COSTLY QUARANTINE

Government spent $6.8 million on Calgary hotel for just 10 people.

Between April 1st and October 30^th, the Trudeau government spent $6.8 million booking a single Calgary hotel to accommodate just 10 people of COVID-19 quarantine.

It’s a shocking waste of taxpayer money. The Calgary hotel was one of 38 hotels under the “Designated Quarantine Facility” label spread across 14 cities

Paying $6.8 million for just 10 people from April to October, an average of $680,000 per person, is indefensible and makes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s $6,000 per night London England hotel rooms look like a bargain. Still, the hotel remained fully booked by the government rather than reducing the number of rooms to something that matched the needs of the program.

Any time the Trudeau government has been asked to explain outrageous COVID-19 spending, it has deflected by saying it had Canadians backs during the pandemic. This isn’t having anyone’s back: this is picking our pockets for wasteful spending.

The Calgary Airport Westin was named a Designated Quarantine Facility under the Quarantine Act on June 22^nd, 2022.

Between that date and when the contract expired last October, the federal government paid the hotel $26.8 million to be available for passengers who had no other place to quarantine.

This wasn’t one of the facilities the government forced people into in 2021 while waiting for their test results, this was a quarantine facility.

In addition to the amount paid to the hotel, the federal government also paid the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires $1.7 million for security, $41,000 for medical transportation services, another $4,600 for bus services, nearly $1.5 million to the Canadian Red Cross for traveler support services and $1.1 million for cleaning services.

Add on the $35,000 for the government paid for repairs, and we get a grand total of $31.3 million or an average of about $21,000 for each of the 1,490 people who stayed there over the past three years.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was so much we didn’t know about COVID-19, there was plenty of fear and plenty of misinformation. By the time 2022 came around, the vast majority of the population was vaccinated, anyone who wanted a shot received one if not more than one. By the start of the 2022-23 fiscal year, things were getting back to normal, yet the federal government kept paying for these hotels, the full hotels in 14 cities across 38 locations.

Who keeps booking an entire hotel to quarantine air travelers when you’re getting zero passengers in a month , or two at most.

“There’s no justification for this: COVID restrictions were eased long before this time,” Conservative  MP Michelle Rempel Garner said in the Commons last Tuesday.

Rempel Garner, who uncovered this mess, noticed that the cost per person in the last months of this contract could pay for a beautiful home in her city of Calgary.

“So, two questions: How many other hotels did this happen at? And has anybody been fired for this waste?” Rempel Garner asked.

True to form, the government response focused on protecting people and claiming that is what this was about.

“We’re all very mindful of the terrible pain and the large number of deaths and the even large number of hospitalizations that we have seen in Canada over COVID-19,” Health minister Jean-Yves Duclos said. “Because of these measures and vaccinations in addition, we have saved together, Mr. Speaker, tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars in economic cost.” That response would have been an acceptable defiance in 2020 but not for paying for empty hotel rooms in 2022.

Duclos didn’t come close to dealing with the fact that, between April 1 and Oct. 30, the government spent $6.8 million to house just 10 people for quarantine reasons.