Trudeau’s four-day trip to Europe racks up $71,000 food bill

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

“It would have been cheaper for each member of the prime minister’s delegation to go to the Keg, order a prime rib steak, a Caesar salad, baked garlic shrimp and a bottle of pinot noir for every meal.”

Break out the DVD player and aerate a few bottles of the 2015 Riesling, because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has an important work trip.

The food bill for Trudeau’s four-day trip to Italy and Switzerland this June cost more than $71,000, including at least $43,000 spent on airplane food alone, according to the records.

That works out to an average meal cost of $145. Add it up and the total food bill averaged more than $1,700 per member of the Canadian delegation.

To put that in context: the average Canadian family of four spends about $1,400 on food per month, according to Canada’s Food Price Report.

“The per person food bill for Trudeau and his entourage on this trip was more than the average Canadian family spends on groceries in a month,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “It would have been cheaper for each member of the prime minister’s delegation to go to the Keg, order a prime rib steak, a Caesar salad, baked garlic shrimp and a bottle of pinot noir for every meal.”

The total taxpayer tab for the four-day trip came to nearly $1 million, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation from the Department of National Defence and the Privy Council Office.

The cost of the trip could be even higher, as “some accommodations were covered by Global Affairs Canada,” according to the records.

Trudeau travelled to Apulia, Italy, and Lucerne, Switzerland, between June 13 and 16, 2024, to attend a G7 Summit and a Summit on Peace in Ukraine.

All told, the trip cost Canadian taxpayers at least $918,000, according to the records.

Prior to take-off, government bureaucrats purchased $812 worth of junk food from a grocery store – including Red Bull, pop (Pepsi, Coke, Sprite), chocolate bars (Kit Kats, Twix’s, Reece’s Pieces) and candy (Swedish Berries, Fuzzy Peaches).

Government bureaucrats also swung by a record store and purchased $102 worth of DVDs for the flight, according to the records.

The purchases included the first season of Wednesday, a supernatural coming-of-age TV show based on the Addams Family, Madame Web, a superhero film, the sci-fi thriller Chronicle, and Witness, a 1995 crime movie starring Harrison Ford.

During the flights, the passengers were served meals that would be at home on the menu of a fine dining restaurant, alongside four types of wine – a 2021 Chardonnay, a 2015 Riesling, a 2018 Baco Noir and a 2021 Merlot.

Meals included veal piccata Milanese with potato, buttered green peas and broccoli, and lamb ribs with whole grain mustard sauce, rice pilaf and sauteed spinach.

Other dinner options included cheese ravioli with rose sauce, roasted red peppers and parmesan cheese, grilled chicken with lemon caper sauce, mashed potatoes and glazed carrots, and beef stroganoff with buttered noodles and snow peas.

For dessert, passengers chose between raspberry cheesecake coulis, chocolate and pistachio cake and Swiss chocolate cake.

“I like Sydney Sweeney as much as the next guy, but maybe Trudeau could do some actual work or download a movie on Netflix the next time he flies, instead of billing taxpayers for a DVD copy of Madame Web,” Terrazzano said. “While he’s at it, maybe Trudeau could forgo the Swiss chocolate cake while Canadians back home are lining up at food banks in record numbers.”

Trudeau travelled with an entourage ranging from 36 to 41 people during the four-day trip, including two coordinators of digital and creative content, a videographer, and a photographer, according to the records.

This is far from the first time a short trip for Trudeau meant a big bill for taxpayers.

Trudeau’s six-day trip to the Indo-Pacific region in September 2023 included more than $223,000 spent on airplane food, according to records obtained by the CTF.

That entire trip came with a taxpayer tab of nearly $2 million.

In 2022, Stewart Wheeler, who was Canada’s chief of protocol at the time, told a Parliamentary committee the government would bring down the cost of international travel.

“We recognize that the system that we had in place was not delivering the kind of oversight and control that Canadian taxpayers deserve,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler’s comments came after Governor General Mary Simon spent $100,000 on inflight catering during a nine-day trip to the Middle East in March 2022.

“The government promised to bring the cost of international travel down, but taxpayers are still getting stuck with outrageous bills,” Terrazzano said. “The government needs to figure out how to fly overseas without spending more on food in a few days than four families spend on groceries in an entire year.”

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersFederation #RyanThorpe $145AverageMealCost 000FoodBill Trudeau'sTripToEurope Trudeau$71

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Alberta taxpayers should know how much their municipal governments spend

Published on October 16, 2025

Todayville Content Team

From the Fraser Institute

By Tegan Hill and Austin Thompson

Next week, voters across Alberta will go to the polls to elect their local governments. Of course, while the issues vary depending on the city, town or district, all municipal governments spend taxpayer money.

And according to a recent study, Grande Prairie County and Red Deer County were among Alberta’s highest-spending municipalities (on a per-person basis) in 2023 (the latest year of comparable data). Kara Westerlund, president of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, said that’s no surprise—arguing that it’s expensive to serve a small number of residents spread over large areas.

That challenge is real. In rural areas, fewer people share the cost of roads, parks and emergency services. But high spending isn’t inevitable. Some rural municipalities managed to spend far less, demonstrating that local choices about what services to provide, and how to deliver them, matter.

Consider the contrast in spending levels among rural counties. In 2023, Grande Prairie County and Red Deer County spent $5,413 and $4,619 per person, respectively. Foothills County, by comparison, spent just $2,570 per person. All three counties have relatively low population densities (fewer than seven residents per square kilometre) yet their per-person spending varies widely. (In case you’re wondering, Calgary spent $3,144 and Edmonton spent $3,241.)

