Thursday, May 17, 2007

Liberals, Spending Your Taxes on Luxury Flights

Premier Dalton McGuinty has made the news again. This time it's about his travel behaviour:

Premier Dalton McGuinty has used government aircraft flights worth up to $1 million to reach destinations as close to Toronto as Hamilton and Niagara.

That's what I'm saying, luxury flights, on a government aircraft. One million, can't buy all that much for that anymore these days. So what's all the fuss about?

Many of the flights -- for which other users pay $2,000 an hour -- were for news conferences or photo opportunities in local communities. Neither the premier nor the lieutenant governor have to pay to use the province's two executive turboprops.

Hmmm, this doesn't look all that good. PR blowback time, I guess.

One round trip took McGuinty to a Liberal party campaign event at a Windsor auto plant during the 2006 federal election. He repeated a two-week-old announcement of provincial funding for DaimlerChrysler. [...]

Supporting Big Business with our tax-money, twice: at least he's spending it wisely.

The premier refused a request for an interview for this story.
Questions are always trouble. Parliamentary Press Gallery, FOI requests, Parliamentary Committees, they're just not very helpful.

- whole story: Hamilton Spectator
- Hamilton Spectator - pdf
- Dalton McQuinty
- Cover up



2 comments:

susansmith said...

"But that isn't good enough for the opposition NDP and Canadian Taxpayers Federation. They're outraged that there's no regular oversight or auditing of the aircraft use. And they want the premier to pay back the value of any flights used for personal or partisan purposes."

Now there's two unlikely bed partners if I every saw one.

That said, flying to Windsor to make the same announcement for a federal liberal campaign, well, partisan is the word there. Pay the money back, as that wasn't govt business, that was liberal business.

Erik said...

"Pay the money back, as that wasn't govt business, that was liberal business."

Many Libs have a hard time distinguishing what's lib, what's gov, and what's business.

Keep on mixing and spinning the machine, no corruption here.

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