National
Bureaucrat booze bill cost taxpayers $51,000 a month

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
By Ryan Thorpe
“Working” in government may be a thirsty profession, but a booze tab of $51,000 a month is definitely a problem.
And the problem gets worse when the bill is sent to taxpayers.
Global Affairs Canada bureaucrats spent more than $3.3 million on alcohol between January 2019 and May 2024, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
That means the department spent an average of $51,000 on beer, wine and spirits per month.
“The government is wasting our tax dollars faster than we can say bottoms up,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Is any politician going to look a single struggling Canadian in the eye and try to justify the government spending thousands of dollars on wine tastings and cocktail parties?”
The largest single order from Global Affairs Canada came on Feb. 20, 2019, when bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., spent $56,684 on “wine purchases from special store.”
Other large orders include $9,815 worth of wine expensed by bureaucrats in Beijing, China, in March 2021, and $8,912 worth of wine expensed by bureaucrats in New Delhi, India, in May 2022.
Orders flown off to bureaucrats in far flung locales like Oslo, Tokyo, Moscow and London routinely run into the thousands of dollars per shipment.
At times, the records obtained by the CTF indicate the alcohol was purchased for a specific purpose – such as an official event or reception, or in one case, a $1,024 booze-filled “trivia night.”
But in many cases, the records provide no explanation beyond “bulk alcohol purchase” or “replenishment of wine stock.”
“The price of booze went up when Ottawa increased alcohol taxes, but that’s not a good excuse for these runaway bills,” Terrazzano said. “I like to party as much as the next guy, but maybe these bureaucrats could chill it on the cold ones when the government is more than $1 trillion in debt and taxpayers are struggling.”
On March 19, 2019, bureaucrats in San Jose, California, expensed $8,153 worth of booze. Just 12 days later, those bureaucrats spent another $2,196 on booze.
On Jan. 23, 2020, bureaucrats in Reykjavik, Iceland, bought $8,074 worth of booze, only to follow it up with a $2,849 alcohol purchase less than two months later.
Roughly $1.9 million of the spending came under the Canadian Alcoholic Beverages Abroad program, formerly known as the Canadian Wine Initiative.
The Canadian Wine Initiative was launched in 2004 with a mandate of supporting the country’s booze industry by promoting it abroad.
The rest of the spending was miscellaneous alcohol purchases billed to taxpayers. The records obtained by the CTF give no indication any of the $3.3 million spent on alcohol was recouped by taxpayers.
An access-to-information analyst at Global Affairs Canada told the CTF the department doesn’t centrally track its alcohol purchases. As a result, it’s possible Global Affairs Canada spent more than $3.3. million on booze.
The records obtained by the CTF only detail alcohol purchases from Global Affairs Canada. According to the government of Canada’s website, there are more than 200 other federal departments, Crown corporations and agencies.
“These bureaucrats seem like they’re having a good time, but what value are taxpayers getting from this huge booze bill?” Terrazzano said. “Billing taxpayers $51,000 a month for booze is mind boggling, but what’s even crazier is this tab is just for one government department.”
Business
It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers
The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.
Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.
These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.
Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.
In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.
Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.
According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.
Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.
A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.
Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.
Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
2025 Federal Election
Carney’s budget is worse than Trudeau’s

Liberal Leader Mark Carney is planning to borrow more money than former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
That’s an odd plan for a former banker because the federal government is already spending more on debt interest payments than it spends on health-care transfers to the provinces.
Let’s take a deeper look at Carney’s plan.
Carney says that his government would “spend less, invest more.”
At first glance, that might sound better than the previous decade of massive deficits and increasing debt, but does that sound like a real change?
Because if you open a thesaurus, you’ll find that “spend” and “invest” are synonyms, they mean the same thing.
And Carney’s platform shows it. Carney plans to increase government spending by $130 billion. He plans to increase the federal debt by $225 billion over the next four years. That’s about $100 billion more than Trudeau was planning borrow over the same period, according to the most recent Fall Economic Statement.
Carney is planning to waste $5.6 billion more on debt interest charges than Trudeau. Interest charges already cost taxpayers more than $1 billion per week.
The platform claims that Carney will run a budget surplus in 2028, but that’s nonsense. Because once you include the $48 billion of spending in Carney’s “capital” budget, the tiny surplus disappears, and taxpayers are stuck with more debt.
And that’s despite planning to take even more money from Canadians in years ahead. Carney’s platform shows that his carbon tariff, another carbon tax on Canadians, will cost taxpayers $500 million.
The bottom line is that government spending, no matter what pile it is put into, is just government spending. And when the government spends too much, that means it must borrow more money, and taxpayers have to pay the interest payments on that irresponsible borrowing.
Canadians don’t even believe that Carney can follow through on his watered-down plan. A majority of Canadians are skeptical that Carney will balance the operational budget in three years, according to Leger polling.
All Carney’s plan means for Canadians is more borrowing and higher debt. And taxpayers can’t afford anymore debt.
When the Liberals were first elected the debt was $616 billion. It’s projected to reach almost $1.3 trillion by the end of the year, that means the debt has more than doubled in the last decade.
Every single Canadian’s individual share of the federal debt averages about $30,000.
Interest charges on the debt are costing taxpayers $53.7 billion this year. That’s more than the government takes in GST from Canadians. That means every time you go to the grocery store, fill up your car with gas, or buy almost anything else, all that federal sales tax you pay isn’t being used for anything but paying for the government’s poor financial decisions.
Creative accounting is not the solution to get the government’s fiscal house in order. It’s spending cuts. And Carney even says this.
“The federal government has been spending too much,” said Carney. He then went on to acknowledge the huge spending growth of the government over the last decade and the ballooning of the federal bureaucracy. A serious plan to balance the budget and pay down debt includes cutting spending and slashing bureaucracy.
But the Conservatives aren’t off the hook here either. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that he will balance the budget “as soon as possible,” but hasn’t told taxpayers when that is.
More debt today means higher taxes tomorrow. That’s because every dollar borrowed by the federal government must be paid back plus interest. Any party that says it wants to make life more affordable also needs a plan to start paying back the debt.
Taxpayers need a government that will commit to balancing the budget for real and start paying back debt, not one that is continuing to pile on debt and waste billions on interest charges.
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