'Legitimately flabbergasting': MP raises concerns over government's quarantine hotel spending
CTV
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner is raising concerns over the federal government's spending on so-called COVID-19 quarantine hotels, calling the total spent on a Calgary-area hotel in 2022 'legitimately flabbergasting.'
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner is raising concerns over the federal government’s spending on so-called COVID-19 quarantine hotels, calling the total spent on a Calgary-area hotel in 2022 “legitimately flabbergasting.”
According to the response of an order paper question put forth by Rempel Garner in November, in the fiscal year 2022, the federal government spent $6,790,717.46 to use the Westin Calgary Airport hotel as a quarantine facility. In the 2022 calendar year, the hotel housed 15 people for the duration of their quarantines, coming out to about $452,714.50 per person.
“Government waste is always a problem,” Rempel Garner wrote in a post on Substack. “But waste of this magnitude when deficit spending needs to be reined in due to inflationary pressures shows that Trudeau doesn't have the capacity or willingness to get things under control.”
The Westin Calgary Airport hotel was designated a quarantine facility from June 22, 2020, to Oct. 30, 2022, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
Over the course of the two and a half years, the hotel housed 1,490 people to the tune of nearly $27 million, about $18,000 per person.
In its response to Rempel Garner, PHAC writes that “given this response required a manual collection of information, it is possible there is a small degree of human error when determining the amount the federal government paid to the Westin Calgary Airport hotel.”
The federal government’s hotel quarantine requirements largely ended in August 2021.
