Prime Minister Personally Approves $7,400 Hospitality Tab For “Refreshments”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally approved a $7,400 tab for “refreshments” for public servants about three months before his government announced a crackdown on hospitality expenses.

Harper’s signature appears on an Aug. 26 approval form asking him to endorse the refreshment expense for a meeting of staff from the Privy Council Office, the prime minister’s own department.

The so-called town hall meeting was held the morning of Sept. 13 at the posh Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, where a meeting room for the affair cost taxpayers about $5,000 an hour.

Town halls for Privy Council Office staff were inaugurated by the Conservatives in 2006 and have rapidly risen in cost over the years from $19,000 to $42,000, the bill for the latest gathering.

Documents outlining costs of the meeting were obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

The Conservatives’ 2009 federal budget imposed a two-year freeze on spending for travel, conferences and hospitality in all government departments, holding those expenses to 2008-2009 levels.

And last month, Treasury Board President Stockwell Day further tightened the restrictions, announcing tougher government-wide rules effective for 2011.

“Canadians have had to do a significant amount of belt tightening themselves as they’ve gone through these last couple of years, and they expect governments to do the same,” Day said on Nov. 24 to justify the clamp-down.

Asked at a news conference to provide an example of improper hospitality spending, Day cited the example of federal government reception that cost $31,500 for several hundred people. “We’re saying … that’s not a good signal to be sending.”

An aide later explained that Day was referring to a May 9, 2005, reception hosted by Statistics Canada — during the term of the previous Liberal government — that cost taxpayers $31,674 for about 400 people.

The Statistics Canada event, in fact, was similar in scale to the $47,158 budgeted by the Privy Council Office for the Sept. 13 town hall, intended for some 600 public servants.

A spokesman for the Privy Council Office said the town hall came in under budget, at $42,077, partly because hospitality costs amounted to only $6,520 for “coffee, tea, bottled juice and pastries.”

Raymond Rivet was not immediately able to say how many public servants attended the event. But if all 600 showed up for the three-and-a-half hour session, total costs were about $70 for each participant — not far off from the $79 for each person who attended the 2005 Statistics Canada event that Stockwell Day said was “not a good signal to be sending.”

Rivet said the Privy Council Office town hall “provides a venue for interactive discussion on the priorities and challenges for the upcoming year.”

Parliament was not sitting on Sept. 13, and large committee rooms in the Centre Block were available for government gatherings, as was the government’s own downtown conference centre, in a refurbished railway station across from the Chateau Laurier Hotel.

Rivet said the conference centre “could not accommodate the estimated attendance of 600 employees in round table format.”

“In choosing a facility, consideration is given to capacity, availability and cost. … The Westin … offered the most suitable venue at a competitive rate.”

The prime minister did not attend the town hall, which was hosted by the clerk of the Privy Council, Wayne Wouters. The guest speaker was Steven Fletcher, the Conservative minister of state for democratic reform.

Harper was required to sign the Aug. 26 expense form because of Treasury Board policy, which requires a minister’s approval for hospitality costs expected to be more than $5,000.

Rivet said the Privy Council Office has abided by the 2009 directive to hold travel, hospitality and conference expenses to 2008-2009 levels, despite the increased costs of the town hall meetings. Total PCO spending on all these items was $4,051,878 in 2008-2009, compared with $3,771,503 in 2009-2010, he said.

“PCO will continue to make spending decisions in line with the government’s directive on the management of expenditures on travel, hospitality and conferences,” he said.

The Westin Hotel in Ottawa is listed as one of PCO’s sole-sourced companies for hospitality, in a Nov. 22 government response to a written question in the House of Commons from New Democrat MP Malcolm Allen.

Harper is not the first Conservative minister to sign a large hospitality bill for the benefit of public servants. Peter MacKay, then foreign minister, approved a $16,800 hospitality bill on March 2, 2007, to buy lunches for 400 Passport Canada employees doing weekend shifts.

Government policy normally requires ministers to publicly post their hospitality costs on departmental websites, but not when such costs are incurred for the benefit of the department, even though a minister may have personally approved the expense.

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