I cannot conceive of circumstances under which it would be legitimate for a city councilor to fly to China - with his wife!- under "official" city business. Normally when a Councillor goes on an exotic overseas trip it gets voted on by the city council. The fact that Kelly dipped into his office budget seems suspicious. And then there is the case of Kelly billing the taxpayer's for a personal side-trip to Paris! This kind of conduct stinks and I wonder if he should have been charged with misappropriation of public funds? (perhaps it's not too late).
This is what happens when YOU vote for a crackhead for mayor. YOU are dealing with the ramifications of your actions.
If Kelly used taxpayer money to fund vacations, that is absolutely wrong. But YOU should be happy, because his level of indiscretion, let's put it at $20,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to what Ford has done.
Let's do some math.
Reading carefully through the ITO and going over the Star's attempts to document Ford's work schedule reveals that he basically works about 20 hours a week in what should probably be about a 60 hour a week job if done by a competent, committed individual. YOU pay his salary of $167,000. Considering that he works about 30% of what would be expected of the mayor of Toronto, that computes to roughly $115,000 of waste.
Price is hired at $130,000, double the salary of what his position should entail. $65,000 of waste.
Staffers who stayed loyal to Ford - $5000 bonus, staff of 20 - $100,000 waste.
Finkel and Ransom 'vodka runs' on the city's dime, probably another $1000-2000 in terms of manhours.
Time spent by the mayor and his staff dealing with crackgate when they should have been running the city - probably running up into the hundreds or thousands of hours, easily another $50-75,000 in waste (probably vastly underestimated actually).
So right now, by conservative measures, you're looking at roughly $300,000+ of waste generated by mayor McCrackinstein.
So, yeah, you should be HAPPY if Kelly used $20k of your taxpayer dollars to finance personal trips. That is an order of magnitude less graft than Ford has been involved in over the last year (that we know of - I've no doubt that when all of the skeletons are out of Ford's closet we'll find out about some unscrupulous financial dealings. A man with his total lack of moral compass most likely let his moral bankruptcy permeate into his financial dealings as well).