Olivia Chow and her crew from City Hall racked up thousands of dollars in travel expenses on their film industry trip to London and Dublin, including more than $11,000 for a boozy reception and $720 for a limo ride, the Toronto Sun has learned.
City Hall’s economic and community development committee will receive a final report on Chow’s film mission on Tuesday. However, there are glaring inconsistencies between the details in that report and documents the Sun has seen, such as the money spent and even the number of City of Toronto employees on the July trip.
The Sun filed a freedom-of-information request, asking City Hall for expense records, itineraries and briefing notes related to Chow’s week-long trip, which was advertised as a response to the more protectionist stance recently taken by the U.S. film industry. City bureaucrats told the Sun they’d need two months more than usual to provide those documents – and even after that wait, expenses were missing for three of the seven people on the trip, including Chow.
City Hall told the Sun this week that those absent expenses would not be provided in time for publication.
Heading across the pond were Chow, her chief of staff Karla Webber-Gallagher, and Devon Sissons, Chow’s director of tour and scheduling. Also in attendance were city officials Aretha Phillip, head of protocol; Clare Barnett, director of business growth services; Marguerite Pigott, the municipality’s film commissioner; and Jessica Menagh, a program manager for film sector development.
In addition, eight film industry representatives – five of them appearing on behalf of labour unions – were listed as attending meetings, in groups of four led by Pigott or Menagh.
The delegation left Toronto for Dublin on a red-eye flight on July 5, and went on to London on July 8. The highlight appears to have been July 9’s Co-Producing the Future Reception, a soiree Chow’s group put on at the High Commission of Canada in London, which is known popularly as Canada House.
Toronto taxpayers footed at least $11,000 for that party. Booking the reception room cost $1,397. Event photography was just over $1,000, converted from British pounds. The caterer cost roughly $8,850 – including more than $2,500 on alcohol.
Chow’s office declined a request for an interview. The mayor’s deputy chief of staff, Shirven Rezvany, emailed a statement to the Sun that said Toronto’s $2.6-billion film industry and its 40,000 jobs “need to be protected in the current economic climate.”
“A key part of the city’s response to U.S. trade threats, including the threat of film tariffs that threaten Toronto workers, is building trade relationships with other partners … The mayor and the delegation of industry and city representatives had 30 meetings with companies interested in expanding business to Toronto, across the film sector and other industries as well,” Rezvany’s statement said.
“The previous mayor also led a trade mission to the U.K., in addition to trips to China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka and other places.”
It’s unclear how many of those meetings Chow or the city employees attended, but it was clearly fewer than 30. A briefing note, put together in June, emphasized Chow “will not attend all of the meetings the film delegation has booked.”
Comparing the itineraries disclosed to the Sun , it appears Chow had two brief commitments on July 6, then five on July 7, three on July 8, four on July 9, one on July 10 and at least one on July 11. Many of those were receptions or meetings with politicians or envoys.
The first day of the trip, the group visited Dublin’s Famine Memorial and hosted delegates for a “mission kickoff” at their hotel, the Conrad Dublin, but had no other meetings. Four days later, on July 10, a number of meetings were on the itinerary, presumably for Pigott and Menagh’s teams – but a reception with the mayor of London was the only listed commitment for Chow and the rest.
Recommended video
On July 11 – the last day before a morning flight home on July 12 – no meetings were listed for Chow, her staffers, Barnett or Phillip. But the documents suggest Chow joined a morning meeting with Sky Studios officials, and left that meeting in style: An invoice says a limo service shuttled the mayor and five other people from that meeting to Pinewood Studios outside London and then back to the Thistle London Trafalgar Square – at a cost of 375.66 British pounds, or well over $700.
The Thistle Trafalgar Square, where the city representatives stayed, is about a three-minute walk from Canada House. It offers a special High Commission of Canada rate of 230 British pounds per night per room, according to an email disclosed to the Sun .
