Well, another year, another taxpayer-funded vacation for MLAs attending Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conferences in exotic locales like Fiji and the Bahamas.

This year's conference, Sept. 28 to Oct. 6, was held in Arusha, Tanzania where Kam Lake MLA Dave Ramsay and the old master of these time zone bending jaunts, Speaker Paul Delorey, went to represent the NWT.

The legislative assembly hasn't been able to tell me how much this one will cost, but I imagine it's in the neighbourhood of $30,000. I was told they flew economy class, which is some token of fiscal frugality I guess. But I still have no idea why little old Northwest Territories needs to be there year after year after year.

Delorey got pretty cranky with me last time I referred to his trip abroad as a "vacation," but until I see something to suggest otherwise, I really don't know what else to call it. I spent the weekend poring over transcripts from the legislative assembly covering the last 15 days of the session following Arusha, and couldn't find a single reference to the conference, nor have I seen any kind of report.

Yellowknife city councillors provide meticulous and easy to find reports every time they travel out of the territory, why don't MLAs?

Delorey thinks it's good enough to come back and whisper sweet nothings to other MLAs behind closed doors?

Some may take exception to my continuous harping about all these visits to various palm-frilled capitals of former British colonies, but to me it's just another example of our legislative assembly's overly inflated sense of importance and equally large addiction to international travel.

It's a bad combination in a land of limited means and vast spending priorities.

The big enchilada is the super spectacular United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark where five MLAs and three GNWT staffers will be on hand next month to lend support in dealing with the "most pressing issues of our time," according to Minister of Everything Michael Miltenberger.

He said it's going to be such a big, important deal that it will likely lead to another big conference, which I assume will require even more MLAs and tens of thousands of dollars freed from the public purse to send them there.

The budget for the Copenhagen trip is $86,000, $50,000 of which is for travel. It elicited a chuckle from Hay River South MLA Jane Groenewegen in the legislative assembly last week who figures the budget is $25,000 too rich.

"I don't think it costs that much to fly to Copenhagen," the MLA duly noted, to which Miltenberger said the government tends to underestimate its spending so this time they want to be "accurate," which I gather means this time they're going to overestimate just in case they run out of money during their 11-day trip and can't pay for their $10 morning lattes.

Who's all going, you might ask? Well, there's Miltenberger, Premier Floyd Roland, Great Slave MLA Glen Abernethy, Weledeh MLA Bob Bromley, and of course, David Krutko, who travels so much he's like the Marco Polo of the Mackenzie Delta.

Apparently, the Nahendeh's Kevin Menicoche wanted to come too but Miltenberger said no way, they're not spending anymore money. Besides, he already got a trip to China last year.

I realize that climate change is a pretty important issue, but it baffles me why cabinet feels it needs to send eight people across the ocean to a conference where the NWT will assuredly struggle to get any kind of attention as they jostle among a crowd that will contain every VIP on the planet.

It also seems kind of hypocritical to fly over so many people to a climate change conference of all things. Aren't planes bad for the environment? Weren't Krutko and Bromley in Denmark just last spring studying how to turn squirrel droppings and juniper bushes into wood pellets?

They must be spending themselves broke on carbon offsets, but I guess you can never spend enough or travel enough to fight climate change. And if all else fails, perhaps they'll at least get a chance to have their picture taken with Barack Obama.

- Mike W. Bryant is assignment editor for Yellowknifer. Contact him at 766-8236 or by e-mail at minder@nnsl.com