While the Harper government is floundering in the wake of a damning auditor general’s report that cites potential cost overruns in the tens of billions of dollars, water-cooler chatter is instead focused on the purchase of a single, $16-glass of orange juice.
Of course, this is just one example of the lavish spending by International Development Minister Bev Oda that was revealed in a series of recent media reports.
In June 2011, Oda attended an international conference in London, England, which was convened to discuss vaccine and immunization initiatives for children in developing nations.
Although the conference organizers had rooms reserved in the five-star Grange St. Pauls Hotel, Oda chose to upgrade her lodgings to the landmark Savoy Hotel, which is renowned for its famous clientele, which includes royalty and Hollywood stars.
Of course, now that she was no longer staying at the site of the conference, Oda needed some form of local transportation. As no ordinary London taxi should be used to ferry the well-heeled patrons of the Savoy, a limousine was chartered for the princely sum of nearly $1,000 a day.
Somewhere during all that senior-level international networking, Oda found the time to order that $16-glass of orange juice.
For some reason, that one item has become a symbol of Oda’s excess and lavish waste of taxpayers’ money. Average Canadians do not frequently jet off to the U.K. Only a relative handful of Canadians would have ever stayed at the Savoy, and of those only an infinitesimal fraction would have considered renting a private limo service.
So while those costs are all largely abstract to the regular voter, the vast majority of Canadians can easily grasp the fact that $16 is way more money than one would spend for a large glass of fresh-squeezed OJ at the local Booster Juice.
Since those expenses were first reported, Oda has been pilloried in the national media and lambasted by opposition parties in the House of Commons.
But to be fair, Oda has voluntarily offered to reimburse the Crown for the incremental cost difference for the hotel, her London limo service and, yes, even the glass of orange juice.
If this was the first time Oda had been caught splurging at public expense, one might believe that the minister or her well-meaning staffers were simply naive in the ways of allowable expenditures. However, one only has to go back to 2006 when Oda was chastised for spending nearly $6,000 in just four days on a limousine service in Halifax while attending the Juno Awards.
No matter how many times she transited between functions, $6,000 is still an unfathomable amount of money in comparative cab fare. While it is ultimately the minister’s responsibility for these ridiculous expenditures, one has to wonder why she was not better served by her loyal staffers.
One would like to think that even the most novice ministerial chief of staff on Parliament Hill would recognize the potential backlash from the public should such a wanton disregard for the public purse be revealed in the media. There is a fine line between being a loyal servant and a sycophantic yes-man, and cabinet ministers would be better served by the former.
In July 2010, when Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s staff wanted the air force to airlift their boss from a private fishing lodge, the operations officer in Winnipeg initially balked at the request. The reason for the objection was essentially, how will this look to the public?
Instead of realizing that the officer was correct in his prediction, a Cormorant helicopter was nevertheless dispatched to hoist up MacKay under the guise of a search and rescue training exercise. It took 18 months for the media to uncover MacKay’s excellent little helicopter adventure, but when they did, he too had to endure a media crap storm and opposition demands for his resignation.
Unlike Oda, MacKay has never even offered to repay the $32,000 expense of his personal airlift.
Original Article
Source: the chronicle herald
Author: SCOTT TAYLOR
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