LOBBYIST TRIPS ON RISE FOR MPS
ETHICS QUESTIONS RAISED OVER $840K IN FREE TRAVEL
MPs racked up $840,000 in 2023 on travel bills paid for by lobby groups and foreign countries, nearly four times what was spent five years ago.
Sponsored travel, as it is known on Parliament Hill, allows MPS to accept trips to destinations all over the world and within Canada as long as the purpose, cost and sponsor of the trip is publicly disclosed.
MPS are prohibited from accepting gifts that might be seen to influence them with some exemptions including gifts from friends. That exemption permitted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent trip to Jamaica, where a family friend gifted him lodging that normally cost $84,000.
Sponsored travel is another of those exemptions: MPS can’t accept gifts, but can accept travel, accommodations and meals sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars. MPS must disclose the travel to the ethics commissioner who posts information about the trips online.
Last month, NDP MP Matthew Green put a motion forward at the ethics committee, calling on the House of Commons committees that set rules for MPS to end sponsored travel. He said flying around the globe on other people’s expense is a bad look for MPS.
“Ultimately, I look at these trips as part of a perk that is not justifiable in the present economic context, nor is it accountable in terms of transparency and accountability,” he said.
Green has taken trips as an MP, including most recently to Gaza, but said he paid for those trips out of his office budget or his own pocket.
Green is proposing that MPS be allowed to travel internationally on two trips out of their existing travel budget, which works on a points system, giving them a set number of trips back and forth to their constituency and other travel as needed.
The National Post compiled data on the trips over the last five years. MPS from all parties, except the Greens, took 204 trips from sponsors over that time frame.
Conservative MPS have been the biggest users of the system taking 97 separate trips, followed by Liberal MPS at 65 trips, NDP MPS, who took 23, and Bloc Québécois MPS, who went on 16 sponsored excursions.
Conservative MP Garnett Genuis took the most trips of any MP, with 10 over the five-year period, with trips to Brussels, France, Washington, D.C., Rome, India, w, Switzerland, Prague, Taiwan, Tokyo and Kenya. Collectively, those trips cost just over $41,000, paid for by a variety of different groups.
Conservative MP Michael Barrett said his party supports the review Green pushed for at the ethics committee.
“Common-sense Conservatives approved of a review of sponsored travel to take place at committee, and we look forward to the committee undertaking this work,” he said in an email to the National Post.
Barrett has taken two sponsored trips, one to Taiwan in 2023 at a cost of $10,202.86 and another to Israel in 2022 at a cost of $16,209.30.
Liberal MP Judy Sgro had the most expensive trip in the last five years, at $32,510 for a trip to Taiwan paid for by that country’s government, where Sgro brought along her husband and an assistant. MPS brought a guest with them for about a quarter of the trips, usually a spouse.
Sgro said she believes trips to countries like Taiwan, which is under threat from China, are valuable as they give MPS clear insight into the challenges they face.
“It’s certainly beneficial to all of the members that have gone, as they get a greater sense of the threat that Taiwan is under and the importance of us promoting democracy,” she said.
She added that a trip to Taiwan is different than one from an advocacy group or lobbyist.
“I think the Taiwan trip is different than one being put on by a pharmaceutical company or being put on by a company that is specifically wanting to influence members of Parliament.”
Party leaders have also taken these trips. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh travelled with staff to Berlin with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation at a cost of about $28,000. The foundation is a political think tank associated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party and has brought several NDP MPS to Berlin. Singh also travelled to Las Vegas at a cost of about $8,000 to speak to the United Steel Workers, who paid for the trip.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre spoke to the Banff Forum in 2021 and the organization covered his $1,000 flight.
Not all of the trips have been posted for 2023 yet, but it is still set to be a record year, with MPS flying to 92 destinations, including places like London, Israel, Taiwan, Paris and Seoul, at a cost of $839,870.89. That number is twice what it was in 2022, when MPS were given $412,332.86 worth of travel and nearly four times what it was in 2019 when MPS were comped $221,627.76 in travel bills. The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 saw relatively little travel, with only seven trips in either of those years.
