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Roger Redman, chief of the Standing Buffalo First Nation, has been named the “winner” of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s (CTF) annual Teddy award for government waste.
CTF federal director Gregory Thomas named Redman the Federal Teddy Winner for government waste on Parliament Hill Wednesday.
“When band members gathered to impeach him, the Chief padlocked the band office and confiscated the chequebook. For leading the Standing Buffalo reserve, home to 443 people, Chief Redman took home more after-tax income than the Prime Minister, and each of his councillors out-earned Saskatchewan’s premier,” reads a statement from the CTF.
Alberta tourism minister Christine Cusanelli took the provincial award for a trip to the London Olympics with her mother and daughter on the taxpayer’s dime—money she eventually paid back. Alberta cancelled a massive provincial junket to the Olympics, leaving the province with $113,000 worth of empty hotel rooms.
The Toronto Maintenance and Skilled Trades Council won the local Teddy for billing the Toronto Public School District for 293,000 work orders totalling $158 million, including $143 to attach a pencil sharpener to a desk with four screws and $266 for hanging three pictures on a wall.
Former Conservative cabinet minister Bev Oda snared the Lifetime Achievement Award for leaving office with her $52,000 pension after expensing chauffeured limousines in cities from Halifax to London, England, expensing two luxury hotels in London on the same nights, ordering $16 glasses of orange juice, and charging taxpayers for an air purifier so she could smoke in her office.
Each year the CTF hosts the Teddy awards to shine a spotlight on corruption and waste at all levels of government. The awards are named for Ted Weatherill, a former federal appointee sacked in 1999 after submitting a litany of dubious expenses, including a $700 lunch for two.
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