Loading...
Canada deserves to know.
Loading...
The figure is from the government's own proactive-disclosure data, released in response to Order Paper Questions tabled by opposition MPs. Across 28 official flights between March 2025 and February 2026, Prime Minister Carney's delegations spent $524,815 of taxpayer money on in-flight catering — equivalent to 32 average Canadian households' entire annual food budget, or 60 family-of-four annual food budgets for a healthy diet. This is the math.
Across Prime Minister Mark Carney's first year in office (March 2025 - February 2026), in-flight catering on the 28 official flights he took as Prime Minister cost approximately $524,815 CAD (£281,773 in the original UK media reporting). The figure was provided in writing by the Government of Canada in response to Order Paper Questions tabled by opposition Members of Parliament — meaning the number is the government's own published answer, drawn from internal expense records. Specific high-cost examples documented in the response: approximately $21,000 in catering for a two-hour flight to Washington DC in May 2025 for the Prime Minister's first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump; approximately $159,000 in catering for a combined visit to the United Arab Emirates and the G20 summit in Johannesburg; and an October 2025 flight where the refreshments cost approximately eleven times the fuel costs for that journey for 55 delegates. For comparison: Statistics Canada's Survey of Household Spending reports the average Canadian household spent $8,659 on food from stores in 2023; Canada's Food Price Report 2024 projected a typical family of four would spend $16,297.20 annually on a healthy diet, or $339 per person per month. The Carney flight-catering total therefore equals roughly 60 family-of-four annual healthy-diet budgets, or 32 average household annual grocery bills. This article documents the proactive-disclosure record, the specific high-cost flights, the family-food comparison, and the honest caveats — including the fact that "refreshments" covers the entire travelling delegation, not just the Prime Minister personally.
Between March 2025 (when Mark Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister) and February 2026, the Government of Canada spent **approximately $524,815 CAD on in-flight refreshments** across the 28 official flights the Prime Minister took during that period.
The provenance of this number is important. It is NOT a partisan estimate, NOT a media calculation, and NOT a leak. It is the government's OWN figure, provided in writing in response to **Order Paper Questions** tabled by opposition Members of Parliament.
Order Paper Questions are a parliamentary accountability tool. Any MP can table a written question to the government on the Order Paper of the House of Commons; the relevant minister is required by parliamentary convention to provide a written answer within 45 days. Those answers become part of the public record.
Opposition MPs tabled questions about the Prime Minister's travel expenses. The government answered. The answer, drawn from internal departmental expense records, was $524,815 across 28 flights for in-flight refreshments alone.
The figure was first reported in the Canadian press by the **Toronto Sun**, with subsequent coverage in Juno News and international press including the UK's GB News. The Canadian-dollar figure ($524,815) is the conversion published in the same reporting from the original £281,773 sterling figure used in some sources.
The Order Paper Question response broke out specific high-cost flights. Three examples that have drawn particular attention:
**The Washington DC trip — May 2025 — approximately $21,000 in catering.** A two-hour flight to Washington for the Prime Minister's first official meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. The catering cost roughly $21,000 (the £11,360 figure in UK reporting). For a two-hour flight, that works out to approximately $10,500 per hour of flight time spent on food and drink.
**The UAE + G20 Johannesburg trip — approximately $159,000 in combined catering.** A single combined diplomatic trip covering the United Arab Emirates and the G20 leaders' summit in Johannesburg. The catering on the combined journey came to approximately $159,000 (the £85,359 figure in UK reporting). This is approximately ten family-of-four annual healthy-diet food budgets.
**The October 2025 flight — refreshments cost approximately 11 times the fuel.** A trip in October 2025 carried a delegation of 55 people. Per the government's own response, in-flight refreshments on that flight cost approximately **eleven times the fuel cost** for the same journey. The fuel figure was approximately $1,500-$1,600 (£800 in the UK reporting), making the catering figure roughly $16,800.
Davos. The Prime Minister's travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2026 is included in the overall 28-flight, $524,815 figure, though specific Davos-only catering numbers were not separately broken out in the public reporting on the Order Paper Question response.
Two reference points for what Canadian families actually spend on food.
**Statistics Canada — Survey of Household Spending, 2023 (most recent year published):** - Average Canadian household spending on food from stores: **$8,659 per year** (up 7.4% from 2021). - Breakdown: meat ($1,544), dairy and eggs ($1,203), fruit ($1,073), vegetables ($1,031), non-alcoholic beverages and other food ($2,153), plus other categories.
