‘They have no respect for you’: Peel MPPs at the centre of PC expense scandal remain silent

PC MPPs in Brampton and Mississauga are refusing to explain why they collectively spent more than $75,000 on downtown Toronto hotel stays over the last three years despite living a short drive from Queen’s Park. 

None of the 10 Peel PC MPPs embroiled in the spending scandal responded to questions from The Pointer about the reasons they stayed in an expensive hotel downtown despite living 40 kilometres or less away from their home riding. 

Brampton East MPP Hardeep Grewal was the biggest spender, accounting for more than one-fifth of the $121,409 spent on hotel stays by 20 Toronto-area PC MPPs over the last three years. Grewal expensed $27,275 in Toronto accommodations between 2023 and 2026, according to an analysis of the public disclosures compiled by the NDP.

Other big spenders among Peel’s MPPs included Nina Tangri (Mississauga-Streetsville), who spent $18,976 of taxpayer money on hotel stays and Charmaine Williams (Brampton Centre), who spent $15,865. 

Amarjot Sandhu (Brampton West) billed $4,027, the majority of that over the last year, and Silvia Gualtieri (Mississauga East-Cooksville) has spent $3,177 on downtown hotels since being elected just over a year ago in the 2025 provincial election. 

Graham McGregor (Brampton North) and Natalia Kusendova-Bashta (Mississauga Centre) spent just over $2,000 each; Deepak Anand (Mississauga-Malton) expensed $1,512 over the three-year time frame, while Rudy Cuzzetto (Mississauga-Lakeshore) and Sheref Sabawy spent less than $600.
The scandal has already cost Premier Doug Ford one cabinet minister after Stan Cho—who billed taxpayers over $16,000 in hotel stays despite living less than 6 km from Queen’s Park—resigned from Cabinet last month. While leaving his position as Minister of Tourism, Culture and Gaming, he will continue to represent his Willowdale riding. 

Cho later said he has since repaid the expenses, admitting he had “made a mistake”. 

Cho did not answer questions from The Pointer.

At an unrelated news conference on July 17, Ford said Cho did the right thing by resigning. 

He said he’s made it clear to the entire caucus that the expenses are “totally unacceptable,” and “not tolerated.”

“Every single person is going to pay back every single penny,” Ford claimed. 

In the fallout from the scandal, PC house leader Steve Clark said he intends to introduce legislation to remove the allowance that permits MPPs who live within 50 km of Queen’s Park to bill for hotel stays in special or unusual circumstances.

Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles, in an interview with The Pointer, said the spending revelations are a clear sign of the culture Doug Ford is cultivating within his party. 

“These guys are all spending tens of thousands of dollars on luxury hotels, rather than commuting from work to home the way that their constituents do every single day,” Stiles remarked. “I think it shows a culture of entitlement and I think that that starts right at the top…I think the Premier has decided that the taxpayer dollars are like his personal piggy bank, and we've seen that over and over again. The government members, the Premier himself, get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and that's when they apologize; they say, ‘we'll look into it, oh gosh, we were wrong,’ But they never really tell us upfront.”

On August 13, that pattern was on display after Ford was questioned about a media report that alleged that the PC party spent nearly $3,000 in donor and taxpayer dollars on two five-star resorts in Jamaica to spy on Bonnie Crombie.

“I wouldn’t do it, but again, things happen,” he said at a news conference in Guelph, comparing the spending to media outlets following him on trips in Florida, Chicago and New Jersey.

“It’s politics; it was $3,000.”

While Ford claims that the entire amount was taken from the party’s money in this case, there are still several unanswered questions about the hotel stays; expense records posted on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario’s website do not identify where the MPP stayed, the exact dates of the stay, or the reason a hotel was necessary. 

Among 20 Toronto-area PC MPPs, Brampton East’s Hardeep Grewal has spent the most over the last three years, costing taxpayers more than $27,000.

(Graphic: Alexis Wright, Photo:Hardeep Grewal/X)

Stiles says the public deserves answers from the government.

