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Economy

Trudeau drops $220,000 on airplane food

Published

10 months ago

5 minute read

News release from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

You ever get the feeling the government is running a secret contest to see who can order up the most expensive meals while flying around the world?

Well if they are, we’ve got a new winner: The Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

After Governor General Mary Simon spent $100,000 on airplane food, Trudeau said, ‘Hold my beef Wellington’ and doubled the taxpayer tab.

All that and more in this week’s Taxpayer Waste Watch.

Bon apétit.

Franco.

Fine China, fancy feasts and a $220,000 taxpayer tab

Welcome to Air Trudeau, where the cares are free, the juice is freshly squeezed, the meals are served on fine China and the bill is sent to you.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his entourage spent $223,000 of your money on airplane food during a six-day tour of the Indo-Pacific region last fall, according to government records dug up by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Eating that much could wear a silver spoon right out.

To put things in perspective: that’s enough money to cover a month of groceries for 165 Canadian families, or buy 13,937 glasses of Bev Oda’s favourite orange juice.

But the bill gets big when this is the grocery list:

Beef brisket and parsley mashed potatoes with truffle oil. Pan fried beef tenderloin with port wine reduction sauce. Braised lamb shanks with steamed broccoli and boiled baby potatoes. Strawberry shortcake and baked cheesecake with pistachio brittle.

Sounds just like the meals you get on Air Canada or WestJet, right?

The records indicate staff were told Trudeau’s meals (and ONLY Trudeau’s meals) must be appropriately garnished and served on China dishware.

Pro-tip for the prime minister:

Have you seen your polling numbers lately? It might be tough to connect with the middle class while chowing down on braised lamb shanks, topped with a sprig of parsley and served on fine China.

Snacks offered onboard Air Trudeau included cured meats and artisanal cheeses, veggies and dip, and fresh papaya, pineapple, dragon fruit, watermelon and berries. And the juice served was noted as being “freshly-squeezed.”

A special request was put in for the plane to be stocked with Trudeau’s favourite brand of premium alkaline spring water, and staff picked up $900 worth of pop and chips before take-off. Trudeau and his entourage also spent $300 on movies and magazines.

Well we already know the prime minister doesn’t read his briefing notes, so it’s good he had the latest editions of the Jacobin and Mad Magazine to keep him occupied – it was a long flight, after all.

All told, the trip cost you $1.9 million and counting.

Trudeau has now claimed the top spot on our leaderboard for the most extravagant taxpayer-funded travel expenses, surpassing Governor General Mary Simon’s legendary March 2022 performance, when she gobbled up $100,000 worth of airplane food.

After details of Simon’s airplane extravaganza went public (courtesy of your friends at the CTF), a parliamentary committee summoned high-ranking bureaucrats to answer for the outrageous tab.

The bureaucrats pinkie promised to change the rules and stop frivolous spending.

Well clearly those efforts are going swimmingly…

The government set out to lower costs.

Then Trudeau doubled them.

Poilievre grills Trudeau about airplane feast in House of Commons 

Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre grilled Trudeau about his $223,000 worth of airplane food expenses in the House of Commons.

 

Trudeau’s EV corporate welfare worse than you think

Federal and provincial governments are ponying up billions more in electric vehicle battery subsidies than the corporations themselves are spending to build their own factories.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report this week showing just how bad taxpayers are being taken to the cleaners on these corporate welfare deals.

Governments promised $52 billion to these corporations. The corporations are only spending $46 billion.

Does that sounds like a good deal to you?

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Published on April 6, 2025

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The Audit David Clinton

Contrasting the principle of equalization with the execution

Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light.

You’ll need to search long and hard to find a Canadian unwilling to help those less fortunate. And, so long as we identify as members of one nation¹, that feeling stretches from coast to coast.

So the basic principle of Canada’s equalization payments – where poorer provinces receive billions of dollars in special federal payments – is easy to understand. But as you can imagine, it’s not easy to apply the principle in a way that’s fair, and the current methodology has arguably lead to a very strange set of incentives.

According to Department of Finance Canada, eligibility for payments is determined based on your province’s fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is a measure of the taxes (income, business, property, and consumption) that a province could raise (based on national average rates) along with revenues from natural resources. The idea, I suppose, is that you’re creating a realistic proxy for a province’s higher personal earnings and consumption and, with greater natural resources revenues, a reduced need to increase income tax rates.

But the devil is in the details, and I think there are some questions worth asking:

  • Whichever way you measure fiscal capacity there’ll be both winners and losers, so who gets to decide?
  • Should a province that effectively funds more than its “share” get proportionately greater representation for national policy² – or at least not see its policy preferences consistently overruled by its beneficiary provinces?

The problem, of course, is that the decisions that defined equalization were – because of long-standing political conditions – dominated by the region that ended up receiving the most. Had the formula been the best one possible, there would have been little room to complain. But was it?

For example, attaching so much weight to natural resource revenues is just one of many possible approaches – and far from the most obvious. Consider how the profits from natural resources already mostly show up in higher income and corporate tax revenues (including income tax paid by provincial government workers employed by energy-related ministries)?

And who said that such calculations had to be population-based, which clearly benefits Quebec (nine million residents vs around $5 billion in resource income) over Newfoundland (545,000 people vs $1.6 billion) or Alberta (4.2 million people vs $19 billion). While Alberta’s average market income is 20 percent or so higher than Quebec’s, Quebec’s is quite a bit higher than Newfoundland’s. So why should Newfoundland receive only minimal equalization payments?

To illustrate all that, here’s the most recent payment breakdown when measured per-capita:
Equalization 2025-26 – Government of Canada

For clarification, the latest per-capita payments to poorer provinces ranged from $3,936 to PEI, $1,553 to Quebec, and $36 to Ontario. Only Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC received nothing.

