The free-spending ways of our politicians

SUNDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — What is it with politicians and money? They can’t stop spending it.

It’s bad enough when they spend it on programs we don’t like or need — there’s always going to be disagreement on that. But they have a habit of spending too much on themselves. And when somebody notices they’ve been spending too much, they just pay it back.

Doesn’t seem like a very high standard.

The newest case involving personal expenses involves B.C. New Democrat Jenny Kwan, who agreed this week to reimburse $35,000 for travel to Disneyland and Europe involving her family.

It’s a complicated case, but has to do with trips taken by her former husband on behalf of the government-funded Portland Hotel Society, which runs the Vancouver safe-injection facility. Family members went along and Kwan says she thought the costs for the family were paid by him personally.

“I never would have gone had I known that the family portion of the travel would appear to have been paid for by PHS.”

Kwan has taken a leave of absence from the Legislature and said she’s repaying the money out of her own pocket.

She isn’t the only B.C. MLA whose expenses are being noticed. House speaker Linda Reid tallied $120,000 in expenses and renovations including $48,000 for upgrades to the Speaker’s desk.

The day before it hit the fan for Kwan, Alberta Premier Alison Redford quit in the wake of revelations that she spent $45,000 on first-class air tickets and a government plane to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral, and that government planes had flown her daughter and her daughter’s friends around.

She said she’d pay some of it back but it was too late.

The Senate, of course, tops everybody for free spending, especially for travel. Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau have been most in the spotlight for their spending practices but they are no means the only Senators who have lived well, bought one too many first-class tickets.

And then, of course, there was cabinet minister Bev Oda and her infamous $16 glass of orange juice and expensive stay at a London hotel. She repaid the cost of the juice and hotel upgrade and apologized, but she, too, resigned.

Let’s be fair and give Jenny Kwan the benefit of the doubt. And we can put Reid’s generous spending down to an interest in touch-screen computers and nice furniture.

Redford and Oda paid with their jobs, and Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau are suspended.

So there is a price to pay, if you make a mistake or don’t follow the rules, or follow the rules but should be more thrifty, and if you’re caught. What we worry about is those who aren’t.