Almost half a million dollars in credit card bills were wracked up by the Premiers Office from April of 2011 to March of this year.
Former Premier Gordon Campbell’s office spent just 202-thousand the year previous.
Among the costs going to taxpayers, 20-thousand at various electronics shops, and six-thousand to buy coffee. Cellphone bills ran up more than 120-thousand dollars, and dining at some of Vancouver’s most high-priced restaurants cost almost 18-thousand. Airfare accounts for another 138-thousand dollars.
The Premier’s office says costs of a trade junket to Asia and hosting the Council of Federation is to blame. They say it is the price of wining and dining dignitaries pointing to the half a million spent by the Premier’s office when it welcomed the world during the 2010 Olympics.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federations says its time for more accountability.
Jordan Bateman with the CTF says you just never know if things are above board, “It is always impossible to know 100-percent and that is why we trust people like the Auditor-General to do their work investigating these expense claims. That is one of the reasons we are pushing so hard for full disclosure, receipt-by-receipt on expenditures, because it becomes a whole bunch more difficult to sneak that by. I mean, even within the Premier’s Office probably not everyone sees every receipt.”
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