Well, the bill is in for shipping Bill to China.

Nanaimo taxpayers shelled out at least $5,088 to send Mayor Bill McKay to China on an economic development junket last year, according to an FOI filed by the Nanaimo News Bulletin.

That’s on top of another $10,000 or so spent by the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation, which has taken $8 million in funding from Nanaimo taxpayers since 2010.

What did Nanaimo taxpayers get back for this trip? Not a single dollar in investment or deals.

Right after he got back, McKay gushed about how China might spend “upward of a billion dollars” in Nanaimo over the next five years.

But a few months later, with not a nickel to show for the trip, the mayor says he’ll double down and spend MORE tax dollars to go back: “If you had [$4,000] or $5,000 trips and you ended up with $1 million-worth of business out of the deal, would that be good value? Yup. Are you going to get it the first trip over? Probably not. You are just getting to know people at that point.”

Lucky Nanaimo taxpayers.

As I’ve said before, very little ever comes out of these kind of mayoral junkets. Yet politicians keep spending your money to go there, and keep pretending like the next trip will be the one that finally gets the golden goose to lay her egg.

Enough.