Can you guess how much Prime Minister Justin Trudeau bills Canadians every year for groceries at his home at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa? And you don’t have to include what it costs when he’s having an official dinner for the Sultan of Brunei or the Prime Minister of Norway. State dinners are covered by taxpayers by custom.
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I’m talking strictly about breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks the PM and his family, and perhaps the occasional staffer or cabinet minister, consume on a regular day.
If your family is typical, you’ll spend about $300 a week, or just over $15,000 a year, according to Canada’s Food Price Report.
And now, thanks to a freedom of information request by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), we don’t have to guess what Trudeau’s food budget for a year is. The Privy Council Office (PCO) released to CTF totals for 2022 and 2023.
Trudeau billed taxpayers $76,214 for home groceries in 2022 and another $81,428 in 2023. (Figures for 2024 are not yet available.)
That’s more than $1,500 a week, five times what you and your family are spending.
My guess is the PM isn’t buying a lot of no-name mac and cheese, day-old pastries and expired luncheon meat.
I don’t begrudge Trudeau eating well — if he’s buying his groceries on his own dime. But he’s not.
While prime ministers do get some groceries paid for from the public purse, the CTF research has revealed that Trudeau billed ordinary Canadians for 83 per cent of the foodstuffs consumed by his family.
Over two years, Trudeau only paid just over $31,000 for groceries (under $16,000 a year), which is just about the same as the amount spent by an average Canadian home, despite the fact that, as PM, his income was almost five times higher.
For him to know the same pinch at the grocery checkout, he would have to have spend roughly $80,000 of his own money annually.
He did spend around that amount ($80,000), but working Canadians paid for most of it.
The total cost of food consumed at the PM’s home for the two years in which records were released was $188,864, of which taxpayers reimbursed Trudeau $157,642.
According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian family earned $84,000 in 2023. That means the amount Trudeau was reimbursed, just for groceries at his personal home, was equivalent to 96 per cent of the total annual income of a typical family of four.
Again, I don’t blame the PM for his food choices. In fact, I suspect the kitchen staff at his home (who are also paid for by taxpayers) do most of the menu planning, grocery shopping and food prep. Trudeau has very little personal connection to what gets bought and served.
My point is: Why are working Canadians, who are having so much trouble affording food for their own families, made to fork over so much money to pay Trudeau’s grocery bills? Trudeau makes about $406,000 annually.
I bet he’s never had to choose between a lesser cut of beef or another night of grilled cheese sandwiches, versus hockey or soccer registration for the kids, or gas for the family SUV.
Liberal leadership front-runner, Mark Carney, is similarly detached from reality on ordinary Canadians and groceries.
At the French-language leadership debate this past Monday, Carney could not answer a question about what the average Canadian spends per month on groceries.
(The answer is over $1,300 a month, up from just over $1,000 a month in 2022.)
It’s important for political leaders to know such facts. Few will know it from personal experience. (Probably no prime minister from Sir John A on, has paid his own household’s bills directly.)
But for a true leader to understand what ordinary people are being put through as a result of government policy, they should have a clear understanding of the very real pressures on family budgets.