of Ambrose, the expenses were actually incurred last fall, and include four months’ rent at the $2,000-a-month condo where she used to live in Ottawa.
That includes October and November, when she was still living there, and the $4,000 she paid to cover December and January in order to break her lease when she moved into Stornoway, a 34-room home on Acacia Ave. in the tony Ottawa neighbourhood of Rockcliffe Park.
“Ms. Ambrose does not charge taxpayers for a secondary residence while living at Stornoway,” her spokesperson, Mike Storeshaw, said in an email Friday.
“The only secondary residence charge to taxpayers while Ms. Ambrose and her family have resided at Stornoway is a small penalty of two months’ rent for breaking a lease, and for which the House of Commons explicitly provided an exception.”
The expenses policy does not normally allow MPs to claim lease termination costs for their secondary residences, but the Conservatives provided an email from the House administration showing they made an exception.
The Conservatives have been going hard after the Liberals for a series of stories about expenses, including that taxpayers shelled out $1.1 million to move about four dozen staffers to Ottawa.