Despite repeated attempts by The Pointer, none of Peel’s MPPs involved in the scandal responded to questions or offered any explanation for the hotel stays. 

“I think it's pretty clear that many members of this government have shown us time and again who they are. They have no respect for you, the taxpayer, and the reality that you face right now, your struggles. I think ultimately the answer is you have to vote them out,” Stiles said. “This is your money. These are taxpayer dollars, and you deserve to know that they are being spent in a responsible way by the people who've been elected to represent you.”

Grewal also faces a separate ethics controversy. 

In July, Stiles asked Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner to investigate whether Grewal’s use of taxpayer-funded constituency advertising in the Canadian Punjabi Post, a newspaper solely owned by his father Jagdish Singh Grewal, created a conflict of interest and saw his father benefit financially.

“There is a clear pattern of ads placed in a local paper owned by his father. If MPP Grewal’s family members are benefiting from tax dollars, the people deserve to know,” Stiles wrote in a statement following her request to the IC.

Grewal, in a statement provided to other media outlets, admits he should have consulted with the Integrity Commissioner prior to placing the ads and has since reached out to her office.

His father's newspaper was founded in 2002 as a daily Punjabi news outlet, with 35,000 readers, according to a media kit posted on its website. The same media kit lists Jagdish Singh Grewal as the point of contact for “advertising, insertion orders, sales or contracts”.

Past issues of the newspaper included in the NDP complaint show advertising for Hardeep’s events, such as a summer BBQ, on the front page of the newspaper.

Examples of advertisements by Brampton East MPP Hardeep Grewal placed in his father’s newspaper sent to the Integrity Commissioner by the NDP include a Canada Day Spread that ran for three days and other seasonal greetings.

(Supplied)
 

“When we are elected as members of provincial parliament, you meet with the Integrity Commission's office, and you're told very quickly these are the rules. You share information about your own family and what they do and what things you might have yourself invested in or owned, and all of that is made very clear to you,” Stiles told The Pointer. “I don't think Mr. Grewal has any excuse to place ads in a paper that is solely owned by his father.”

According to the IC’s website: “MPPs are expected to perform their duties of office and arrange their private affairs in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity of each member, maintains the Legislative Assembly’s dignity and justifies the respect in which society holds the Assembly and its members,” and “an MPP shall never use their office to influence or to seek to influence a decision to be made by another person so as to further the MPP’s private interest or improperly to further another person’s private interests.”

MPP Grewal did not answer questions sent by The Pointer on the hotel expenses and advertisements in his father's paper.

The NDP are calling on all 20 MPPs to pay back the taxpayer-funded expenses and explain the reason for their stays. 

A breakdown of the hotel expenses for 20 Toronto-area, PC MPPs. Ten of the MPPs represent ridings in Brampton or Mississauga. 

John Fraser, Interim Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, believes there needs to be further action taken beyond Cho’s resignation.

“You have to be responsible. You have to be accountable,” he said at a news conference, adding the “pattern of abuse of taxpayer dollars” by the party isn’t surprising given Ford’s past actions. 

Fraser referenced the PC announcement on April 15 that the party had purchased a pre-owned Bombardier Challenger 650 for $28.9 million to be used by Ford. 

Less than a week after its purchase was disclosed, the Ontario government sold the private jet back to Bombardier after it was met with backlash from opposition parties, advocacy groups and the public.

Stiles questioned the PC government about its “greedy scheme” during Question Period at Queen’s Park on April 20, noting there was no mention of the jet in the budget introduced a month prior. 

“At a time when we have teachers who are receiving layoff notices, hospitals cutting nurses, families struggling with gas, with groceries… here you are, obsessed with buying your premier a luxury jet,” she added.

“When they were elected in 2018, [they] said the party with the taxpayer dollars is over. The truth is that party just moved over into the luxury hotel suites,” Stiles told The Pointer. “The government basically said, ‘go ahead, book hotels’. It kind of seems to have given their MPPs free rein. The Premier now just wants to keep this under the rug, pretend it never happened. The Premier himself is the one who has created this culture of entitlement. I don't think this premier can be trusted anymore.”

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