Business
Feds spend $1.5 million on hotel rooms during UN summit in Montreal
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Author: Ryan Thorpe
Taxpayers picked up the $1.5-million tab for 400 people to attend a two-week United Nations summit in Montreal last December.
That’s according to government records released in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Eric Melillo (Kenora), and additional information confirmed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
The $1.5 million was spent on hotel rooms for the “approximately” 400-person delegation Canada sent to the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal on Dec. 7-19, 2022, also known as COP15.
“Did the feds really need to send 400 people to Montreal for a conference?” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Canadians pay an obscene amount of money when our politicians and bureaucrats travel abroad, and now we learn we also pay an arm and a leg when we host a conference at home.”
Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed total spending on hotel rooms was even higher than $1.5 million, but said it lacks the resources to tally up the full bill.
“There were also other costs for hotel rooms that were booked directly by travellers and reimbursed by ECCC,” the agency wrote. “It would require a significant amount of time and effort to locate and analyze the supporting documentation of each travel request and manually extract the requested information.”
The rooms were booked at two downtown hotels, Le Westin Montreal and the Intercontinental Montreal, costing taxpayers $1,539,052.
“It seems like all you have to do to get a taxpayer-funded hotel room is show up,” Terrazzano said. “At a time when so many taxpayers are struggling to make ends meet, it’s outrageous the government is spending so much money at a conference in our own backyard.”
This isn’t the first time lavish spending by Canadian politicians and bureaucrats during a UN climate conference has raised eyebrows.
In 2021, Canada sent the largest delegation of all G7 countries to the COP26 Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow, Scotland. At least $1 million in taxpayer funds went towards the trip, although full costs were not released by the government.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and three support staff managed to book hotels in the wrong city – 86 kilometres away, in Edinburgh. As a result, they billed taxpayers thousands of dollars to hire a luxury chauffeur service to shuttle them between the two cities.
“It’s clear politicians and bureaucrats love spending other people’s money going to conferences in fun cities, but what value are taxpayers getting from all this spending?” Terrazzano said. “The feds are more than $1 trillion in debt and Canadians can’t afford higher taxes, so reining in their conference budgets should be a no brainer.”
Fr0m LifeSiteNews
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been providing massive funds in the name of COVID despite the fact that Joe Biden admitted the ‘pandemic’ was over by 2022.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is withdrawing $11.4 billion in COVID funding to state and local health departments, non-government groups, and international recipients about two years after the U.S. government declared the COVID-19 “national emergency” over.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS director of communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement, NBC News reported.
“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.“
Despite the fact that former President Joe Biden admitted in 2022 that the COVID “pandemic” was over, Health and Human Services (HHS) has been continuing to allocate funds for COVID testing, “vaccines,” and “global COVID projects,” according to CDC talking points.
The funding cut comes as millions of dollars for other initiatives, including vaccine hesitancy research and HIV prevention, are slashed under new HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
HHS has made the greatest funding cutbacks government-wide, according to the Department of Government Efficiency’s website.
Dr. Robert Malone argued in 2023 that the only reason the Biden administration decided to end the national COVID “emergency” when it did is because of the congressional legislation seeking that end.
“The bottom line is that the imperial U.S. administrative state will never give up these unconstitutional powers until forced to do so,” Malone wrote.
For years, major corporations bragged about their wonderful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. They’re good for business and morally correct, they said. So why are they now cutting those programs?
Robby Starbuck says these programs once got a lot of buy-in, because people wanted to be nice! But DEI came to mean much more than just being nice.
Starbuck says what it looked like in practice was “crazy trainings” and “overtly racist hiring practices.” Now lots of people agree with him.
Companies actually take notice when Starbuck tells his many followers about their DEI programs. Often the programs get dropped.
That’s the power of free speech.
After 40+ years of reporting, I now understand the importance of limited government and personal freedom.
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Libertarian journalist John Stossel created Stossel TV to explain liberty and free markets to young people.
Prior to Stossel TV he hosted a show on Fox Business and co-anchored ABC’s primetime newsmagazine show, 20/20. Stossel’s economic programs have been adapted into teaching kits by a non-profit organization, “Stossel in the Classroom.” High school teachers in American public schools now use the videos to help educate their students on economics and economic freedom. They are seen by more than 12 million students every year.
Stossel has received 19 Emmy Awards and has been honored five times for excellence in consumer reporting by the National Press Club. Other honors include the George Polk Award for Outstanding Local Reporting and the George Foster Peabody Award.
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