The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has awarded the New Brunswick government a 2025 Teddy Waste Award, Canada’s top dishonour for wasting taxpayers’ money, for a tourism campaign that sent government officials to Europe only to promote shuttered attractions and peddle incorrect information.

New Brunswick’s Department of Tourism spent $77,000 sending the minister and bureaucrats on a European junket to pitch the province to foreign travel companies. The result? Ad campaigns riddled with embarrassing errors.

“This wasn’t a tourism initiative, it was a taxpayer-funded trainwreck,” said Devin Drover, CTF Atlantic Director. “If you’re going to spend tax money promoting New Brunswick, the least you can do is get the facts right instead of advertising zoos that shut down years ago.”

The ads promoted long-closed attractions like the Cherry Brook Zoo and the New Brunswick Museum, which has been closed for years of renovations. They also repeatedly misidentified Saint John as both the province’s capital and largest city despite being neither.

The Teddy Waste Awards are named after Ted Weatherill, a federal appointee fired in 1999 for submitting lavish expense claims, including a $700 lunch for two in Paris. Each year, the CTF hands out golden pig trophies to the worst offenders of government waste at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels.

This year’s other 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.