Montreal spent $120K on employees' travel expenses in 2 years

Over a two-year period, the City of Montreal spent nearly $120,000 on travel for support staff, on top of the $200,000 spent on trips by the mayor and elected councillors.

Employees such as the mayor's chief-of-staff, press attachés and advisors accompanied either the mayor or other city councillors on 64 separate trips in 2014 and 2015.

These numbers were disclosed by the Official Opposition, Projet Montréal, which has recently criticized the Coderre administration for a lack of transparency.

Although the travel costs of elected officials were published by the city, those of support staff were obtained through an Access to Information request.

Earlier this month, CBC reported the city's elected officials spent $200,000 on 86 trips over two years.

This comes to a total of $320,000 for travel since November 2013. Staffers went as far as Argentina, Italy, South Korea, Japan, China, Haiti, Tunisia, and India.

Most of the trips (41 of them) took place inside Quebec, and most of the expenses were for drivers who transported officials to meetings in the province.

The main destinations were:

• Quebec City: 21 trips

• Toronto:  4 trips

• Paris: 4 trips

• Gatineau: 3 trips

Denis Coderre's chief-of-staff, Denis Dolbec, was the staffer who traveled the most, 16 times in the two years.

The mayor's communications director, Louis-Pascal Cyr, came in second with 15 trips.

How other cities compare

Other major Canadian cities report officials' expenses in very different ways, which makes direct comparisons difficult. But in a similar time span of two years (2013 and 2014), Toronto reported $176,000 in travel costs by the mayor, councillors and support staff.

However, Toronto mayor Rob Ford only travelled once in those two years, and he paid for the trip himself. Montreal mayor Denis Coderre travelled no fewer than 40 times since he was elected in late 2013.

Toronto also has 44 city councillors, while Montreal has 65.

Vancouver, by comparison, reported $120,000 in travel expenses for its mayor and 10 councillors over two years (2013 and 2014), staff expenses not included.

Lack of transparency cited

The Coderre administration has been under fire recently for what critics say is a lack of transparency.

In a press conference last week, Projet Montréal accused the mayor of limiting media access to city employees and keeping his agenda secret.

"This is an administration that wants to be an administration of good news and it has trouble handling criticism and difficult questions. But in politics, running a city is a job that requires that we accept confrontation with facts," François Limoges, city councillor with the opposition, said last week.

The party will table a motion on Jan. 25 demanding more transparency and swifter responses to Access to Information requests.

More open data coming, city says

A city spokesman responded that it's the only one in Quebec to publish politicians' expenses on a website, and that last December, it revamped its transparency policy to make more city data "open by default".

"All data, under certain criteria, will be open to the public," Jacques-Alain Lavallée said.

"Under this new policy, an inventory will be made by spring to determine the volume and priority of data to be liberated."

Projet Montréal wasn't the only ones to criticize the Coderre administration's lack of transparency. Quebec's federation of professional journalists said it has received several complaints from its members about hurdles in accessing to information.

The FPJQ will meet with Coderre at the end of the month.