Last month, while discussing Trudeau’s Jamaica trip at the House of Commons ethics committee, Liberal MPS raised trips taken by Conservative MPS sponsored by the group Canadians for Affordable Energy.
Conservative MPS travelled to London in both 2022 and 2023 with the group, which advocates against the Liberal carbon tax and any phaseout of natural gas. According to the records MPS filed about the trip, they met with U.K. parliamentarians and also dined at several fine restaurants where steak, oysters and several bottles of champagne were part of the meal.
Green said the Conservatives’ trip to London demonstrated what a big loophole sponsored travel is to the ethics rules MPS are supposed to abide by.
“The idea that the Canadians for Affordable Energy under the current law, couldn’t send any of those Conservatives a $800 bottle of champagne, but could send a limo to pick them up, fly them first class to London, put them up in a hotel, share the $800 bottle of champagne and $1,000 steak dinner and that’s OK, is absurd.”
The sponsored trips are funded by a wide variety of groups; aid organizations taking MPS to see development projects, think tanks bringing MPS for presentations, foreign governments and human rights groups.
Unions have brought MPS to their annual conferences for speeches; MPS have travelled to India to meet the Dalai Lama; Kurdistan — a breakaway province of Iraq — has brought MPS to their region; and advocates for both Uyghurs and Iranians seeking democracy hold annual conferences and bring MPS to them.
Journalists, including those working for the National Post, have also taken trips provided by advocacy groups and governments. The Post always discloses who paid for the trip in any coverage.
The biggest sponsors of trips are Taiwan’s government and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). Combined, they sponsored about 60 trips for MPS in the last five years.
Shimon Fogel, CIJA’S CEO, said Canadian MPS don’t have the kind of travel budgets American legislators have, and ending sponsored travel entirely will only limit what MPS learn about.
“It is going to diminish the capacity of parliamentarians to engage on issues with as broad an understanding as they would otherwise,” he said.
Fogel said the trips his organization runs to Israel are meant to show MPS from all parties the country they can’t see in news reports, and says they are organized to show as many perspectives as possible.
CIJA had to stop offering trips last year, as the organization is a registered lobbyist under Canadian law and Lobbying Commissioner Nancy Bélanger brought in new rules preventing firms from offering sponsored travel.
Bélanger’s rule put limits on the value of gifts or hospitality that lobbyists can provide MPS, capping it at $40. She said putting a limit on that and leaving sponsored travel unregulated would have made no sense.
“For me, it was completely inconsistent to say you can’t give a gift or hospitality more than $40 but you could bring members of Parliament on sponsored travel worth thousands,” she said.
Fogel said they were disappointed in Bélanger’s new rules and the trips are education opportunities for MPS only.
“They are not used as an opportunity to leverage a relationship or extract some consideration,” he said. “They’re educational opportunities that don’t oblige MPS to come back with anything, no commitments, no promises, no undertakings, no strings attached.”
Bélanger regulates lobbyists and can’t prevent MPS from accepting trips or regulate the foreign groups and governments who offer trips, but she said a further study makes sense.
“I welcome the idea that they are going to be at least discussing the issue.”
Ian Stedman, a York University professor who previously worked for Ontario’s integrity commissioner, said the loophole for sponsored travel should long ago have been closed. “It’s absolutely ridiculous and doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s a Get Out of Jail Free card for taking gifts — travel from organizations without any sort of oversight,” he said. “It was totally carved out of the rules of acceptability.”
During the meeting where Green proposed banning the practice, Lyne Robinson-dalpé, who works with the federal ethics commissioner, said they don’t offer advice or direction on sponsored travel, because it’s specifically not within their power to regulate.
“They would come to our office, we would say there are no acceptability tests in the context of sponsored travel. It is the decision of the member to determine whether or not he or she should accept sponsored travel,” she told MPS
Stedman said all codes of conduct for MPS and other legislators in Canada are set by the legislators themselves and that makes it unlikely they are going to bring in stricter rules.
“What we rarely do, is we rarely see a public consultation or whether or not these laws match the public’s expectations of propriety,” he said. “You never see them make it harder on themselves, unless all of us say you don’t get our vote until you improve these laws.”