**Canada's Food Price Report 2024 — projection for a typical family of four:** - Annual healthy-diet food spending: **$16,297.20**. - Per person, per month: $339. - The Food Price Report is co-published by Dalhousie University, University of Guelph, University of Saskatchewan, and University of British Columbia — non-partisan academic research with established methodology.
**The direct arithmetic:**
| Measure | Annual cost | Ratio to Carney Y1 catering | |---|---|---| | Carney in-flight catering (Y1) | $524,815 | 1.00× | | Family of four — healthy diet (Food Price Report 2024) | $16,297 | 32× lower | | Average household — food from stores (StatCan 2023) | $8,659 | 60× lower |
Carney's first-year in-flight refreshment bill is therefore equivalent to **32 families of four** spending a full year on a healthy diet, or **60 average Canadian households** spending a full year on groceries.
The single Washington-DC two-hour flight ($21,000) is more than a family of four spends on food for **15 months**. The combined UAE-Johannesburg catering ($159,000) is approximately what **10 families of four** would spend on food in a year.
One feature of this story that distinguishes it from a typical political-expense controversy: every figure comes from the government's own published answer to questions tabled in the House of Commons.
The Government of Canada operates under a **Proactive Disclosure** policy that requires senior officials' travel and hospitality expenses to be published publicly within 30 days of the end of the month in which expenses were reimbursed. The proactive-disclosure database is searchable at open.canada.ca.
In addition, Order Paper Questions are the established parliamentary mechanism by which MPs can demand specific aggregated figures that the proactive-disclosure database does not publish in convenient summary form. When opposition MPs asked specifically about the Prime Minister's in-flight catering across 28 flights, the government had to answer in writing.
The accountability architecture is working as designed: opposition MPs identified a category of public spending they wanted explained; they used a parliamentary tool to extract the disclosure; the disclosure produced numbers; those numbers are now on the public record. The story is not "this was hidden and discovered." The story is "this was answered, and the answer is the numbers above."
Several real qualifiers belong in this article in the interest of accuracy.
**"Refreshments" covers the entire travelling party.** The $524,815 is NOT food for one person. International prime-ministerial travel typically involves a delegation that can include: the PM, RCMP protective detail (usually 6-12 officers), senior political advisors, senior public-service advisors (Privy Council Office, Foreign Affairs, the lead department for the trip), an interpreter, a personal aide, sometimes journalists on the press flight, and sometimes diplomatic counterparts on return legs. A 55-delegate plane is not an unusual size. On a per-person basis, the $524,815 across 28 flights is much less shocking than the headline figure suggests. But it is still public money.
**Government aircraft catering pricing differs from a grocery bill.** Federal contract catering includes service-overhead costs, security-screened supply chains, hazmat-handled liquids, and the operational complexity of feeding a delegation on a moving aircraft. None of these costs apply to a household grocery bill. A direct dollar-per-meal comparison overstates the cost per equivalent meal.
**Previous prime ministers also had catering bills.** This is not the first PM whose in-flight catering has been disclosed and not the first to draw criticism. The Harper, Trudeau, and Mulroney governments all had documented PM-travel catering spending in their respective eras. Year-over-year comparisons across PMs are complicated by inflation, currency, frequency of international travel, and the size of the delegation typical for each PM.
**International prime-ministerial travel has policy value.** Diplomatic meetings, trade negotiations, alliance maintenance, and crisis response (e.g., the Trump tariffs the Washington meeting was about) are genuine government functions that require physical travel. The question is the cost level, not whether the travel should exist.
None of these qualifiers makes the $524,815 figure smaller. They explain what it covers. The arithmetic comparison to family food budgets remains valid; readers can weigh the per-person caveat themselves.
On the documented public record — from the government's own written answer to questions tabled in the House of Commons:
- Across 28 official flights in Prime Minister Carney's first year in office, in-flight refreshments for the travelling parties cost approximately **$524,815** of taxpayer money. - That figure is approximately **60 times** the annual food spending of an average Canadian household, or **32 times** the annual healthy-diet food budget of a typical family of four. - A single 2-hour flight to Washington in May 2025 cost approximately **$21,000** in catering — more than a family of four spends on food in 15 months. - A combined UAE-G20 trip cost approximately **$159,000** in catering — approximately 10 family-of-four annual food budgets. - One October 2025 flight saw refreshment costs run approximately **11 times the fuel costs** for the same journey.
