Royal Family News: King Charles’ Trip to Canada Leaves Taxpayers with $1.4 Million Bill
Royal Family news reveals that King Charles’s 2022 Royal Tour of Canada will end up costing Canadian taxpayers $1.4 million or more. Read on and we’ll give you the low down.
Royal Family News: An Expensive Trip
Royal Family news reveals that, according to CTV News, then-Prince of Wales’s three-day trip from May 17 – 19 saw Charles and his wife then-Duchess of Cornwall visit Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Northwest Territories over a span of roughly 57 hours or about two and a half days. The meter ticked off at about $25,000 an hour.
The $1.4 million (or so) bill doesn’t even include government, military, or law enforcement salaries, it also doesn’t cover the normal operational costs so, the true bill will likely be much higher.
Bill to be Much Larger
The King’s plans to visit Canada first came to light in a Times report last month with Canada making the top of the monarch’s list of destinations. Tatler reported that it made the list because the King had already indicated a desire to visit a Commonwealth country first.
This hefty bill doesn’t even include overtime pay, fleets of vehicles, VIP flights, and armed security paid for by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Department of National Defence and Canadian Heritage who ultimately oversaw the trip and its planning.
Canada Was Ready
A high-ranking government official said ahead of the visit, “You only get the first overseas trip by a new monarch once and we need to make it count. We are going to be carefully looking at the options in close consultation with Buckingham Palace.”
Last month a Foreign Office source for Tatler said that “a trip to Canada could form part of a wider royal tour that could take in Washington as well as parts of the Caribbean.” They added that no decision had been made and “other key UK allies were also under consideration.”
Of course, we now know that the trip was a go. It remains to be seen what other countries the monarch will visit or what that bill will look like for whoever must pay it.
King Charles Bails on COP27
The Canadian trip was proposed as ministers attempted to divert attention away from the King’s cancelation at the climate summit, COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh from the `sixth to the 18th of this month.
A royal source reportedly told The Times, “It is no mystery that the King was invited to go [to Cop27]. He had to think very carefully about what steps to take for his first overseas tour, and he is not going to be attending Cop.’ They said the decision was ‘entirely in the spirit of being ever-mindful as King that he acts on government advice”.