Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon made regular use of a government executive jet last year while keeping the trips off his travel expenses, documents show.
He's the second minister this week to have his travel habits exposed using government documents obtained by the NDP through an Access to Information Act request.
It's an embarrassing lapse of transparency for a government in the midst of trumpeting new accountability legislation in the House of Commons.
Transport Canada's aircraft flight log shows at least six trips taken by Cannon in 2006 aboard a sleek Citation C-550 executive jet that do not appear in his ministerial expenses posted on the department's website, as mandated by the federal Treasury Board.
Again, it's not necessarily the amount of money that we need to take issue with.
It is the sheer, and blatant, hypocrisy of the Conservatives that keeps coming up time and again. They ran a campaign last election based on being "more open and accountable". Hiding expenses incurred by burying them in "other budgets" or in other places that require a "Access to Information" request is plain dishonesty of a magnitude that the Cons would have screamed blue murder about prior to last election.
That's two in one week - from a party that complained bitterly about the Liberals' sense of "entitlement"...
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