The qualifiers in the previous section are real. The arithmetic is also real.
Whether the level of this spending is appropriate for a country with a $66.9 billion federal deficit, two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction, 40 First Nations communities still on long-term boil-water advisories, and a documented $138 million annual operations shortfall on Indigenous water infrastructure, is the question voters and Parliament get to weigh.
Parliament Audit publishes the numbers. The judgment is the public's.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer is an independent officer of Parliament whose only job is to tell the country whether the federal government's own numbers add up. Their analyses regularly contradict government projections — often by tens of billions of dollars. This article explains who the PBO is, what they can and cannot do, and why their published estimates are the closest thing Canada has to an independent fiscal referee.
On April 27, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund — "Canada's first national sovereign wealth fund." Initial federal contribution: $25 billion over three years. The funding mechanism, per Policy Options Canada: government deficit spending. Canada is projected to run a deficit of $66.9 to $78.3 billion this year, with federal debt-service costs ($55.6 billion) already exceeding what Ottawa transfers to the provinces for healthcare. Real sovereign wealth funds — Norway's, Singapore's, the Gulf states' — are built on surplus revenues. Canada is borrowing the seed money. Here is the structural problem with that.
Mark Carney was Vice Chair and then board Chair of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 until January 2025 — the months before he became Liberal leader and Prime Minister. He still held 409,300 Brookfield stock options worth approximately US$6.8 million at the end of 2024. He has placed his assets in a blind trust and operates under a conflict-of-interest screen administered by his own chief of staff and the Clerk of the Privy Council. In April 2026, the House of Commons Ethics Committee said that is not enough — and recommended that prime ministers be required to fully divest. This is the documented financial record.
About this article
Parliament Audit is non-partisan and does not endorse or oppose any legislation. This article is based on publicly available legislative documents and parliamentary records; all sources are linked above.
AI-assisted, human-edited. AI tools help us ingest parliamentary records and draft analysis; an editor reviews every article and verifies key facts against primary sources before publication. Quotation marks are reserved for verbatim text from a primary source. See our methodology and corrections log.
Your MP votes on this. Their constituency inbox is the most-read channel for feedback on bills in committee.
You're welcome to run this article in full on your newsroom, blog, newsletter, or paper. Keep the byline and the link back to parliamentaudit.ca. See the full terms.
<!-- Parliament Audit — republished under CC BY-ND 4.0 -->
<article>
<h1>Mark Carney Spent $524,815 of Public Money on In-Flight Refreshments in His First Year as PM. The Average Canadian Family Spends $16,297 a Year on Food.</h1>
<p><em>By Parliament Audit · June 2, 2026 · 6 min read</em></p>
<p><strong>Across Prime Minister Mark Carney's first year in office (March 2025 - February 2026), in-flight catering on the 28 official flights he took as Prime Minister cost approximately $524,815 CAD (£281,773 in the original UK media reporting). The figure was provided in writing by the Government of Canada in response to Order Paper Questions tabled by opposition Members of Parliament — meaning the number is the government's own published answer, drawn from internal expense records. Specific high-cost examples documented in the response: approximately $21,000 in catering for a two-hour flight to Washington DC in May 2025 for the Prime Minister's first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump; approximately $159,000 in catering for a combined visit to the United Arab Emirates and the G20 summit in Johannesburg; and an October 2025 flight where the refreshments cost approximately eleven times the fuel costs for that journey for 55 delegates. For comparison: Statistics Canada's Survey of Household Spending reports the average Canadian household spent $8,659 on food from stores in 2023; Canada's Food Price Report 2024 projected a typical family of four would spend $16,297.20 annually on a healthy diet, or $339 per person per month. The Carney flight-catering total therefore equals roughly 60 family-of-four annual healthy-diet budgets, or 32 average household annual grocery bills. This article documents the proactive-disclosure record, the specific high-cost flights, the family-food comparison, and the honest caveats — including the fact that "refreshments" covers the entire travelling delegation, not just the Prime Minister personally.</strong></p>
