McKenna’s “social media team” robbed in Bonn Germany: Now we know how much her vanity cost taxpayers
September 10 2018
Environment minister’s COP23 delegation victims of $30,000 hotel lobby theft, documents show
By Sheila Gunn Reid.
Re-printed without permission.
By now you may have heard that Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna routinely has anywhere from 24 to 31 government staffers authoring, reviewing, scheduling, tweeting, and sometimes deleting, her social media posts.
But did you hear about how McKenna’s social media team was robbed when they were in Germany at last year's UN climate change conference?
McKenna's abnormally small social media team of two had everything of value stolen from them in a Bonn, Germany hotel lobby in November 2017.
Hill Times had the story when it broke back in September, after an access to information investigation. The whole affair prompted an order paper question to be posed a week later by Conservative MP Dave McKenzie, demanding the government give a cost breakdown of the robbery and the price tag to send the social media team to Germany to take pictures of McKenna riding an electric bike in high heels for what seemed like the twentieth time in her career.
And now, the government is back with the answers and a truer picture of the costs of McKenna’s German vanity project.
The cost to send the two Environment Canada staffers to Bonn was $11,697. The total value of the stolen items amounted to $30,300.95. None of the items were recovered and nothing contained any classified information and all the memory cards were empty so the thieves were spared from having to go through McKenna's outtakes.
The total cost of McKenna’s social media escapades in Germany are nearly $42,000!
It's unbelievable. Remember the hot water McKenna got herself into after spending $6,000 to have a photographer take glamour shots of her at the Paris Climate Change Summit? She was raked over the coals for that incident.
But two years later, in Bonn, she did it again, sparing no cost to try to make herself look good. This time though, McKenna sourced her glamour photography from inside her own ministry instead of outsourcing it to an photographer with a contract the media might be able to find.
To think we might never have known about about the true cost of her social media vanity but for the actions of two thieves in a hotel lobby in Bonn Germany who foiled her scheme.
McKenna's social media in Germany cost exponentially more than it cost for the Rebel to send me and my camera person/producer to Bonn Germany to the very same conference last year.
I guess it's a lot cheaper to bring Canadians the truth from these conferences than it is to give them the polished narrative the government wants them to see.