Singh expensed more than $500,000 over nine months to run his constituency office; Poilievre charged $143,201
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NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is currently topping out as the highest-spending individual member of Parliament in the House of Commons, while Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre ranks as the lowest.
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The latest figures on MP expenses were released in late March, and they show that for the first three quarters of the last fiscal year (April 1, 2023 to Dec. 31, 2023), Singh expensed $533,533 in his capacity as the MP for Burnaby South.
In that same time period, Poilievre claimed $143,201 in expenses related to his role as the MP for riding of Carleton, roughly a fourth of Singh’s total.
Poilievre was also one of only a handful of MPs whose constituency expenses didn’t include a single dollar for “travel” or “hospitality.”
To be sure, both Poilievre and Singh rack up far higher expenses each year in their capacity as party leaders. But in terms of expenses incurred as individual members of Parliament, Singh charged the most, while Poilievre charged the least.
It makes sense that the two would have wildly different travel expenses, as Singh’s riding is 4,000 kilometres west of Parliament Hill, while Poilievre represents an Ottawa suburb.
Singh, though he was born in Scarborough, Ont., and having previously represented Toronto-area ridings while a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament, opted to run in Burnaby South in the 2019 election and has represented the city near Vancouver since then.
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In 2023, Singh consistently ranked in the top 10 of MPs for travel expenses.
Between July 1 and Sept. 30, his travel expenses of $65,836.58 almost exactly matched those of Lori Idlout ($66,181.59), a perennial high-spender in parliamentary travel due to the simple fact that she represents Nunavut.
Singh’s costs for paying salaries to staffers working in his offices are nearly double those of Poilievre. In the most recent quarter for which there are numbers, Singh had $63,790.64 in salary costs to the $33,808.68 expensed by Poilievre.
In the second quarter (July 1 to Sept. 30), the spread was nearly triple: $94,051.82 to $33,751.19.
That period would also see Singh triple Poilievre’s constituency budget for “contracts,” a category that includes miscellaneous office expenses like rent, advertising and janitorial services.
Over three month, the NDP leader racked up $45,535.99 to Poilievre’s $15,510.25. Poilievre’s entire budget for that period, in fact, was almost exactly what Singh spent merely on the $4,500/month lease for his Kingsway constituency office.
Of course, it’s an entirely different story when it comes to the expenses that both Poilievre and Singh accrue in their capacity as party leaders. Those expenses are counted separately in their role as “presiding officers” in the House of Commons.
Roughly two-dozen MPs — from the prime minister to the speaker to party whips — are given budgets in addition to what they’re allowed to expense as MPs.
And it’s in these figures that Poilievre pulls way ahead of Singh.
In the last three months of 2023, it cost taxpayers around $1.1 million to pay Poilievre’s expenses as “Leader of the Official Opposition” — and another $35,463 to pay the upkeep of Stornoway, Poilievre’s official residence. The prime minister, official opposition leader and Speaker of the House of Commons all receive official residences.
In that same period, Singh’s expenses as leader of what’s officially tallied as the “Other Opposition Party” came to just $330,994.71.
Although, given that Poilievre represents a caucus of 118 to Singh’s 24, the per-member cost to taxpayers of the Conservative leader is still lower.
As for the expenses of the prime minister, while Justin Trudeau is famed for his sky-high travel expenses, the latest figures do show that his Montreal constituency office also ranks as one of the cheapest in the country to operate. In one quarter, Trudeau’s Papineau riding even stood out as one of the only offices aside from Carleton to rack up zero travel or hospitality expenses.
Meanwhile, in select quarters of 2023 it was Conservative MPs who topped out with the highest overall staffing expenses.
Conservative Garnett Genuis represents a riding in the Edmonton bedroom communities of Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan. At the same time that he was one of the MPs most prominently pushing the issue of ArriveCan misspending, his staffing budget for the last three months of 2023 rose to $65,485.81 — the highest of any other MP.
Dan Muys — a rookie Conservative MP for Flamborough-Glanbrook in Hamilton, Ont. — repeatedly topped quarterly rankings as one of the top spenders on “contract” expenses. In one particularly expensive three-month period, Muys’ contract expenses averaged $727 per day.
But when it came to “hospitality” expenses, the clear champion was the Bloc Québécois.
Despite representing less than 10 per cent of the House of Commons, all three quarters analyzed by the National Post found that a Bloc MP was consistently among the top five spenders on hospitality.
Between April 1 and June 30, Bloc MPs took four of the top five spots for highest hospitality expenses.
In first place was Joliette MP Gabriel Ste-Marie, with $5,621 for the quarter, almost all of which was spent on a series of May 22 events for Journée nationale des Patriotes, the Quebec alternative to Victoria Day.
It’s only been a week since the shock revelation that B.C. nurses were being explicitly told to ignore the increasing phenomenon of armed patients doing hard drugs in hospital rooms. And the interim days have seen a flood of reports that all kinds of facilities operated or funded by the B.C. government are apparently awash in knives and crack smoke. On Wednesday, the B.C. legislature heard that supportive-housing facilities operating in the provincial capital are so routinely filled with toxic smoke that staff are now required to wear industrial respirators.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau testified Wednesday before the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference. This marks the second time that he’s testified at an official inquiry convened to probe the actions of his governments (the other one being the Emergencies Act inquiry). And, as expected, Trudeau’s general take was that foreign interference wasn’t a big deal. The National Post’s Catherine Lévesque has a more comprehensive analysis of his testimony, but here are the main bullet points:
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