<h2>The headline number — and where it came from</h2>
<p>Between March 2025 (when Mark Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister) and February 2026, the Government of Canada spent **approximately $524,815 CAD on in-flight refreshments** across the 28 official flights the Prime Minister took during that period.</p>
<p>The provenance of this number is important. It is NOT a partisan estimate, NOT a media calculation, and NOT a leak. It is the government's OWN figure, provided in writing in response to **Order Paper Questions** tabled by opposition Members of Parliament.</p>
<p>Order Paper Questions are a parliamentary accountability tool. Any MP can table a written question to the government on the Order Paper of the House of Commons; the relevant minister is required by parliamentary convention to provide a written answer within 45 days. Those answers become part of the public record.</p>
<p>Opposition MPs tabled questions about the Prime Minister's travel expenses. The government answered. The answer, drawn from internal departmental expense records, was $524,815 across 28 flights for in-flight refreshments alone.</p>
<p>The figure was first reported in the Canadian press by the **Toronto Sun**, with subsequent coverage in Juno News and international press including the UK's GB News. The Canadian-dollar figure ($524,815) is the conversion published in the same reporting from the original £281,773 sterling figure used in some sources.</p>
<h2>The specific high-cost flights</h2>
<p>The Order Paper Question response broke out specific high-cost flights. Three examples that have drawn particular attention:</p>
<p>**The Washington DC trip — May 2025 — approximately $21,000 in catering.**
A two-hour flight to Washington for the Prime Minister's first official meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump. The catering cost roughly $21,000 (the £11,360 figure in UK reporting). For a two-hour flight, that works out to approximately $10,500 per hour of flight time spent on food and drink.</p>
<p>**The UAE + G20 Johannesburg trip — approximately $159,000 in combined catering.**
A single combined diplomatic trip covering the United Arab Emirates and the G20 leaders' summit in Johannesburg. The catering on the combined journey came to approximately $159,000 (the £85,359 figure in UK reporting). This is approximately ten family-of-four annual healthy-diet food budgets.</p>
<p>**The October 2025 flight — refreshments cost approximately 11 times the fuel.**
A trip in October 2025 carried a delegation of 55 people. Per the government's own response, in-flight refreshments on that flight cost approximately **eleven times the fuel cost** for the same journey. The fuel figure was approximately $1,500-$1,600 (£800 in the UK reporting), making the catering figure roughly $16,800.</p>
<p>Davos. The Prime Minister's travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2026 is included in the overall 28-flight, $524,815 figure, though specific Davos-only catering numbers were not separately broken out in the public reporting on the Order Paper Question response.</p>
<h2>The family-food-budget comparison</h2>
<p>Two reference points for what Canadian families actually spend on food.</p>
<p>**Statistics Canada — Survey of Household Spending, 2023 (most recent year published):**
- Average Canadian household spending on food from stores: **$8,659 per year** (up 7.4% from 2021).
- Breakdown: meat ($1,544), dairy and eggs ($1,203), fruit ($1,073), vegetables ($1,031), non-alcoholic beverages and other food ($2,153), plus other categories.</p>
<p>**Canada's Food Price Report 2024 — projection for a typical family of four:**
- Annual healthy-diet food spending: **$16,297.20**.
- Per person, per month: $339.
