Defence Minister Peter MacKay has spent hundreds of hours and millions of dollars on Challenger jets since 2009, according to flight logs, with one trip costing more than $200,000.
An analysis of the logs by CBC News shows between January 2009 and June 2011 MacKay used a Challenger for more than 471 hours.
An hour on the Challenger in 2009 cost $10,104, including maintenance and the pilot's salary.
MacKay has spent days defending himself over accusations he's abusing the VIP planes. He says he uses them only for government business, particularly to travel to repatriation ceremonies when Canadian soldiers are killed in Afghanistan.
The logs show the cost of that.
In July 2009, a Challenger flew empty from Ottawa to Tofino, B.C., to pick up MacKay and fly him to Trenton, Ont., for one of the repatriation ceremonies.
It also returned him to Tofino an hour after the ceremony to continue his holiday, and flew back empty to Ottawa from the West Coast.
The Challenger spent more than 20 hours in the air, at a cost of $205,111.20.
Had he flown on a commercial airline, leaving the day before and returning the day after, an executive class ticket would have cost about $5,600.
In November 2009, MacKay was at a Canadian Forces appreciation night at an Ottawa Senators game. He got on a Challenger at 11:02 p.m. ET to fly to Halifax, arriving at 1:34 a.m. ET. The next morning, he announced infrastructure funding, then left on the Challenger again at 9 a.m. to fly to Toronto, landing at 10:47 a.m.
The plane spent 4.9 hours in the air at a cost of $49,509.60.
John Baird, then the public works minister, flew commercial. That cost $1,032.66.
At a forty hour work week, that's close to three months in the air, or one month per year since 2009.
Between that and his little uniform fetish, he's pathologically using the Canadian Forces, and the Canadian taxpayer, as his personal playground and private aircraft provider.
And a quick note on the repatriation. Speaking for myself, I find it insulting that he uses the jet to cross the country at great expense to attend a repatriation ceremony for an hour before flying back...to a holiday TOFINO! If he's really committed to the troops in that way, then he might visibly attempt to make some personal sacrifice in solidarity with military at war. Leaders of soldiers (or those who play at it) tend not to take vacations until the job is done. When emergencies happen, they cut their vacations short.
The sense of fucking entitlement this man and his prime minister harbour is truly without limits. Hold on kids, we've got years more of this shit. Watch them, next these wannabe banana republic despots will be giving themselves 2000% raises as the Canadian economy follows the rest of the world down the drain.