Tory MP Harris retires with huge expense tally
$505,000 claim is second highest in Canada
OTTAWA — Low-profile B.C. Conservative MP Dick Harris, who is retiring from politics this autumn with one of the fattest pensions in Parliament, has left taxpayers with a parting bill — the highest expense tally of any MP in the province and the second-highest in Canada.
Harris represents the CaribooPrince George riding, but has lived for several years in a condominium near a golf course about 800 kilometres south of Prince George, in the Okanagan Valley.
Harris, whose pro-Conservative riding has consistently given him huge electoral margin wins and who as a rookie Reform MP refused to go on so-called junkets in order to send a message about government spending, racked up $505,257.08 in expenses in 2014-15, according to the annual MP expense report. That makes him the only B.C. MP and one of just two in Canada to cross the half-million-dollar mark, a threshold the media has used to pinpoint big spenders. The nexthighest tally in B.C. was from the only other remaining West Coast member elected under the Reform banner in 1993. Vancouver Island North MP John Duncan, the Conservative whip, had $490,279.86 in expenses. Duncan’s expenses were fourth-highest in the country, just slightly behind the $490,721.34 in bills tallied by Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut.
At the national level, Harris, who will collect a $120,700 annual pension starting this autumn according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, was second only to Alberta Conservative backbencher Chris Warkentin, whose total expenses were $519,775.29. A taxpayers federation spokesman pointed to Harris’s pedigree as one of the few remaining members of the anti-establishment, populist party that swept Western Canada with a vow to clean up waste and excess in Ottawa.
“It is certainly an eyebrowraiser,” said Aaron Wudrick.
“He does still live in B.C., so that does somewhat explain the higher travel costs, but yes there is considerable irony in one of the folks who went to Ottawa to ‘clean things up’ is spending like the very folks they vowed to replace.
“It is a testament to the trappings of the system. Lots of good people get elected, head off to Ottawa, only to get more and more comfortable over time.”
Harris, whose annual pension will be the third-highest among retiring MPs, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
But Warkentin sent several emails to The Sun to explain that his vast and heavily populated Peace River riding is inherently more expensive to serve than almost all others in Canada.
He pointed out that he gets three significant supplemental budget allocations from the House of Commons to serve his riding, resulting in a level of funding that is available to the MPs of only two other ridings, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Harris’ total expenses, which include office salaries, amounted to $436,683.50 in 2013-14. The big increase in the latest fiscal year was due largely to a near doubling of his travel expenses, to $108,711.04 from $56,188.37.
And the main source of that increase was an almost threefold increase in travel expenses involving his wife Anne Phillips, to $54,457.74 from $18,712.97.
“Such a spike in spousal travel is unusual,” said the taxpayer federation’s spokesman.
When Harris announced last autumn he wasn’t running again, the Williams Lake Tribune reported that he and his wife “will live full-time in Osoyoos, where they purchased a condominium on a golf course 12 years ago.” But a laudatory column in the Prince George Citizen last October, headlined “Harris deserves thanks” and still posted on the MP’s website, said he’s already a full-time resident there.
The highly partisan Harris, 70, was never a contender for cabinet and generally avoided the national media during his long career. He made his final statement in Parliament last week, ending by boasting about his retirement plans.
“I head to Osoyoos, B.C., where the snow never falls, the sun always shines, and the golf season is 10 months long,” Harris told MPs.
“I thank everyone very much.”