The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has made a point of examining the expense claims of the three PC leadership candidates seeking to replace Alison Redford and Dave Hancock. We want to know if the three candidate’s records live up to their rhetoric live of “no more entitlements.”

Today we release our findings from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests filed with the City of Calgary for Ric McIver’s time as an alderman for Ward 12 from 2001 to 2010.

We couldn’t find anything that raises an eyebrow, other than two Swiss Army watches at a cost of $400 each. As it turns out, the watches were to recognize two Calgary members of the Canadian Army deployed in Afghanistan. Hard to be critical of that.

The CTF has also kept a close eye on his expenses as a cabinet minister (as we do with all cabinet ministers), and haven’t found anything untoward there as well. He’s managed to stay off the CTF’s annual ‘Naughty and Nice List’ two years running now.

The same cannot be said of former Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, who’s made the CTF’s Naughty & Nice List in both 2012, and 2013, going for a hat-trick in 2014.

We’ve also tried to check out Jim Prentice’s expense-account records as a federal cabinet minister using Access to Information (ATI) requests. Thus far, this has been unsuccessful, as the Department of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs shredded his expense claims, without much of an explanation.

Some politicians might not like us digging through documents to verify their claims of moral rightness, but as Ronald Reagan said of Soviet nuclear-disarmament, “Trust, but verify.”