The hotel is next door to Britain’s National Gallery and sits in the middle of many of London’s touristy landmarks. Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London Eye, the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus can all be reached in 20 minutes or less on foot.
Hours before the reception on the evening of July 9 – which the city’s report said was attended by some 100 people, including High Commissioner Ralph Goodale – an industry luncheon was also hosted at Canada House.
IN FOR A PENNY, IN FOR A POUND
That event was billed as a business roundtable with the Canada-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce featuring a “light lunch.” The cost – 1902.60 pounds, or $3,392.05 – was personally claimed as an expense by Barnett.
Expenses were not provided for a July 7 reception held at a Dublin cocktail bar, which was sponsored by a trade group, the Canadian Media Producers Association. There is an invoice from that group for $5,000 to sponsor the event – money that is apparently not accounted for in the committee report .
In another apparent contradiction, while the report lists the other city representatives, it never mentions Phillip or Barnett. Full expenses for Phillip and Barnett were provided to the Sun , and their names also appear on itineraries, a reception guest list and elsewhere in the documents.
The industry representatives, meanwhile, paid their own way – and then some. Six organizations each contributed $2,500 to sponsor the trip, which bought their people spots at the meetings. The committee report says that $15,000 went toward the mission’s “networking receptions.” (No sponsorship invoice was given to the Sun for a seventh organization on the mission, film company Spin VFX.)
The report cites a $15,849 total spend for business events and receptions, but that would only account for a few thousand dollars more than the July 9 soiree. The total sponsorship revenue, $15,000, appears to not include the $5,000 trade group sponsorship.
Meanwhile, individual expenses for Webber-Gallagher, Chow’s chief of staff, totalled $5,212, covering air travel, ground transportation, accommodation and a daily $100 per diem.
Menagh’s came to $4,966, while Barnett’s total, minus the chamber of commerce event, was $6,222, which included a $645 charge for a London hotel, the Marriott Regents Park, that is not mentioned in any of the other documents provided to the Sun . Expenses for Phillip totalled $4,871.
Expenses for Chow, Sissons and Pigott were absent. The committee’s report listed the “estimated cost” of political and staff travel expenses at $27,905 – just $6,631 higher than the total of the four staffers accounted for in the Sun ’s receipts.
City representatives were asked about these discrepancies, but the Sun was told it would not get a response in time for publication.
The spending started before anyone boarded a plane. Phillip’s personal expenses include $229 spent at Toronto’s Spacing Store and $160 at Indigo, both listed in a spreadsheet for “official gift items” on the mission. Separately, a receipt shows $473 was spent on chocolates at a Broadview Ave. business.
NO BIZ LIKE T.O. BIZ
The people on Chow’s mission met with counterparts from film and TV outfits in the U.K. and Ireland, notably the public broadcasters RTE and BBC. The last stop on the mission’s trip, Pinewood Studios, is famous in England as the place where James Bond and Star Wars movies get made.
While it’s not clear what exactly the city’s representatives discussed, they supplied the Brits and Irish with a 32-page brochure that was provided to the Sun . It opens with a letter from Chow, who bills herself as the “champion-in-chief of Toronto’s screen industry.”
“The Toronto film office has the fastest service standard for permits in North America at 48 hours from letter of notification to permit,” the brochure says.
It also notes Hogtown’s reliable role as an N.Y.C. stand-in. “From New York to Tokyo to the WWII beach landing at Normandy or a South Pacific island, Toronto is a chameleon,” it says.
The document describes tax incentives, lists recent Emmy wins by local productions for editing and visual effects, and a page on nightlife mentions the city’s impending WNBA expansion team.
The document touts the city as a “rich tapestry of diversity” and boasts of homegrown film professionals such as actors Simu Liu and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and directors David Cronenberg and Sarah Polley. A section titled “Toronto’s talent” is led off with a full-page photo from the CBC original series Sort Of , which the broadcaster describes as a sitcom about a “a gender expansive millennial” named Sabi Mehboob.
