Business
Taxpayers deserve proof of how politicians spend their money
This article supplied by Troy Media.
Canadians deserve to know how their money is spent. Politicians must end the secrecy and show every receipt, every time
Taxpayers pay the bills for politicians’ expenses and they deserve to see the receipts.
Right now, in Manitoba, cabinet ministers and the premier post quarterly expense statements online. These statements show the purpose of the trip and the total spent in several broad categories like “airfare” and “accommodation, meals and phone calls.”
What the statements don’t show are the itemized receipts. That’s a problem for taxpayers trying to keep the government accountable.
Taxpayers foot the bill for these trips, so transparency helps ensure public money is being spent responsibly, not frivolously. Taxpayers aren’t asking for much: just the truth, with a receipt attached.
For example, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who leads the province’s NDP government, took a trip to Washington, D.C., in February. That trip cost taxpayers
$4,051. The costs were broken down as $1,481 in airfare, $2,450 in accommodation, meals and phone calls, and $120 in other transportation.
Now, these could be completely justifiable expenses. Travelling costs money. But without the receipts, taxpayers have no way of knowing whether Kinew was purchasing a meal from the local diner or splurging taxpayer cash on caviar.
And that’s just his personal tab. The expenses of staff he brought on the trip aren’t disclosed publicly at all.
Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine went on a trip last March and the expense release form showed the trip cost taxpayers $6,649. But details dug up by the Canadian Press through freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, which allow the public to access internal government documents, show that the total cost of the trip, including staff, was $23,105.
That highlights the core issue: the only way for a taxpayer or a journalist to access the fine details and expenses of accompanying staff is to send in an FOI
request to the government.
That means potentially waiting more than a month for the information and being hit with fees to get information that taxpayers should be able to see for free.
In Alberta, if a politician or senior official spends more than $100 of taxpayers’ money, they have to provide an itemized receipt that’s posted online for all to
see. It’s the gold standard in expense transparency in Canada.
This summer, the Alberta government quietly tried to dump its longstanding policy of proactively posting expense receipts online. That was a mistake. After outrage from taxpayers, the government reversed the decision and restored the receipt transparency.
Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said reversing the decision is a “no-brainer.”
If Alberta can do it, there’s no excuse for Manitoba to lag behind. Taxpayers there deserve the same level of transparency for both politicians and senior officials.
It helps taxpayers hold politicians accountable, and it stops politicians from wasting money in the first place because they know they will have to post the receipts and defend their choices. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
This level of transparency would have helped Manitobans get clearer answers in the past. Former premier Brian Pallister took two trips to Ottawa with some
questionable expenses in 2021. He spent $1,300 on the category of “other transportation.” At that time, Kinew said: “It certainly raises questions as to what
that $1,300 was spent on.” That was the right question for Kinew to ask, and having access to the receipts would have made it easier to hold Pallister to
account.
At the time, a spokesperson for Pallister said “other transportation” could include car rentals, travel agent fees or taxi cabs, essentially anything that isn’t airfare.
But that’s not clear enough for taxpayers. It doesn’t tell them if he rented a Corvette or a Corolla.
The NDP’s 2023 election platform declared that “a Manitoba NDP government will strengthen democracy in Manitoba by promoting transparency and
accountability.”
Kinew didn’t start off on the right foot after becoming premier. He failed to post the required expenses for about the first year of his government, despite repeated calls to do so.
After finally posting the receipts, Kinew said he would look at including staff and bureaucrat travel expenses in the proactive disclosures. That’s the right move.
And it should also include itemized expenses.
Kinew promised transparency. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to file paperwork and pay fees just to get access to basic information about how governments spend their money.
That means showing the receipts.
Gage Haubrich is the Prairie Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
Once upon a time, Canadians were known for our prudence and good sense to such an extent that even our Liberal Party wore the mantle of fiscal responsibility.
Whatever else you might want to say about the party in the era of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, it recognized the country’s dire financial situation — back when The Wall Street Journal was referring to Canada as “an honorary member of the Third World” — as a national crisis.
