Heartburn

One of my co-Bloggers (Blue Blogging Soapbox) sent me the following information that he saw in Maclean's magazine:

• Your tax dollars at work
  
  Since Radwanski, Ottawa's top 99 bureaucrats have spent $14 million on travel and hospitality expenses. They say spending is under control. It isn't.
  
  CHARLIE GILLIS AND MICHAEL FRISCOLANTI
  
  Those who make their living on Parliament Hill have been eager to close the Great Book of Government Excess. The scandal, pundits and politicians assure us, has produced a "cultural shift." No more meaningless junkets. No more boozy dinners. As proof, they point to rules passed by the Paul Martin government requiring all senior bureaucrats, cabinet members, parliamentary secretaries and ministerial staff to post their travel and hospitality expenses on departmental websites. It's called "proactive disclosure," and it gave Canadians their first-ever chance to scrutinize -- at the click of a mouse -- the airline tickets and meal tabs of their top-level federal employees. For this and other reforms, Canadians owe Radwanski a "debt of gratitude," declared Pat Martin, a New Democrat MP who sat on the Commons committee that uncovered his misspending. "People are far more scrupulous with expenses now," he told the Ottawa Citizen. "If anything, the pendulum may have swung too far...
  
  On Sept. 20, 2005, Anne McLellan, then the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, Jean Lapierre, then the transport minister, and nine other senior officials rang up $1,842 at Noce, a posh Toronto restaurant, during a four-hour dinner meeting "to discuss the Windsor border file." Leslie Swartman, Lapierre's chief of staff, picked up the tab. When contacted by Maclean's, Swartman described the dinner as a rare opportunity for department heads to "hash out this issue altogether." Wine was served, she said, but it wasn't charged to the public purse. Still, that means each person's dinner cost taxpayers an average of $167 -- not including alcohol. "I recognize that," Swartman said, when told that some Canadians might be offended by such a hefty bill. "Had I known it was going to be as expensive of a restaurant, I probably would have done it somewhere else. But you don't really find that out until you get there."

Geeez, I hope Transport Canada does a better job researching the cost of a road or tunnel for trucks to the Ambassador Bridge than they do for picking restaurants in Toronto!

Don't you think it would be interesting to know who attended? Were they all out of Ottawa? If so, why did they all have to have dinner in Toronto? How did they all happen to be in Toronto at the same time too? Should travel expenses to fly to Toronto for dinner be added into the costs?

I wondered what they talked about too? Perhaps that should be revealed as well. After all, it took 4 hours.

Leslie also flew to Toronto for a one day trip back on February 18, 2005 to "To discuss Border Crossing Issues." I wonder with whom Leslie met and what was discussed.

For those of you who are cynics, Leslie does know where Windsor is as can be seen from the trip on September 17, 2004 here, at a cost of $1,016.22 to "to discuss border crossing issues." I guess the Toronto dinner meeting was an anniversary meeting or something since it was almost a year later.

PS. I wonder whose expense account picked up the cost for the interesting Mexicantown dinner at Xochimilco Restaurant. Perhaps the Michigan Legislators should ask that question.