Some of that variation reflects differences in the cost of similar services. For example, all three counties provide fire protection but in 2023 this service cost $56.95 per person in Grande Prairie County, $38.51 in Red Deer County and $10.32 in Foothills County. Other spending differences reflect not just how much is spent, but whether a service is offered at all. For instance, in 2023 Grande Prairie County recorded $46,283 in daycare spending, while Red Deer County and Foothills County had none.

Put simply, population density alone simply doesn’t explain why some municipalities spend more than others. Much depends on the choices municipal governments make and how efficiently they deliver services.

Westerlund also dismissed comparisons showing that some counties spend more per person than nearby towns and cities, calling them “apples to oranges.” It’s true that rural municipalities and cities differ—but that doesn’t make comparisons meaningless. After all, whether apples are a good deal depends on the price of other fruit, and a savvy shopper might switch to oranges if they offer better value. In the same way, comparing municipal spending—across all types of communities—helps Albertans judge whether they get good value for their tax dollars.

Every municipality offers a different mix of services and those choices come with different price tags. Consider three nearby municipalities: in 2023, Rockyview County spent $3,419 per person, Calgary spent $3,144 and Airdrie spent $2,187. These differences reflect real trade-offs in the scope, quality and cost of local services. Albertans should decide for themselves which mix of local services best suits their needs—but they can’t do that without clear data on what those services actually cost.

A big municipal tax bill isn’t an inevitable consequence of rural living. How much gets spent in each Alberta municipality depends greatly on the choices made by the mayors, reeves and councillors Albertans will elect next week. And for Albertans to determine whether or not they get good value for their local tax dollars, they must know how much their municipality is spending.

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Major Projects Office Another Case Of Liberal Political Theatre

Published on October 16, 2025

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Lee Harding

Ottawa’s Major Projects Office is a fix for a mess the Liberals created—where approval now hinges on politics, not merit.

They are repeating their same old tricks, dressing up political favouritism as progress instead of cutting barriers for everyone

On Sept. 11, the Prime Minister’s Office announced five projects being examined by its Major Projects Office, all with the potential to be fast-tracked for approval and to get financial help. However, no one should get too excited. This is only a bad effort at fixing what government wrecked.

During the Trudeau years, and since, the Liberals have created a regulatory environment so daunting that companies need a trump card to get anything done. That’s why the Major Projects Office (MPO) exists.

“The MPO will work to fast-track nation-building projects by streamlining regulatory assessment and approvals and helping to structure financing, in close partnership with provinces, territories, Indigenous Peoples and private investors,” explains a government press release.

Canadians must not be fooled. A better solution would be to create a regulatory and tax environment where these projects can meet market demand through private investment. We don’t have that in Canada, which is why money has fled the country and our GDP growth per capita is near zero.

Instead of this less politicized and more even-handed approach, the Liberals have found a way to make their cabinet the only gatekeepers able to usher someone past the impossible process they created. Then, having done so, they can brag about what “they” got done.

The Fraser Institute has called out this system for its potential to incentivize bribes and kickbacks. The Liberals have such a track record of handing out projects and even judicial positions to their friends that such scenarios become easier to believe. Innumerable business groups will be kissing up to the Liberals just to get anything major done.

The government has created the need for more of itself, and it is following up in every way it can. Already, the federal government has set up offices across Canada for people to apply for such projects. Really? Anyone with enough dollars to pursue a major project can fly to Ottawa to make their pitch.

No, this is as much about the show as it is about results—and probably much more. It is all too reminiscent of another big-sounding, mostly ineffective program the Liberal government rolled out in 2017. They announced a $950-million Innovation Superclusters Initiative “designed to help strengthen Canada’s most promising clusters … while positioning Canadian firms for global leadership.”

That program allowed any company in the world to participate, with winners getting matching dollars from taxpayers for their proposals. (But all for the good of Canada, we were told.) More than 50 applications were made for these sweepstakes, which included more than 1,000 businesses and 350 other participants. In Trudeau Liberal fashion, every applicant had to articulate how their proposal would increase female jobs and leadership and encourage diversity in the long term.

The entire process was like one big Dragon’s Den series. The Liberals trotted out a list of contestants full of nice-sounding possibilities, with maximum hype and minimal reality. Late in the process, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains picked the nine finalists himself (all based in cities with a Liberal MP), from which five would be chosen.

The alleged premise was to leverage local and regional commercial clusters, but that soon proved ridiculous. The “Clean, Low-energy, Effective and Remediated Supercluster” purported to power clean growth in mining in Ontario, Quebec and Vancouver. Not to be outdone, the “Mobility Systems and Technologies for the 21st Century Supercluster” included all three of these locations, plus Atlantic Canada. They were only clustered by their tendency to vote Liberal.

Today, the MPO repeats this virtue-signalling, politicking, drawn-out, tax-dollar-spending drama. The Red Chris Mine expansion in northwest British Columbia is one of the proposals under consideration. It would be done in conjunction with the Indigenous Tahltan Nation and is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 per cent. That’s right up the Liberal alley.

Meanwhile, the project is somehow part of a proposed Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor that would cordon off an area the size of Greece from development. Is this economic growth or economic prohibition? This approach is more like the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 than it is nation-building. And it is more like the World Economic Forum’s “stakeholder capitalism” approach than it is free enterprise.

At least there are two gems among the five proposals. One is to expand capacity at the Port of Montreal, and another is to expand the Canada LNG facility in Kitimat, B.C. Both have a market case and clear economic benefits.

Even here, Canadians must ask themselves, why must the government use a bulldozer to get past the red tape it created? Why not cut the tape for everyone? The Liberals deserve little credit for knocking down a door they barred themselves.

Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.