And we (remember, I proudly served as Member of Parliament in that party for 18 years) made many hard decisions with an eye towards cutting spending, paying down the debt, and getting the country back on its feet.
Thankfully we succeeded.
Unfortunately, since then the party has been hijacked by a group of reckless leftwing fanatics — Justin Trudeau and his lackeys — who have spent the past several years feeding what we built into the woodchipper.
Mark Carney’s finally released budget is the perfect illustration of that.
The budget is a 400 page monument to deficit delusion that raises spending to $644.4 billion over five years — including $141.4 billion in new spending — while revenues limp to $583.3 billion, yielding a record (non-pandemic) $78.3 billion shortfall, an increase of 116% from last year.
This isn’t policy; it’s plunder. Interest payments alone devour $55.6 billion this year, projected to hit $76.1 billion by 2029-30 — more than the entire defence budget and rising faster than healthcare transfers.
We can’t discount the possibility that this will lead to a downgrade of our credit rating, which will significantly increase the cost of borrowing and of doing business more generally.
Numbers this big start to feel very abstract. But think of it this way: that is your money they’re spending. Ottawa’s wealth is made up entirely of our tax dollars. We’ve entrusted that money to them with the understanding that they will use it responsibly. In the decade these Liberals have been in power, they have betrayed that trust.
They’ve pursued policies which have made life in Canada increasingly unaffordable. For example, at the time of writing it takes 141 Canadian pennies (up from 139 a few days ago) to buy one U.S. dollar, in which all of our commodities are priced. Well, that’s .25 cents per litre of gasoline. Imagine what that’s going to do to the price of heating, of groceries, of the various other commodities which we consume.
And this budget demonstrates that the Carney era will be more of the same.
Of course, the Elbows Up crowd are saying the opposite — that this shows how fiscally responsible Mark Carney is, unlike his predecessor. (Never mind that they also publicly supported everything that Trudeau did when he was in government.) They claim that Carney shows that he’s more open to oil and gas than Trudeau was.
Don’t believe it.
The oil and gas sector does get a half-hearted nod in the budget with, for instance, a conditional pathway to repeal the emissions cap. But those conditions are important. Repeal is tied to the effectiveness of Carney’s beloved industrial carbon tax. If that newly super-charged carbon tax, which continues to make our lives more expensive, leads to government-set emissions reductions benchmarks being met, then Ottawa might — might — scrap the emissions.
Meanwhile, the budget doubles down on the Trudeau government’s methane emissions regulations. It merely loosens the provisions of the outrageous Bill C-59, an act which should have been scrapped in its entirety. And it leaves in place the Trudeaupian “green” super structure, which has resource sector investment, and any business that can manage it, fleeing to the U.S.
In these perilous times, with Canada teetering on the brink of recession, a responsible government would be cutting spending and getting out of the way of our most productive sectors, especially oil and gas — the backbone of our economy.
It would be repealing the BC tanker ban and Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines act,” so that our natural resources could better generate revenue on the international market and bring down energy rates at home.
It would quit wasting millions on Electric Vehicle charging stations; mandating that all Canadians buy EVs, even with their elevated cost; and pressuring automakers to manufacture Electric Vehicles, regardless of demand, and even as they keep closing up shop and heading south.
But in this budget the Liberals are going the opposite direction. Spend more. Tax more. Leave the basic Net-Zero framework in place. Rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
They’re gambling tomorrow’s prosperity on yesterday’s green dogma, And every grocery run, every gas fill-up, every mortgage payment will serve as a daily reminder that we are the ones footing the bill.
Once upon a time, the Liberals knew better. We made the hard decisions and got the country back on its feet. Nowadays, not so much.
If you only listened to the mainstream media, you would think Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax is long gone. But the Liberal government’s latest budget actually doubled down on the industrial carbon tax.
While the consumer carbon tax may be paused, the industrial carbon tax punishes industry for “emitting” pollution. It’s only a matter of time before companies either pass the cost of the carbon tax to consumers or move to a country without a carbon tax.
Dan McTeague explains how Prime Minister Carney is doubling down on net zero scams.
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