MacKay Took $4,752 Flight to Grey Cup, $3,167 Flight to Seafood Show

In his defence, you can't really put a price on clam chowder.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay is suffering from a serious case of access-to-informationitis, a disease known to afflict cabinet ministers with a predilection toward treating the nation's coffers like a personal piggy bank. His diagnosis appears to be even more severe than originally anticipated, as new access-to-information requests have yielded revelations that MacKay spent $4,752 on a return flight to Edmonton and back to check out the 2010 Grey Cup and another $3,167 to fly to Boston for North America's largest seafood show. Yep. A seafood show. These findings, unearthed by the tireless Canadian Taxpayers Federation, follow previous revelations that MacKay spent almost $3,000 for two nights at a hotel in Munich and, of course, the $16,000 it cost to get MacKay airlifted by a search-and-rescue helicopter from a fishing trip in Newfoundland. The day after he returned from that fishing trip, he took a government jet to attend a lobster-banding competition in Nova Scotia, which he, the man responsible for a G8 military, deemed to be "official government business." Needless to say, there is clearly a pattern emerging of MacKay using government resources to feed his insatiable appetite for seafood