Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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problem facing free-floating star senators who have a sense of entitlement is their assumption that others will tend to grunt-work and minor details.
Many senators — not just Indian chiefs, highly paid hockey players, and network star broadcasters, but also corporate executives and senior officials — have been accustomed to others handling the “details” of arranging travel, paying service accounts, keeping up with financial administration, filing accurate expense accounts, and collecting appropriate reimbursements. In their prior careers, somebody else looked after a lot of things necessary for them to do their jobs, like arranging limousines, air travel, hotels, working the telephones, reserving restaurant tables, picking up dry cleaning, buying clothing, organizing personal grooming, massages, and shopping for food and liquor. Those coming from Canada’s big television news networks had become accustomed to the pattern that lots of people were always around to look after things.
Even if the star performer or top person in a hierarchy is the one pushing cash at people, gaining the goodwill that such munificence provides, it is some “underling” who has to collect a receipt, jot down a note about the payment, or later be handed a clutch of the star’s receipts to process through the reimbursement regime. In 2013, a former employee of Senator Colin Kenny went public with her complaint that she’d spent a lot of time looking after his expenses, booking personal activities, delivering and fetching his cleaning, and the like. In the corporate world, personal assistants do all this, and more, for senior executives all the time. In the Senate, however, employees are paid from public dollars, with the general understanding they are being engaged in public business. But the Senate’s “honour system,” combined with uncertain rules and long tolerated practices, created a murky realm of tacit compliance and wilful abuse.
The Senate and its code of financial conduct, if problematic in the case of Senator Kenny, were especially ill-equipped to mesh a star senator’s acquired sense of entitlement with public expectations for accountability in spending money. Moreover, the distinction between personal affairs and public activities, being foggy, was hard for senators themselves to adhere to. They were, most all of them, on the public dime and using parliamentary facilities and services while conducting private business, continuing professional roles, and doing partisan political organizing. Life was one glorious blur as a senator free-floated through it.
Whatever problems were brewing behind the scenes, however, for the first couple of years the public verdict on Stephen Harper’s picks of celebrity senators was that, once again, the prime minister really knew what he was doing.
For the Conservative Party’s biennial conference in June 2011, delegates to the event at Ottawa’s impressive new convention centre were delighted, and television viewers across Canada entranced, to see two very familiar broadcasters who for years had sent them parliamentary news and reports of political developments from the nation’s capital over CBC and CTV airwaves. Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy basked in enthusiastic partisan approbation at centre stage, co-hosting the national Conservative convention in Ottawa.
Chapter 4
The Elements of Scandal Combine
In the spring of 2012, Canada’s auditor general, Michael Ferguson, released an audit report on several senators’ claims for expenses. In some cases, he noted on June 13, Senate administration did not have documents to support claims for travel and living expenses.
For anyone working inside Parliament familiar with Senate administration, this revelation was not news; it was a common thing, a picayune detail. But to someone unconditioned by senatorial norms, this matter of missing paperwork for expenses approved and paid was, well, scandalous. Even so, accounting sloppiness could not have become fodder for a titanic battle in Canadian politics unless other elements were also converging to make a truly major scandal.
Behind the stone-piled walls in the east end of the Parliament Buildings, the Senate of Canada is controlled by its all-powerful Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets, and Financial Administration. The Senate’s administrators report to this committee. Almost everyone refers to it as “the Internal Economy Committee” to conveniently shorten the long name; this subliminally leads to the overlooking of its role in supervising budgets and financial administration — a case of terminology revealing truth.
To appreciate the depth of the problems in the financial administration at the Senate, a comparison with Parliament’s other house provides a quick lesson. Over at the House of Commons, in the west end of the Parliament Buildings, MPs come and go quickly — the result of Canada having the highest turnover rate of elected representatives in any of the world’s democracies. The financial administrators are permanent employees with real power who take a firm hand in budget management. With passing years, they continue in office and get to know everything about the operations and weaknesses of parliamentarians. They lead each new intake of fresh MPs onto the approved financial pathways and become their firm guides along the journey. They have sharp pencils, even sharper eyes.
When a rule came in back in the 1980s that MPs could not hire family members, two of my colleagues winked as each one hired the other’s daughter to work in their offices for the summer. The Commons Budget Office could not be hoodwinked by such a ruse, because its employees knew what to watch out for and also had a comprehensive system in place for cross-checking and verifying all aspects of an MP’s expenses. The small scandal that resulted created red faces for the two Ontario MPs and loss of jobs for their girls, while serving as a morality play for all MPs: Never mock the budget rules or the financial administrators who enforce them.
Back in the Senate, in stark contrast, the appointed parliamentarians enjoy extended longevity in office while the hired staff come and go. The culture of lax budget control, which is the result, had already become well entrenched in the days when senators held office for life. The absence of administration was camouflaged by hallowed pretence of the Senate’s “honour system.”
The mythical “system” — it was actually an absence of system — continued to be the Senate’s operating cultural norm, even after the 1960s when the rules were changed so that senators could no longer hang around past age seventy-five, simply because it was embedded in the very fabric of the place and because new senators appeared on the scene just a few at a time, sometimes even one by one through a lone appointment. These scattered novices acclimatized themselves to long-established practices. They did not question the existing order — three readings needed for a legislative bill to pass, no expense chits needed for submitting a reimbursement bill — any more successfully than a novitiate entering the priesthood might challenge the intimidating power and dumb inertia of a system that had lumbered along for centuries. Even with mandatory retirement, most senators remain on Parliament Hill for decades. New arrivals acclimatize. There are plenty of old hands to teach inductees the ropes.
All of this means that senators can intimidate the staff ostensibly running budget operations. They do so with ease. Unlike the Commons, members of the Senate have an upper hand over those trying to impose modern administrative procedures and controls. “I’ll still be here long after you’re gone,” one senator asserted in one such showdown, forcing a staff administrator to relent. While not always expressed quite so bluntly, this attitude is part of the operating culture of the Senate. Its members are in charge of themselves and run this public institution more like their private club.
Reinforcing this order of things is the fact senators are appointed by the prime minister. Around Parliament Hill, the wish of a prime minister is as potent as a military commander’s order to a subordinate. Few working on The Hill, including staff at the Senate, are immune from this deference to power. Even with two factors that can offset somewhat this fear of the PM — being of a different political party, and supposedly having some independence as a senator — the reality is that budget officers and financial administrators working for the Senate have little incentive to stir things up, for example, by trying to impose tighter control over spending, or by causing embarrassment to the prime minister over the “minor” financial sloppiness of his appointees.
It is not the case that most of the financial issues that arise in connection with the Senate are the result of deliberate attempts to cheat the system. Senators are good people who’ve had fascinating