And here’s how the total equalization payments (in millions of dollars) have played out over the past decade:

Is energy wealth the right differentiating factor because it’s there through simple dumb luck, morally compelling the fortunate provinces to share their fortune? That would be a really difficult argument to make. For one thing because Quebec – as an example – happens to be sitting on its own significant untapped oil and gas reserves. Those potential opportunities include the Utica Shale formation, the Anticosti Island basin, and the Gaspé Peninsula (along with some offshore potential in the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

So Quebec is effectively being paid billions of dollars a year to not exploit their natural resources. That places their ostensibly principled stand against energy resource exploitation in a very different light. Perhaps that stand is correct or perhaps it isn’t. But it’s a stand they probably couldn’t have afforded to take had the equalization calculation been different.

Of course, no formula could possibly please everyone, but punishing the losers with ongoing attacks on the very source of their contributions is guaranteed to inspire resentment. And that could lead to very dark places.

Note: I know this post sounds like it came from a grumpy Albertan. But I assure you that I’ve never even visited the province, instead spending most of my life in Ontario.

1

Which has admittedly been challenging since the former primer minister infamously described us as a post-national state without an identity.

2

This isn’t nearly as crazy as it sounds. After all, there are already formal mechanisms through which Indigenous communities get more than a one-person-one-vote voice.

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Carbon Tax

The book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read

Published on April 5, 2025

By

By Franco Terrazzano

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote a 500-page book praising carbon taxes.

Well, I just wrote a book smashing through the government’s carbon tax propaganda.

It tells the inside story of the fight against the carbon tax. And it’s THE book the carbon taxers don’t want you to read.

My book is called Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax.

 
Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax 

Every now and then, the underdog wins one.

And it looks like that’s happening in the fight against the carbon tax.

It’s not over yet, but support for the carbon tax is crumbling. Some politicians vow to scrap it. Others hide behind vague plans to repackage it. But virtually everyone recognizes support for the current carbon tax has collapsed.

It wasn’t always this way.

For about a decade now, powerful politicians, government bureaucrats, academics, media elites and even big business have been pushing carbon taxes on the people.

But most of the time, politicians never asked the people if they supported carbon taxes. In other words, carbon taxes, and the resulting higher gas prices and heating bills, were forced on us.

We were told it was good for us. We were told carbon taxes were inevitable. We were told politicians couldn’t win elections without carbon taxes, even though the politicians that imposed them didn’t openly run on them. We were told that we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to leave a healthy environment for our kids and grandkids. We were told we needed to pay carbon taxes if we wanted to be respected in the international community.

In this decade-long fight, it would have been understandable if the people had given up and given in to these claims. It would have been easier to accept what the elites wanted and just pay the damn bill. But against all odds, ordinary Canadians didn’t give up.

Canadians knew you could care about the environment and oppose carbon taxes. Canadians saw what they were paying at the gas station and on their heating bills, and they knew they were worse off, regardless of how many politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and academics tried to convince them otherwise. Canadians didn’t need advanced degrees in economics, climate science or politics to understand they were being sold a false bill of goods.

Making it more expensive for a mom in Port Hope to get to work, or grandparents in Toronto to pay their heating bill, or a student in Coquitlam to afford food won’t reduce emissions in China, Russia, India or the United States. It just leaves these Canadians, and many like them, with less money to afford everything else.

Ordinary Canadians understood carbon taxes amount to little more than a way for governments to take more money from us and dictate how we should live our lives. Ordinary Canadians also saw through the unfairness of the carbon tax.

Many of the elites pushing the carbon tax—the media, politicians, taxpayer-funded professors, laptop activists and corporate lobbyists—were well off and wouldn’t feel the brunt of carbon taxes. After all, living in a downtown condo and clamouring for higher carbon taxes doesn’t require much gas, diesel or propane.

But running a business, working in a shop, getting kids to soccer and growing food on the farm does. These are the Canadians the political class forgot about when pushing carbon taxes. These are the Canadians who never gave up. These are the Canadians who took time out of their busy lives to sign petitions, organize and attend rallies, share posts on social media, email politicians and hand out bumper stickers.

Because of these Canadians, the carbon tax could soon be swept onto the ash heap of history. I wrote this book for two reasons.

The first is because these ordinary Canadians deserve it. They worked really hard for a really long time against the odds. When all the power brokers in government told them, “Do what we say—or pay,” they didn’t give up. They deserve to know the time and effort they spent fighting the carbon tax mattered. They deserve all the credit.

Thank you for everything you did.

The second reason I wrote this book is so people know the real story of the carbon tax. The carbon tax was bad from the start and we fought it from the start. By reading this book, you will get the real story about the carbon tax, a story you won’t find anywhere else.

This book is important because if the federal Liberals’ carbon tax is killed, the carbon taxers will try to lay blame for their defeat on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They will try to say that carbon taxes are a good idea, but Trudeau bungled the policy or wasn’t a good enough salesman. They will try to revive the carbon tax and once again make you pay more for gas, groceries, and home heating.

Just like with any failed five-year plan, there is a lingering whiff among the laptop class and the taxpayer-funded desk rulers that this was all a communication problem, that the ideal carbon tax hasn’t been tried yet. I can smell it outside my office building in Ottawa, where I write these words. We can’t let those embers smoulder and start a fire again.

This book shows why the carbon tax is and always will be bad policy for ordinary Canadians.

Franco’s note: You can pre-order a copy of my new book, Axing the Tax: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Carbon Tax, here: https://www.amazon.ca/Axing-Tax-Rise-Canadas-Carbon

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