NDP MP Niki Ashton pays back some expenses related to trip with her family

NDP MP Niki Ashton has paid back some of the expenses related to a trip she took with her family over Christmas — a trip that CBC News first reported on earlier this month.

In a media statement, Ashton said she repaid a portion of the charges she, her husband and two children billed taxpayers as part of a $17,641.12 trip from Thompson, Man. to Ottawa and then Quebec City and Montreal over the holidays to meet with unnamed «stakeholders» in 2022 and early 2023.

Ashton did not say how much she paid back to the federal treasury for the trip. She only said that she «repaid the expenses incurred in Montreal and Quebec City.»

She told a reporter from Canada's National Observer that the money paid back totalled $2,900.

She said she wouldn't be paying back some of the other expenses incurred because she needed to bring her husband, former NDP nomination candidate Bruce Moncur, to Ottawa to help her deal with bedbugs in her apartment there.

«I believe in accountability and setting the record straight: I went to Ottawa to deal with an urgent bedbug situation in my building and apartment following spraying on December 20 — this expense was approved by the House of Commons. I then met separately with stakeholders in Quebec,» Ashton said in her statement to CBC News.

While Ashton has refused to say which stakeholders she met with while in Quebec City and Montreal — she said only that it was for discussions with unnamed people about the French language — Ashton said she has repaid the money now to «protect the privacy of the stakeholders I met with.»

Social media posts from the trip show Moncur and the children took in some of Quebec City's winter attractions, including an ice slide and snow tubing at Village Vacances Valcartier outside the