ST. JOHN’S, NL: The Canadian Taxpayers Federation nominated Newfoundland and Labrador Immigration Minister Gerry Byrne for a 2025 Teddy Waste Award, Canada’s annual prize for the most outrageous examples of government waste.

Byrne earned the nod for spending $171,000 to sponsor Barrow AFC, a fourth-tier British soccer team, in a bizarre bid to promote immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador.

“You don’t grow the population by slapping a provincial logo on the jersey of some random team in England’s minor leagues,” said Devin Drover, CTF Atlantic Director. “If people like Byrne stopped wasting so much money, we would have lower taxes and more jobs and that’s how you get people to move to Newfoundland and Labrador.”

Despite the expensive sponsorship, access-to-information requests revealed no evidence that a single person moved from the United Kingdom to Newfoundland and Labrador as a result.

The Teddy Waste Award, the golden pig-shaped trophy the CTF annually awards to governments’ worst waste offenders, is named after Ted Weatherill, a former federal appointee who was fired in 1999 for submitting a raft of dubious expense claims, including a $700 lunch for two in France.

This year’s winners include:

• Municipal Teddy Winner: The city of Calgary – In most cities, you can only send a message in a bottle down a river. But not in Calgary, where the city spent $65,000 so people can phone the Bow River.
• Provincial Teddy Winner: New Brunswick – New Brunswick spent $77,000 on an eight-day trip to Europe to get Europeans to visit the province. The ads created to promote New Brunswick to Europeans were full of gaffs and incorrect information about the province.
• Federal Teddy Winner: Global Affairs Canada – The federal department of Global Affairs Canada spends an average of $51,000 per month on booze, according to records obtained by the CTF. Perhaps all that alcohol explains the department’s crazy spending, like an $8,800 sex toy show in Germany and a $1,700 musical featuring lesbian pirates?
• Lifetime Achievement Teddy Waste Award Winner: Former prime minister Justin Trudeau – On his way to doubling the federal debt in less than a decade, Trudeau added 99,000 federal bureaucrats and wasted taxpayers’ money all over the world on fancy feasts and hotel suites.

You can find the backgrounder on this year’s Teddy Waste Award nominees and winners HERE.