A longtime rural resident, I use my 60 plus years of life learning to opinionate here and elsewhere on the “interweb” on everything from politics to environmental issues. A believer in reasonable discourse rather than unhelpful attacks I try to give positive input to the blogesphere, so feel free to comment upon rural issues or anything else posted here. But don’t be surprised if you comments get zapped if you are not polite in your replys.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

MPs expenses

At least one observer has pointed out the large increase in printing costs over the preceding fiscal period and wondered if that was due to all those 10%ers. It would appear that this is not the case as the glut of mailouts came AFTER this fiscal period ended. We will have to wait until next after the 08 – 09 expense is tabled to see the cost of that! Meanwhile unless there has been some creative accounting going on it would seem that apart from the printing and advertising budgets the members have been holding the line or even reducing expense spending. Could it be they are starting to see the light.
Here is a breakdown of the numbers, I would like to provide more detail by party but the report does not do so and restricts copying so that we cannot easily cut and paste to a spreadsheet to produce such detail, seems strange to restrict copying of a public document???

Here are the details…

MPs expenses April 1st to March 31st

………………… "06-07……….."07-08……%increase
Directexpenses
Staff…………..$69,020,001…..$71,338,025…3.36%
Localtravel…...$3,512,341……$3,458,350….-1.54%
Advertising…..$3,743,526……$4,373,154…16.82%
Office lease…..$6,996,072……$7,256,155…..3.72%
Provided by parliamentary services
travel&meals…$26,282,267…..$25,732,399…-2.09%
telephone……..$3,386,763……$3,421,654…...1.03%
printing……….$7,852,378……$9,408,5311….9.82%
supplies………$1,453,530……$1,321,753…..-9.07%
equipment……$906,036……...$833,062…….-8.05%
other………….$928,324……...$707,135...-23.83%

totals…………$124,081,238….$127,850,218…3.04%

MPs expenses for 2007 – 2008 are available at

http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/house/GeneraLInformation/MembersExpenses-2007-2008-e.pdf

PS If someone can tell me how to copy and paste a list such as this to blogger without loosing the formating I sure would like to know!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rural,

Nice breakdown of the numbers, though I somewhat disagree about the delivery of the tenpercenters. While it's true there was a glut in the months leading up to the election, there was also quite the flurry of them in December and January - at least here in Simcoe-Grey.

As to the copy and pasting, the .pdf document is protected (I have Acrobat, so I was able to look at the protection level), and unless you know the password, you can't copy and paste. Which I find odd, considering it's a public document.