Hey, big spender ... At $533K, Singh tops MP expense list
DECLARING $61K IN SAME PERIOD, CONSERVATIVE LEADER POILIEVRE RANKS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is topping out as the highest-spending member of Parliament in the House of Commons, while Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre ranks as the lowest.
The latest figures on MP expenses were released in late March, and they show that for the first three quarters of the last fiscal year (April 1, 2023 to Dec. 31, 2023), Singh expensed $533,535 in his capacity as the MP for Burnaby South.
In that same period, Poilievre claimed $61,287 in expenses related to his role as the MP for the Ontario riding of Carleton, almost nine times less than Singh. Poilievre was also one of only a handful of MPS whose constituency expenses didn’t include a single dollar for “travel” or “hospitality.”
To be sure, both Poilievre and Singh rack up millions of dollars in expenses each year in their capacity as party leaders. But in terms of expenses incurred as individual members of Parliament, Singh charged the most, while Poilievre charged the least.
It makes sense that the two would have wildly different travel expenses, as Singh’s riding is 4,000 kilometres west of Parliament Hill, while Poilievre represents an Ottawa suburb.
Singh, though he was born in Scarborough, Ont., and represented Toronto-area ridings while a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, opted to run in Burnaby South in the 2019 election and has represented the city near Vancouver since then.
Regardless, he consistently ranked in the top 10 of MPS for travel expenses.
Between July 1 and Sept. 30, Singh’s travel expenses of $65,836.58 almost exactly matched those of MP Lori Idlout ($66,181.59), a perennial high-spender in parliamentary travel due to the simple fact that she represents Nunavut.
Poilievre, for his part, didn’t charge a single cent to taxpayers for travel — he lives about 30 kilometres from Parliament Hill.
Singh’s costs for paying salaries to staffers working in his offices are nearly double those of Poilievre. In the most recent quarter for which there are numbers, Singh had $63,790.64 in salary costs to the $33,808.68 expensed by Poilievre.
In the second quarter (July 1 to Sept. 30), the spread was nearly triple: $94,051.82 to $33,751.19.
That period would also see Singh triple Poilievre’s constituency budget for “contracts,” a category that includes miscellaneous office expenses like rent, advertising and janitorial services.
Over three month, the NDP leader racked up $45,535.99 to Poilievre’s $15,510.25. Poilievre’s entire budget, in fact, was almost exactly what Singh spent just on the $4,500/month lease for his Kingsway constituency office.
Of course, it’s an entirely different story when it comes to the expenses that both Poilievre and Singh accrue in their capacity as party leaders. Those expenses are counted separately in their role as “presiding officers” in the House of Commons.
Roughly two dozen MPS — from the prime minister to the Speaker to party whips — are given budgets in addition to what they’re allowed to expense as MPS.
And it’s in these figures that Poilievre pulls way ahead of Singh.
In the last three months of 2023, it cost taxpayers around $1.1 million to pay Poilievre’s expenses as “Leader of the Official Opposition” — and another $35,463 to pay the upkeep of Stornoway, Poilievre’s official residence. The prime minister, official opposition leader and Speaker of the House of Commons all receive official residences.
In that same period, Singh’s expenses as leader of what’s officially tallied as the “Other Opposition Party” came to just $330,994.71.
Although, given that Poilievre represents a caucus of 118 to Singh’s 24, the per-member cost of the Conservative leader is still lower.
Nevertheless, in select quarters of 2023 it was Conservative MPS who topped out with the highest overall staffing expenses.
At the same time that Conservative Garnett Genuis, who represents a riding in the Edmonton bedroom communities of Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan, was one of the MPS most prominently pushing the issue of Arrivecan misspending, his staffing budget for the last three months of 2023 rose to $65,485.81 — the highest of any other MP.
Dan Muys, a rookie Conservative MP for Flamborough-glanbrook in Hamilton, Ont., repeatedly topped quarterly rankings as one of the top spenders on “contract” expenses. In one particularly expensive threemonth period, Muys’ contract expenses averaged $727 per day.
But when it came to “hospitality” expenses, the clear champion was the Bloc Québécois.
Despite representing less than 10 per cent of the House of Commons, all three quarters analyzed by the National Post found that a Bloc MP was consistently among the top five spenders on hospitality.
Between April 1 and June 30, in fact, Bloc MPS took four of the top five spots for highest hospitality expenses.
In first place was Joliette MP Gabriel Ste-marie, with $5,621 for the quarter, almost all of which was spent on a series of May 22 events for Journée nationale des Patriotes, the Quebec alternative to Victoria Day.
While Justin Trudeau is famed for his sky-high travel expenses as prime minister, the latest figures do show that he runs his Montreal constituency office relatively cheaply. In one quarter, Trudeau’s Papineau riding even ranked as one of the only offices aside from Carleton to rack up zero travel or hospitality expenses.