OTTAWA - Conservative MPs and senators took advantage of up to 211 reserved tickets for the Olympic Games while opposition parties avoided the controversial perk entirely, a government tally indicates.

A detailed account of a block booking by Canadian Heritage shows parliamentarians bought 211 of the reserved tickets, mainly for what the account describes as "prime" events, such as the opening ceremony or a gold medal hockey game.

Government departments purchased a further 239 Olympic tickets.

The Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc Quebecois parties say they did not take advantage of the VIP seats that had been purchased in advance by Canadian Heritage, leaving the parliamentary allotment to the Conservatives. Parliamentarians were required to pay for all tickets they requested.

Hockey was the top draw for the Conservatives while none of them watched biathlon, cross-country skiing, Nordic combined or men's luge.

Only 34 parliamentarians took advantage of tickets to the Paralympic Games, 20 of them for the gold medal sledge hockey final. Canada did not qualify for that event, although MPs and senators may have given the tickets to others.

A Canadian Heritage spokesman blamed a drop in demand for Paralympic tickets on changes in the House schedule. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to suspend Parliament for February eliminated a scheduled recess in March during the Paralympic Games.

Parliamentarians took 16 tickets for the opening ceremony, the account shows. The tickets appear to be Category A, which the Vancouver Olympics website describes as "a premium event ticket including the opening and closing ceremonies, gold medal ice hockey and all other high-demand competition events."

Category A opening ceremony tickets cost $1,100 each.

Parliamentarians bought a total of 76 tickets for hockey, though none for women's gold and only four for the men's gold final, which took place the Sunday before Parliament resumed following Harper's controversial prorogation.

Only 12 of the parliamentary tickets were for women's hockey. The cost of a Category A ticket for men's hockey ranged from $140 for the preliminaries and $425 for semifinals to $775 for the gold game.

The MPs and senators paid Canadian Heritage by personal cheque or money order. But the opposition says the issue wasn't just the cost of the tickets.

"We don't think, as members of Parliament, that we should get privileged access to tickets," New Democrat MP Peter Stoffer said.

"We should be just like every other Canadian: we go to Ticketmaster or we line up to buy the tickets, just like everybody else."

There were opposition MPs and senators who attended the Games, but spokesmen for all three parties say they purchased them outside the government allotment and paid for the tickets themselves.

Originally, Canadian Heritage purchased and booked 2,500 Olympic tickets for public servants, MPs and senators. But as demand for access to the Games became evident, Sport Minister Gary Lunn announced last year 1,000 tickets would be returned for sale to the public.

With the bill at the time totalling more than $400,000, Lunn declared every MP, senator and public servant who received one of the coveted tickets would pay for it themselves.

A Canadian Heritage spokesman confirmed all government employees also paid for their tickets.

Still, the image of privileged access prompted the opposition parties to announce shortly before the Games began that their MPs and senators would join the long queues like other Canadians.

"I think that senators, like anybody else, should have lined up and bought their own tickets, and that's what many did," said Liberal Senator Jim Munson.

The Conservatives accuse the Liberals of being hypocritical about ticket access.

"When the Liberals were in power, they ordered thousands of tickets for themselves to attend the Olympic and Paralympic Games using taxpayer dollars," said Vanessa Schneider, Lunn's communications director.

"When the Conservatives instructed that all parliamentarians pay for their tickets out of their own pockets, the Liberals refused to pay for a single ticket."

It was unclear when the Liberals booked so many tickets for themselves, since the only prior Olympics in Canada were the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, under a federal Progressive Conservative government, and the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal.

"Many Conservative MPs and senators were happy to pay with their own money to attend the Olympics and Paralympic Games and cheer on our athletes as they won a record fourteen gold medals at the Olympic Games and ten gold medals at the Paralympic Games," Schneider said in an email.

She did not respond to requests for an exact count of Conservatives who took up the reserved tickets.

"Ticket purchases by parliamentarians were not recorded according to parliamentary affiliation," said department spokesman Tim Warmington.