Proactive Disclosure

Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat

Report on Annual Expenditures for Travel, Hospitality and Conferences

As required by the Treasury Board Directive on Travel, Hospitality, Conferences and Event Expenditures, this report provides information on the total annual expenditures for each of travel, hospitality and conferences fees of the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat (CICS) for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015. It also provides the variance explanations from the previous fiscal year in each of these areas.

This information is updated annually and does not contain information withheld under the Access to Information Act or the Privacy Act.

Expenditures on travel, hospitality and conferences fees incurred by federal departments and agencies are related to activities supporting a departmental or agency mandate(s) and the government’s priorities.

In particular, for CICS, this includes the delivery of the following core program:

• The mandate of the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat (CICS) is to support federal, provincial and territorial governments by providing conference support services for the planning and conduct of senior level intergovernmental conferences held across Canada. The primary objective of CICS is to relieve client departments in virtually every major sector of intergovernmental activity of the numerous technical and administrative tasks associated with multilateral conferences, thereby enabling conference participants to concentrate on the substantive policy issues. CICS provides continuous, effective, impartial administrative services to these meetings.

• For additional information on CICS services please refer to the various CICS reports and publications on the following web link : http://www.scics.gc.ca/english/view.asp?x=198

Annual Expenditures for Travel, Hospitality and Conferences of the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat

Significant variances compared to the previous fiscal year.

This section is used to provide a brief explanation of significant variances from the previous year’s annual expenditures for each category.

TRAVEL:

The nature of the travel costs are the same for both Public and Non-Public servants. Non-public servants are made up of provincial employees, working in the Conference Services Division, who are part of a provincial interchange program. Travel costs were some $14 thousand lower than in the previous year:

Primarily because the number of teleconferences jumped to 19 during 2014-15, up from 3 in the previous year. There are no travel costs associated with these teleconferences.

In addition, the Secretariat was in a transition phase of hiring new provincial employees to replace those whose term had come to an end thus helping to reduce the overall travel costs during 2014-15.