[Dion]

Redford and her MLAs accused of further abuse of government planes

EDMONTON — It was wheels up at 3:11 p.m. last Nov. 26 for Premier Alison Redford, a few aides and a fellow Calgary MLA, as the government’s Beechcraft King Air took off from the capital for Calgary.

Thirty-one minutes earlier, two other Calgary MLAs made the same trip on another taxpayer-funded plane.

Had the politicians co-ordinated their travel, they and all the aides they flew with could have fit on the nine-seater that ferried the premier to her hometown.

Since 2012, Redford has flown a government plane within Alberta at least seven occasions when another taxpayer-funded aircraft had made the same trip within an hour of the premier’s takeoff. On another three occasions, the one plane was headed to Calgary International and another flew shortly after to Calgary-Springbank airport. The two Calgary airports are 42 kilometres apart.

In all of those cases, there were enough seats for all passengers to share a plane, according to publicly available flight manifests.

The Herald found two duplicate flights on the same day in flight logs posted on the finance minister’s website.

On the morning of Jan. 20, 2012, eight of Redford’s caucus mates and one aide took the province’s 36-seat propeller plane from Calgary to Edmonton, while Redford flew home with a pair of assistants a half-hour later. The same trio returned north in that smaller plane, instead of waiting 54 more minutes and joining 14 MLAs on the bigger Dash-8.

A month later, Redford and her executive assistant flew to the Springbank airport late on a Thursday afternoon. There was room on their plane for the six southern Alberta MLAs who took the same route on a seven-seat craft 56 minutes later.

Last June, the premier took a plane from Edmonton to Calgary with Brad Stables — her travel companion on the controversial trip to South Africa in December. A half-hour later, Lt.-Gov. Don Ethell and his wife were the lone passengers on a second government plane.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/po...119/story.html