Feds Spent More Than $1.5M on Montreal Hotels for Biodiversity Conference: Document

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers remarks during the opening ceremony of the COP15 UN conference on biodiversity in Montreal on December 6, 2022. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press)

The federal government spent more than $1.5 million to lodge public servants attending a UN conference on biodiversity in Montreal last year.

The information was tabled by the government in an Inquiry of Ministry released on Sept. 18, the first day of the current parliamentary session.

Conservative MP Eric Melillo submitted an order paper asking the government to provide details on lodging expenditures for participation in the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal in December 2022.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault released the information, indicating a partial figure for hotel costs amounted to $1,539,052.

His department said there were other costs incurred by travellers who booked their accommodations directly and were reimbursed by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).

“It would require a significant amount of time and effort to locate and analyze the supporting documentation of each travel request to manually extract the requested information for those other costs,” says the official document.

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Rooms were booked at the Intercontinental Montreal and the Westin Montreal, at a rate between $249 and $289 a night. Overall the government paid the Intercontinental $286,060 and the Westin $1,252,991.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) highlighted the Inquiry of Ministry in a Nov. 14 statement questioning the cost of the trip.

“Did the feds really need to send 400 people to Montreal for a conference?” said Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the CTF, in the release.

“Canadians pay an obscene amount of money when our politicians and bureaucrats travel abroad, and now we learn we also pay an arm and a leg when we host a conference at home.”

The COP15 conference resulted in a deal to strengthen the protection of the world’s biodiversity, aiming to protect at least 30 percent of land and sea. It includes developed countries providing at least US$20 billion a year to less developed countries by 2025 to increase biodiversity protection.

The CTF also noted the tab for public servants attending the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

In an Inquiry of Ministry at the time, the government said it costs over $1 million to send a delegation of over 200 individuals.

A little over half of the amount had been spent on accommodations, while $171,722 was spent on flights.

“It’s clear politicians and bureaucrats love spending other people’s money going to conferences in fun cities, but what value are taxpayers getting from all this spending?” Mr. Terrazzano said.

The cost to send a delegation to the COP27 conference in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm-El-Sheikh in 2022 ran higher, reaching at least $1.77 million.

Chris Forbes, then-deputy minister of Environment, told a House of Commons committee in March the department would try to reduce the costs of attending such conferences.

“Our goal is always to keep the costs at a minimum if possible for such an event,” he said. “So we’ll look at the options with regards to hotels, costs … the delegation size.”