Right now, when a senior government official flies commercial or charters a plane, that trip has to run through Ontario's standard expense system.
Someone buys a ticket, submits an expense claim with receipts, and that claim is reviewed and then posted online per public disclosure rules.
That's why we can see trip-by-trip entries for ministers today: the name, the destination, the purpose, and a breakdown of costs — airfare, hotels, meals.
The transparency exists because the rules are built around reimbursing individual expenses and publishing those claims.
Ontario sold off its government aircraft fleet in 2015. For eleven years, ministerial travel has run through the commercial and charter system — the same system that generates the expense claims you can look up today.
A government-owned jet changes how money moves.
Once the province owns the aircraft, the cost structure changes. Fuel, crew, hangar space, maintenance, insurance — all paid as operating costs against a ministry budget.
Those costs show up as aggregate line items in a ministry operating budget — not trip-by-trip records.
Disclosure rules are triggered by expense claims supported by receipts. Not by every use of a government-owned asset. If there's no personal travel expense claim filed, there's nothing that automatically feeds into the public expense-posting system.
When asked today, the government source who confirmed the purchase said they could not provide a firm estimate of operating costs — after several months of procurement work on a $28.9M acquisition.
The Premier's travel funded through a ministry operating budget produces aggregate line items. The expense-disclosure system requires individual claims backed by receipts. The two systems do not overlap.
The government has not announced any disclosure regime for this aircraft's operations — no commitment to publish flight logs, passengers, destinations, or per-trip costs.
Without one, travel won't show up in the existing expense-disclosure machinery at all.
On its own, that's already a significant drop in transparency: fewer trip-specific entries, less structured, searchable data about where and when the Premier travels on the public dime.
At the same time, the government is moving Bill 97 through the legislature — amendments to Ontario's access-to-information law that would pull the Premier's Office and ministers' offices outside the reach of FOI, with retroactive effect.
The two moves stack:
If both go forward, the only information the public would have access to is whatever the government chooses to share.
The jet is a $28.9M purchase. The disclosure gap has no announced close date.