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, Conference and Event Expenditures, this report provides information on the total annual expenditures for travel, hospitality and conference fees of the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat (CICS) for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017. It also provides explanations of significant variances in each of these areas compared to those of the previous fiscal year.

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

Expenditures for travel, hospitality and conferences 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 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.ca/en/

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

The Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat’s total annual expenditures for travel, hospitality and conferences are summarized below:

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 who are part of a provincial interchange program, working in the Conference Services Division. Total travel costs were some $57 thousand greater than in 2015-16:

Primarily because CICS managed 141 conferences in 2016-17, up from 114 in 2015-16, including 5 First Ministers Meetings. These costs were somewhat offset by a growth in teleconferences (where there are no travel costs) to 47 in 2016-17 up from 42 in 2015-16.