Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.
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Global Affairs Canada put the cost of flying Canadians home from China in the opening weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic at $4,307,558, and nearly all of it went to aircraft. Financial records released under the Access to Information Act show $4,207,605.60 — 97.7 per cent of the department's own total — was charged against five charter flight invoices, leaving less than $100,000 to cover everything else, including the consular staff who worked the evacuation on the ground.
The records were released in March 2026 in response to request A-2025-02355, which asked for the expenses and costs Global Affairs incurred arranging chartered flights to evacuate Canadian citizens from China at the start of the pandemic. The nine-page release was disclosed in full and consists of general ledger extracts and pivot tables covering charges posted between March and June 2020, with individual travel claims dated from 1 February to 7 March 2020.
What the Documents Show
The release is built around a one-page summary that splits the evacuation into four buckets: flight costs at $4,207,606, decontamination at $39,691, additional fuel at $31,823, and a Wuhan travel claim at $28,438. Everything else in the package is the supporting detail behind those four numbers — ledger codes, invoice references, and per-traveller expense lines.
What the summary does not do is capture the full contents of its own release package. Two additional pivot tables in the same document set out travel claims for Beijing totalling $43,770.73 and Shanghai totalling $19,362.09. Neither appears in the $4,307,558 figure. Added in, the records account for $4,370,690.82 in documented spending.
The accounting itself is unusual in one respect. All five charter invoices, plus a separate invoice from the United States government, were charged to general ledger code 40392 — described in the department's own legend on the first page as "Non Public Servant Travel in Canada — Other reasons — Transportation." Flights out of Wuhan, in other words, were booked against a ledger line for domestic travel by people who are not public servants. The records offer no explanation for the coding choice, and the pattern is consistent enough across every flight line that it does not read as a one-off error.
That kind of ledger-level detail is what makes financial releases like this one useful long after the events they describe. The same is true of internal pandemic recordkeeping elsewhere in the federal government, including the internal CBSA logs tracking COVID-19 infections among border staff, where the classification decisions embedded in the data turned out to matter as much as the totals.
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The Five Charter Invoices
The $4,207,605.60 in flight costs breaks into five separate invoices, all filed under the same internal reference: N791-2393-China Flight. Two of them account for the overwhelming share. Invoice DND0892 was charged at $1,958,787.60 and invoice DND0891 at $1,582,658.00 — together $3,541,445.60, or 84 per cent of the entire flight bill. A third, DND0899, came in at $132,440.00.
The remaining two carry a different prefix. Invoices PWC0900 and PWC0901 were charged at $200,145.00 and $333,575.00 respectively. Grouped by prefix, the DND-referenced invoices total $3,673,885.60 against $533,720.00 for the PWC-referenced ones — a split of roughly 87 to 13 per cent.
The records do not identify what the prefixes stand for, name the carriers or aircraft involved, or say how many flights the five invoices represent. There is no contract, no tender, and no per-flight or per-seat breakdown anywhere in the release. The invoice numbers themselves are the only identifying detail provided.
A Summary Sheet That Doesn't Match Its Own Line Items
The two mid-sized costs on the summary page are where the release gets genuinely puzzling. The summary lists decontamination at $39,691 and additional fuel at $31,823. The detail pages contain both amounts, but the descriptions attached to them do not obviously match those labels.
The $39,690.92 figure appears in the ledger as invoice 2003WUTCN1, described as "US STATE GOV — CANADIAN EVACUEES" and posted on 15 June 2020. A companion page shows the same charge as US$29,640.00, implying a conversion rate of roughly 1.339. Nothing in the description references decontamination; on its face it is a bill from the American government relating to Canadian evacuees, which suggests Canadians were flown out on a US-arranged flight and Canada was invoiced for the seats. The records do not say so directly.
The $31,823.32 figure is the sum of three invoices from a contractor identified as WINMAR Emergency Services — $14,136.82, $11,046.10 and $6,640.40 — all referencing purchase order 7417466 and invoice LJ045512, all posted on 31 March 2020, and all charged to general ledger code 41660, "Repair and upkeep of road motor vehicles." Nothing in those lines references fuel.
