Financial records and receipts reveal Parliament Hill’s costly operation
Yesterday, a number of financial records and receipts surfaced from Parliament Hill, revealing that the annual cost of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office has ballooned to nearly $10 million, an increase of 30 per cent over the last two years. Other revelations included the tab for the PM’s travels in 2009-10: $6,904,790. Former governor-general Michaëlle Jean also had a big travel budget: her annual spending on foreign trips nearly doubled over the last three years, and her office spent nearly $2.65-million on trips and preparation work by advance teams in the 2009-10 fiscal year. MPs spent $10.2-million last year sending flyers into their competitors’ ridings, making it the third-largest expenditure of the near $143-million parliamentarians spent in all. There’s also those G8/G20 summits: the RCMP are expected to submit final receipts currently estimated at about $330 million. That would bring the total security bill for last June’s international gatherings to about $750-million.