Parliament spent nearly $600,000 on luxury hotel rooms it never used

Parliament spent nearly $600,000 on luxury hotel rooms it didn't use when nearly half of the listed delegates for a conference of European parliamentarians it hosted either didn't show up or chose less expensive hotels.

Parliament expected 700 delegates to attend the annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly, which took place in Vancouver from June 30 to July 4. The conference is usually held in Europe, where most of its members are based.

Only 365 delegates ended up attending, and not all of them stayed at the hotels the government selected. That left taxpayers on the hook for 1,400 overnight stays worth $596,000 in total — an average of $425 a night.

Audio-visual costs for the conference were also higher than expected, contributing to the event going $649,000 over the original budget of $1.8 million.

Sen. Elizabeth Marshall, former auditor general for Newfoundland and Labrador, questioned why the conference cost so much.

"It is very concerning, especially in the current economic times, when people are lined up at food banks while we're looking at a $1.8 million event that went 35 per cent over budget," Marshall said when parliamentary officials appeared before the Senate's internal economy, budgets and administration committee. "That does not look good on either the Senate or the House of Commons."

Conservative Sen. Don Plett said he was disturbed by the deficit.

"I'm not sure how we can just ... sugarcoat this and pass this off," he told the committee. "A deficit of over a half a million dollars."

Members of Parliament were also taken aback by the amount of money spent on rooms that weren't used.

"I think this is a disastrous waste of money, quite frankly," Conservative whip Kerry-Lynne Findlay told members of the House of Commons Board of Internal Economy.

"I'm really disturbed by this," said NDP House leader Peter Julian. "This is a massive deficit. I just think, at a time when Canadians are really struggling, I can't see it being justified."

Liberal MP Hedy Fry, who headed the Canadian delegation in her riding and pitched for Canada to welcome the conference, defended the decision to host. She said organizers were only told in May that attendance would be much lower than expected and while they released as many rooms as they could, they were bound by the contracts signed with the hotels.

"We had a pretty normal delegate showing, and then, for whatever reason, people just didn't turn up," Fry told CBC News. "I think one of the reasons, we found out later on, was that also our hotel rooms had increased since pre-pandemic. The cost of hotels in Vancouver just shot up post-pandemic."

Russian and Belarusian delegations didn't attend because of sanctions Canada imposed on their countries following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. During the last in-person pre-pandemic conference in Luxembourg in 2019, there were 34 people in the Russian delegation and five Belarusians, said Nat Parry, head of communications for the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly.