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Thursday, April 23, 2009

CBC managers get royal treatment, taxpayers foot bill

All I can say about this article in the Ottawa Sun is, must be nice.

CBC's top executives spent more than $60,000 over six months holding meetings in luxury hotels and resorts and expensing such items as sparkling wine and limousine rides. ...

More than $21,600 was spent sending 21 CBC and Radio-Canada human resources managers and senior executives to the ritzy Chateau Beauvallon in Mont-Tremblant, Que., for two days. The limo costs alone for one vice-president amounted to $1,009.94.

[At] Auberge Sauvignon ... they dropped $1,612.93 on supper. ...

A day-long meeting at the Renaissance Hotel, a few blocks from the CBC's Toronto headquarters, cost $3,481.65 for 28 senior television managers. ...

Tacked on the bill was an order for six bottles of Hillebrand Trius Brut sparkling wine. ...


Documents also show a penchant for posh surroundings: ... dinner for 28 at the private members-only The Spoke Club in Toronto came to $2,002; and a meeting for six Radio-Canada employees at Montreal's swanky boutique hotel Place D'Armes, a four-minute drive from Radio-Canada's headquarters, cost $950.22. ...

So presumably the moral of this story is that producers of programs like mine can just go eat cake ...

UPDATE: The Ottawa Sun has taken the article cited above off its site, but you can still access it here and here.

2 comments:

Ukemonde said...

Thanks Paulette for publishing this article which shows the extravagent spending by CBC/RCI management has been known for. How little concern they have for taxpayers money, while it comes to tightening their belts, they lash out closing Ukrainian section to save some money for desert.

Pawlina said...

Well I can't take credit for publishing anything, really. This post is just excerpts of an article published in the Ottawa Sun and my observations on the feeding frenzy at the public trough ... which is off-limits to producers of Ukrainian programs in Canada, obviously. The message to our listeners seems to be: just pay your taxes and shut up, Canada's public broadcaster has more important things to do than help struggling democracies, much less bohunks trying to retain their cultural identity.

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