- The Food Price Report is co-published by Dalhousie University, University of Guelph, University of Saskatchewan, and University of British Columbia — non-partisan academic research with established methodology.</p>
<p>**The direct arithmetic:**</p>
<p>| Measure | Annual cost | Ratio to Carney Y1 catering |
|---|---|---|
| Carney in-flight catering (Y1) | $524,815 | 1.00× |
| Family of four — healthy diet (Food Price Report 2024) | $16,297 | 32× lower |
| Average household — food from stores (StatCan 2023) | $8,659 | 60× lower |</p>
<p>Carney's first-year in-flight refreshment bill is therefore equivalent to **32 families of four** spending a full year on a healthy diet, or **60 average Canadian households** spending a full year on groceries.</p>
<p>The single Washington-DC two-hour flight ($21,000) is more than a family of four spends on food for **15 months**. The combined UAE-Johannesburg catering ($159,000) is approximately what **10 families of four** would spend on food in a year.</p>
<h2>Why this is a public-record story, not a leak</h2>
<p>One feature of this story that distinguishes it from a typical political-expense controversy: every figure comes from the government's own published answer to questions tabled in the House of Commons.</p>
<p>The Government of Canada operates under a **Proactive Disclosure** policy that requires senior officials' travel and hospitality expenses to be published publicly within 30 days of the end of the month in which expenses were reimbursed. The proactive-disclosure database is searchable at open.canada.ca.</p>
<p>In addition, Order Paper Questions are the established parliamentary mechanism by which MPs can demand specific aggregated figures that the proactive-disclosure database does not publish in convenient summary form. When opposition MPs asked specifically about the Prime Minister's in-flight catering across 28 flights, the government had to answer in writing.</p>
<p>The accountability architecture is working as designed: opposition MPs identified a category of public spending they wanted explained; they used a parliamentary tool to extract the disclosure; the disclosure produced numbers; those numbers are now on the public record. The story is not "this was hidden and discovered." The story is "this was answered, and the answer is the numbers above."</p>
<h2>The honest "yes but"</h2>
<p>Several real qualifiers belong in this article in the interest of accuracy.</p>
<p>**"Refreshments" covers the entire travelling party.** The $524,815 is NOT food for one person. International prime-ministerial travel typically involves a delegation that can include: the PM, RCMP protective detail (usually 6-12 officers), senior political advisors, senior public-service advisors (Privy Council Office, Foreign Affairs, the lead department for the trip), an interpreter, a personal aide, sometimes journalists on the press flight, and sometimes diplomatic counterparts on return legs. A 55-delegate plane is not an unusual size. On a per-person basis, the $524,815 across 28 flights is much less shocking than the headline figure suggests. But it is still public money.</p>
<p>**Government aircraft catering pricing differs from a grocery bill.** Federal contract catering includes service-overhead costs, security-screened supply chains, hazmat-handled liquids, and the operational complexity of feeding a delegation on a moving aircraft. None of these costs apply to a household grocery bill. A direct dollar-per-meal comparison overstates the cost per equivalent meal.</p>
<p>**Previous prime ministers also had catering bills.** This is not the first PM whose in-flight catering has been disclosed and not the first to draw criticism. The Harper, Trudeau, and Mulroney governments all had documented PM-travel catering spending in their respective eras. Year-over-year comparisons across PMs are complicated by inflation, currency, frequency of international travel, and the size of the delegation typical for each PM.</p>
<p>**International prime-ministerial travel has policy value.** Diplomatic meetings, trade negotiations, alliance maintenance, and crisis response (e.g., the Trump tariffs the Washington meeting was about) are genuine government functions that require physical travel. The question is the cost level, not whether the travel should exist.</p>
<p>None of these qualifiers makes the $524,815 figure smaller. They explain what it covers. The arithmetic comparison to family food budgets remains valid; readers can weigh the per-person caveat themselves.</p>
<h2>The bottom line</h2>
<p>On the documented public record — from the government's own written answer to questions tabled in the House of Commons:</p>
<p>- Across 28 official flights in Prime Minister Carney's first year in office, in-flight refreshments for the travelling parties cost approximately **$524,815** of taxpayer money.
- That figure is approximately **60 times** the annual food spending of an average Canadian household, or **32 times** the annual healthy-diet food budget of a typical family of four.
- A single 2-hour flight to Washington in May 2025 cost approximately **$21,000** in catering — more than a family of four spends on food in 15 months.
- A combined UAE-G20 trip cost approximately **$159,000** in catering — approximately 10 family-of-four annual food budgets.
- One October 2025 flight saw refreshment costs run approximately **11 times the fuel costs** for the same journey.</p>
<p>The qualifiers in the previous section are real. The arithmetic is also real.</p>
<p>Whether the level of this spending is appropriate for a country with a $66.9 billion federal deficit, two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction, 40 First Nations communities still on long-term boil-water advisories, and a documented $138 million annual operations shortfall on Indigenous water infrastructure, is the question voters and Parliament get to weigh.</p>
<p>Parliament Audit publishes the numbers. The judgment is the public's.</p>
<hr />
<p><small>
Originally published by <a href="https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/carney-flight-catering-524000-canadian-family-food-budget">Parliament Audit</a>
under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND 4.0</a> license.
<img src="https://parliamentaudit.ca/api/republish-beacon?slug=carney-flight-catering-524000-canadian-family-food-budget" alt="" width="1" height="1" />
</small></p>
</article>