Cabinet holds third retreat in university dorm
After shelling out almost half a million dollars for Justin Trudeau to hole up with his 30 ministers at two different luxury resorts, taxpayers will get a break this weekend when the prime minister hosts his third cabinet retreat since taking office last fall.
The two-day retreat, which starts Sunday, is being held at Sudbury’s Laurentian University where the ministers will be sharing student dorms.
“We are matching people up and making sure everybody’s roommates are all good,” said Kate Purchase, Trudeau’s communications director.
Keeping costs down does not appear to be the motivation behind the unusual accommodations. It’s more about ensuring ministers get out of the Ottawa bubble and don’t lose touch with ordinary folks.
“A lot of the reason we’re doing these cabinet retreats out and about in Canada is so that cabinet is sort of actively faced with real life in Canada,” said Purchase, noting that “lots of kids are going to be going into the dorms a week later.”
Still, sharing space in a student residence is likely to make this retreat much cheaper than the previous two.
The first retreat at a swanky seaside resort in New Brunswick last January cost $174,321, according to the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic arm of the Prime Minister’s Office.
That included $74,429 in hotel rooms, airfare, meals and incidentals for the ministers plus another $99,892 in costs incurred by the PCO related to holding the retreat, such as meeting rooms and audio-visual equipment. The latter figure has been revised upward by almost $25,000 since PCO’s first cost estimate last spring.
The second retreat in April, at a luxury mountain resort in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country, racked up a total bill of $248,934 — $165,604 in hotel rooms, airfare, meals and incidentals plus $83,330 in additional PCO costs.
The retreats are also intended to be a bonding exercise for what is still a relatively new group of ministers. Sharing a dorm takes that to a new level.
The retreat will be aimed at fostering other good relationships as well, particularly the federal government’s relationship with the provinces and territories, indigenous peoples and the United States.
As for the provinces, ministers will begin preparing for a planned first ministers’ meeting in the fall that is supposed to hammer out a national strategy for combating climate change.
They’ll also start work on next year’s budget, amid signs of a stagnant economy. And they’ll begin fleshing out the so-called innovation agenda, figuring out how the government can spur growth through strategic investments that will, for instance, attract new technology clusters and spur development of clean energy technology.
As they prepare for what is promising to be a busy, challenging fall, Purchase said ministers will review the government’s record thus far in getting its legislation through the House of Commons and Senate.
It’s not a particularly pretty record. Critics have blamed Dominic LeBlanc, the government House leader until that role passed on to Bardish Chagger on Friday, for an attempt last spring to ram through legislation, poisoning relations with opposition parties and creating a toxic atmosphere in the Commons that reached a new low when Trudeau elbowed a New Democrat MP.