Kris Sims is the Alberta Director and Jen Hodgson is the Investigative Journalist for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.It’s time for Albertans to vote to abolish the Senate.The referendum is happening on Monday, October 19, with Albertans voting on ten big questions.The question on potential independence is getting most of the attention, but when question seven comes up on the ballot paper, folks should remember that they’re having their wallets drained by the unelected, wasteful Senate in Ottawa.And they should vote to abolish the unelected Senate.Scrapping the Senate would save taxpayers $140 million a year.How does a parliamentary rubber stamp run up that kind of a bill?Here’s how.Taxpayers have spent nearly $1 million on Senate Speaker Raymonde Gagné and her entourage jet-setting around the world in the last three years.The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) found documents detailing the trips to places such as Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Romania, Spain, New Zealand, and the African country of Benin.Gagné told the online Senate Magazine in 2024 that she and her partner enjoy travelling around the world..It’s easy to enjoy travelling when you’re not the one paying the bills.But wait. There’s more.That news story about taxpayer-funded Senate travel got lots of attention, with interviews on TV, on radio, on podcasts, in print, and elsewhere.That put some heat on the Senate.Then that quote about how much the Senate Speaker enjoyed travelling around the world mysteriously disappeared.It was there, online, for all to see when the CTF first wrote the story.But after all of the media attention, the quote vanished.Where did it go? Was it ever there?Was the CTF’s investigative journalist Jen Hodgson hallucinating when she saw the travel quote from the Senate Speaker in the Senate magazine, SenCA+?The internet is forever, and the online internet archive, the Wayback Machine, is a handy tool..The quote was there in August 2024 and when Hodgson wrote the story in 2026.“You are also an avid traveller! You have been to 30 countries and almost every continent. Do you have any special stories?” the magazine asks in the question-and-answer print-format article.“My current partner also likes to travel, and we have explored India and Japan together. These are countries that are completely different from what we are used to; I cherish those experiences,” Gagné’s answer reads.Now, after the CTF report detailing the costs of the Speaker’s international travel with an entourage, the quote is gone.The article simply skips to the next question.Unelected senators in Canada have no constituency because nobody ever votes for them. Senators represent nobody, and they get paid more than $190,000 per year until the age of 75.It’s bad enough that taxpayers have been stuck with the globetrotting travel bills for dozens of senators.Senators nearly doubled their international travel spending in two years, with costs spiking 88% from $391,095 in 2023 to $736,165 in 2025, according to a CTF analysis of parliamentary financial disclosures.A total of 65 unelected senators spent $1.9 million in taxpayer dollars on international travel between January 16, 2023, and March 17, 2026, the records show.It’s also bad enough that the Senate is costing taxpayers more than $140 million this year and has cost more than $1 billion over the last decade.But seeing an awkward quote about enjoying global travel — while taxpayers pay megabucks for those trips — mysteriously vanish from a Senate of Canada website is a step too far.If these globetrotting trips taken by unelected Canadian senators have resulted in lucrative trade deals, essential peace treaties, and new scientific discoveries, then the senators taking these trips should be able to defend the spending of taxpayers’ money.Instead, we see the lack of elections, the big spending, the exotic locations, and now the deleted quotes after they get called out.Canadians deserve better than this.It’s time to abolish the unelected, unaccountable, wasteful, expensive, and sneaky Senate.Albertans should vote on Monday to abolish the Senate.Kris Sims is the Alberta Director and Jen Hodgson is the Investigative Journalist for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
