\u201cA Government trip, organised and sanctioned by Cabinet, a SUV four-wheel drive organised by North American trade officials, used by the Foreign Affairs, MBIE, and the trade officials to take me around Toronto to multiple meetings out of the location of the conference \u2026 what is unusual about that?\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the Canada trip, Jones had flown from Honiara \u2013 where it was 36C in the shade \u2013 to Australia before flying on to Vancouver, where he was stranded overnight for seven hours in \u201cvery average\u201d facilities before flying to Toronto.<\/p>\n
In Toronto, he headed directly to the mining conference, \u201cinto meeting after meeting, media after meeting, and a host of investment presentations around the city of Toronto\u201d, he told Bridge.<\/p>\n
Stuff has reported that Jones was staying at the InterContinental Hotel in Toronto, 200m from the convention centre where the conference took place, with an indoor walking bridge connecting the two buildings.<\/p>\n
Bridge repeatedly asked if Jones had been aware of his hotel\u2019s proximity to the conference venue, but Jones did not directly address the issue, referring to \u201cfalsehoods designed to try and undermine the matua\u201d – a term he often uses to refer to himself.<\/p>\n
He said the media\u2019s focus on the issue was \u201ctiresome\u201d and they were trying to malign him, \u201cas the left-wing media sought to obstruct Trump\u2019s rise\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cA Government trip, organised and sanctioned by Cabinet, a SUV four-wheel drive organised by North American trade officials,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16574,250485,11357,275,4766,45609,3039,1888,71,16718,185,2176,685,33186,9093,1073,2752,6722,111,43,139,69,2687,312,7228,274,1315,140046,1530],"class_list":["post-501656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-bill","tag-blowout","tag-budget","tag-canada","tag-conference","tag-defending","tag-defends","tag-first","tag-from","tag-him","tag-is","tag-jones","tag-last","tag-laundering","tag-lies","tag-media","tag-mining","tag-minister","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-saying","tag-says","tag-shane","tag-travel","tag-trip","tag-undermine","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}