The amounts reconcile to the penny, so the mapping between the summary and the detail is not in doubt. What is in doubt is the labelling. The release contains no note, memo, or correspondence explaining how a US State Department invoice became "decontamination" and three vehicle-maintenance invoices became "additional fuel."
The Wuhan Claims, Down to the Stationery
The $28,437.69 in Wuhan travel claims is the most granular part of the release, spread across ten separate ledger codes. Accommodation is the largest single category at $10,305.69, followed by transportation at $6,838.49, meals at $5,403.81, and a catch-all "other" category at $5,071.17. A second tier of claims coded to "other reasons" rather than core mandate adds $106.86 in transportation, $166.64 in accommodation, $231.19 in meals and $154.28 in other charges.
Then it gets small. The department separately tracked $104.36 in printing and $55.20 in office and stationers supplies against the evacuation — roughly one-thirty-thousandth of what the flights cost, itemized to the dollar in the same records.
The accommodation lines are described in the ledger as hotel stays for Wuhan Canadians leaving, and several repeat at identical amounts: $870.65 appears four times and $1,567.17 twice. Claim descriptions throughout the section pair Wuhan with Trenton, Ontario, and cover date ranges running from 1 February into early March 2020. Several rows are logged at $0.00 across multiple categories for the same traveller, with no explanation given for the zero values.
Global Affairs has a documented pattern of standing up ad hoc machinery when Canadians get caught in overseas crises — the same department later built a dedicated inter-departmental protocol, the Enlisted Canadians Coordination Cell, to handle Canadians fighting in Ukraine. The Wuhan claims are the financial residue of an earlier version of that improvisation.
Beijing and Shanghai: $63,133 Outside the Total
The two pivot tables excluded from the summary cover consular travel to China's two largest cities during the same period. The Beijing claims total $43,770.73, of which $29,704.72 is transportation. That section lists six travel lines, five of them airfare or ticketing entries ranging from $4,740.30 to $6,858.14 for individual Canada-to-Beijing tickets, plus a $1,331.45 travel claim covering 1 to 29 February 2020. Accommodation accounts for $7,129.83, meals $4,960.95, and other charges $1,975.23.
The Shanghai claims total $19,362.09 and are shaped differently. Transportation is $5,737.80 and meals are $5,545.31, but accommodation appears twice under two different codes — $639.71 under core mandate accommodation and a further $5,554.15 logged as room charges under an entirely separate "internal governance" accommodation code. The same trip's lodging, in effect, was split across two ledger lines that a reader consulting only one of them would never reconcile. The travel is dated 2 February to 7 March 2020 and described in the ledger as consular support related to COVID-19.
Whether these claims were meant to be excluded from the headline total is not addressed anywhere in the release. They sit in the same package, cover the same weeks, and describe the same operation.
What's Missing from the Records
The request asked for the expenses and costs of arranging chartered evacuation flights, and the department disclosed the release in full. But financial records answer only financial questions, and this package leaves most of the obvious follow-ups untouched.
The records do not state how many Canadians were evacuated, how many flights operated, what aircraft were used, or which carriers were paid. There is no date for any flight — only invoice and posting dates. Nothing indicates whether evacuees were charged for their seats, reimbursed, or flown at no cost. Costs associated with the quarantine period after arrival do not appear, despite the repeated Trenton references in the travel claims.
The department's own general ledger legend on the first page lists a code for "Professional services not elsewhere specified," but no released line item uses it. Whether that reflects a legend copied wholesale from a broader chart of accounts or a category that was populated and not released, the records do not say.
What the release does establish is a firm floor. At minimum, and by Global Affairs Canada's own accounting, bringing Canadians home from China in early 2020 cost $4,307,558 — and the paperwork in the same package documents another $63,132.82 that the department's summary never added up.
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Support Government FilesAll figures referenced are from Global Affairs Canada, request A-2025-02355, obtained through Access to Information requests. The records consist of general ledger extracts and pivot tables covering charter flight invoices, contractor charges, and individual travel claims related to the evacuation of Canadians from China in early 2020.
