This week, it was learned that Charles Boyer, a former aide to Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, expensed about $31,000 worth of restaurant tabs between 2001 and 2003 -- or about 16 times the average annual restaurant outlay for a Canadian household. Chalking up a bill that big is difficult on just three meals a day. But then, Mr. Boyer was apparently unrestricted by the ordinary conventions of food consumption. On June 12, 2002, he hosted two dinners in one night. (It was a highly multicultural soiree: The first event took place at a Japanese eatery, the second at an Italian restaurant.) The whole trough-feeding marathon was discovered by John Williams, an Alliance MP and regular critic of government overspending, who targeted Mr. Boyer's restaurant tabs with an Access to Information request.On its Web site, the Treasury Board of Canada -- which oversees the federal civil service -- proclaims that "public servants shall endeavour to ensure the proper, effective and efficient use of public money."
[. . . .] Mr. Williams' revelations call for a Treasury Board inquiry.
More specifically, the board should scrutinize Mr. Boyer's meal tabs to ascertain precisely how they are purported to have served the public interest. . . . [The] board should try to identify ways the relevant amounts might be recovered. . . .
Second, the board should fix a glaring flaw in its rules regarding so-called "hospitality" expenses. At present, the board imposes a maximum annual average on food expenses that civil servants can claim on a per-meal, per-person basis. But this practice would appear to simply encourage Ottawa's expense-account junkies to treat their friends to the company card en masse. A better system would be one that also flags big spenders for special scrutiny based on the absolute amounts they charge.
. . . hire extra staff for its audit office. . . . [The] new hires would pay for themselves and then some.
My Commentary:
OPM -- Get on the government tit and eat at the best! Expenses are not monitored adequately and the waste is out of control.
1. What are those big, well-furnished offices for anyway? Use them to meet business or government clients.
2. In what other job is your restaurant tab picked up by the company you work for? Do what the rest of us do. Pay for your own meals!
3. What do MPs and their minions need taxpayer funded credit cards for anyway -- except to impress others? The rest of us have our own personal credit cards and we pay our own bills!
4. Where a taxpayer-funded lunch or dinner is unavoidable, every MPs expenses should be a matter of public record -- available for ALL of us to see -- not just available to those who sign them off or available after much digging by a few interested parties and the media willing to use the Access to Information Act. These profligate fellows are Canadian Taxpayer EMPLOYEES -- NOT MEDIEVAL POTENTATES!
