Quote:
Originally Posted by GP_Matt
I am not taking sides, or maybe I am, but as far as I can tell the PC's announced a trip and said that the budget was $84000. I think it is safe to assume that that number came from somewhere. The flight and hotels would have been booked in advance and after that there is incidental activities, food and transportation. The events themselves are not part of this budget as far as I have heard.
Absolutely, the final accounting isn't done until after the trip, but the time to save money is before it is spent, not after. A lot of companies make people estimate their costs before they can get approval for a trip. I know that if I am going to go to a conference somewhere I am supposed to write up a quick account of how much it will cost and what I expect to get out of it. It doesn't have to be perfect but it does have to be approved before I leave, not after I get back.
I would hope that something like this is required within the provincial government and based on the fact that they have a ballpark cost already I think it is safe to assume that they did follow this process. So in the end, one party (the PC's) already has this information and have chosen not to release it until later, the other party (the Wildrose) is trying to determine how the number could possibly be so high. They aren't allowed access to the information so they have to try to guess. They put together the cost of fairly expensive flights and hotels, allowed the maximum for food and incidentals and then tried to fill the rest of the budget with transportation costs. The only way to get the transportation costs high enough to hit the $84000 mark was with the Rolls Royces. They aren't saying that they are using those cars, just that that is what a trip would look like in their mind if they were trying to spend the money that is being spent.
I think the bigger issue here is not that the numbers that the Wildrose made up aren't perfect but that the PC's have the real numbers and would prefer to release them later when the media attention has died down.
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Wow you really are trying to justify the WRP fabricating expenditures that aren't being made in a partisan attempt to make Redford look bad.
Just so I' m clear, are you really suggesting that the opposition, or the taxpayers themselves, should pre-approve the budgeted cost of every business trip? Will the WRP provide detailed information of travel expenditures that are funded by the taxpayer PRIOR to incurring them?
That's incredibly dumb. Doesn't the WRP have anything better to do than take ridiculous potshots at the government over an $84,000 expenditure?
There is no way those WRP dummies are fit to govern.