Pallister has trouble telling the truth By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/01/2021 (1382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister will not tell anyone how he spent $2,075 of taxpayer money on two recent trips last year to Ottawa. Given the modest sum of money involved, the obvious question is, why?

As an elected official, and as the first minister who leads the provincial government, Pallister has a legal and moral obligation to provide specifics about how he spends public money, whether it’s in Manitoba or another province.

Or, put another way, the premier has no legal, moral or administrative authority to withhold the details of how he spends public money. And yet, that’s exactly what he’s doing.

The two trips in question from last year — one in July and the second in September — had been documented by the Free Press, given that Pallister had provided no compelling reason for travelling east to Ottawa during the pandemic.

From the first moment the purpose of his trips was questioned, the premier has maintained that he was on important government business.

His agenda from those trips tells a different story.

Most of the meetings he attended could have been done remotely, and given the pandemic, should have been done remotely. At least one scheduled meeting with the prime minister was done via video conference with Pallister in his hotel room. And eventually, the premier admitted he only worked about half the time he was out of the province.

It was patently clear there was nothing of a pressing nature that would have justified the time, expense and risk of travelling to Ottawa in the teeth of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The story would have ended there if it had not been for one last development.

This week, the Free Press obtained details from his expense account for the two trips last year. At first blush, little about Pallister’s expenses would raise eyebrows, although the modest amounts he claimed for accommodation and meals certainly suggest he spent as much or more time on vacation than he did on official meetings.

But then there was another category — “other transportation” — in which the premier claimed $2,075 over the two trips.

What was covered by that expense category? Pallister has refused to say. A spokeswoman could only say that it covered transportation to and from the airport and meetings away from his hotel. For anyone who has visited Ottawa, the suggestion that Pallister needed more than $2,000 to pay for transportation in and around the city for official meetings and airport transit is, in a word, laughable.

It also prompts intrigue that is, in some ways, inappropriate for the size of the expenses.

This should have been a one-off story. Simple question is met with a simple explanation. Asked and answered. Time to move on.

Instead, Pallister’s inability to tell simple truths is coming back to haunt him, once again.

Pallister’s preposterously vague explanation suggests that he either charged something to his expense account that was improper, or that the expenses themselves reveal the nature of his activities on the days he wasn’t working.

This should have been a one-off story. Simple question is met with a simple explanation. Asked and answered. Time to move on.

Instead, Pallister’s inability to tell simple truths is coming back to haunt him, once again.

Rarely in the annals of Manitoba political history, and perhaps Canadian political history, have we seen a political leader with such an appetite for self-harm.

Pallister has continually generated headlines for his refusal to tell the truth.

Like the time in 2014, when he claimed he was unable to visit flood-ravaged western Manitoba because he was at a family wedding in Alberta. (Turned out he was in Costa Rica the entire time.) Or, the time he threatened to sue the Free Press for a story we wrote on how he was in arrears on his property taxes. (He was, and even after he was forced to admit he owed taxes, he refused to apologize or withdraw the legal action.)

Pallister’s travails have also included an alarming number of stories that involve liberties he has taken on so-called official trips. Pallister found himself in a firestorm in 2019 for using taxpayer money to visit France for the 75th anniversary of D-Day only to blow off one of the most important ceremonies to visit the owners of a French company that built a pea processing plant and, quite obviously, get a start on a personal vacation with his wife, Esther.

In the face of all these stories, Pallister has been nothing short of incorrigible, often to his own detriment.

The fact that Pallister was successful enough in the private sector to afford a lovely home in Costa Rica is not much of a story. Even the inordinate amount of time he spent in Costa Rica in the years after he returned to politics is, in essence, a pretty small story.

It is also rather innocuous that Pallister tacks on a personal vacation to many of his “official” trips. Hey, who among us hasn’t done that?

However, what elevates these mostly innocuous stories to screaming headline status is Pallister’s propensity to mislead, obscure and — yes — lie to cover up some of the more questionable aspects of his travel and vacation decisions.

This is not a story about a questionable travel expense. It’s a story about a politician with a questionable grasp of the truth.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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