Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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experiences make each one abidingly interesting as an individual. Any Canadian fortunate enough to do so is enriched by the educational experience of conversing with a senator. Each has so much to teach. Many have rich contributions to make to public affairs, and try gamely through the muted channels of the Senate to do so. Few of them, though, have been administrators seasoned in running a large, diverse, tradition-bound organization spending $92,500,000 a year in a politically contentious environment.
The result is that those appointed to advance partisan interests focus their attention on political organization and fund-raising; those appointed in recognition of their past accomplishments devote themselves mostly to basking in such glory as the Senate offers; those appointed to get them out of cabinet or remove them from some other public role where they have become an impediment to the prime minister generally resign themselves to drawing a generous salary and accepting that their future is behind them; and the ones with years of senatorship ahead who want to promote a worthy cause of special personal importance devote themselves to that. With all those subtractions from a total membership of 105, a relatively small number of senators remains available for, or is even interested in, dedicating energy and time to the internal economy, budgetary, and administrative matters of the place.
It is mostly the “political” senators, previously distinguished by devotion to party and elections, who want to be on the Internal Economy Committee. They have been drawn to power and its exercise in the past, and remain that way still. As a consequence, those running the upper house as members of the Internal Economy Committee tend to look at things less through the lens of a chartered accountant or a professor of public administration and more through the eyes of instinctive power wielders serving the best interests of their party, while in the process seeking the least embarrassment or controversy for the institution they are running. As members of the Senate’s most powerful committee, they are “players” in Ottawa’s power game.
And among those players, the three most pivotal when the expenses scandal exploded were senators David Tkachuk, George Furey, and Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, with Conservatives Tkachuck and Stewart-Olsen indispensable in arranging the elements of an explosive scandal.
Senator David Tkachuk of Saskatchewan became known to Canadians, when the expenses scandal broke, as chair of the committee.
A down-to-earth man who earned his B.A. from University of Saskatchewan in the 1960s and followed that with teaching, David found politics a bigger draw by the 1970s. He became a member of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party when it was as flat as a field of Prairie wheat after a summer’s heavy hailstorm. He set about rebuilding the party from the ground up, turning it into an effective political force that carried Grant Devine into office. David accompanied Saskatchewan’s new premier to the Regina Legislative Buildings as his principal secretary.
Mr. Tkachuk’s commitment to the PC cause extended into the national realm as well. After becoming chair of the John Diefenbaker Society in 1992, he arranged funding to keep the former prime minister’s papers at the University of Saskatchewan’s John G. Diefenbaker Centre. In June the next year, a grateful Brian Mulroney appointed Tkachuk to the Senate. In 1997, from the Senate, he co-chaired the Progressive Conservative national election campaign, and in 2005 Conservative leader Stephen Harper named him “Senate Chair” for the general election that took place in 2006, when the Conservatives formed a national government. Senator David Tkachuk had earned his respected reputation in Conservative Party circles.
Liberal Senator George Furey of Newfoundland and Labrador had plenty of experience with Senate administration by the time the elements of the Senate expenses scandal came together, having himself chaired the committee from October 2004 to March 2010. He was now deputy chair of the Internal Economy Committee, in keeping with the tradition of partisan balance.
George Furey had also started his career as teacher, but after leaving the profession, he went on to qualify to practise law in 1984, specializing in labour arbitration at his St. John’s firm. He also volunteered with community groups, and served on professional boards and provincial commissions. The pull of politics was strong. In 1989, he had a senior role in the provincial Liberal election campaign that brought Clyde Wells to power, and in 1995 chaired Brian Tobin’s leadership campaign as the federal minister of fisheries and oceans became the province’s new premier. He then chaired the Liberal landslide victory campaign in the ensuing general election.
On the federal front, George Furey was equally impressive, co-chairing successful general election campaigns in Newfoundland and Labrador for Prime Minister Chrétien in 1993 and 1997. In August 1999, Mr. Chrétien brought campaign organizer Furey closer to hand, placing him on the public payroll in the Senate of Canada from where he chaired the Liberal’s 2000 general election win in the province. From 2012 on, when the Senate expenses issues began to grow complicated, Senator Furey would by instinct as an administrator, lawyer, and partisan maintain a close watch on Liberal interests and keep his colleagues informed, but keep his public profile low.
Joining them on the Internal Economy Committee, Senator Carolyn Stewart-Olsen played a pivotal role developing the Senate expenses scandal. Born in Sackville, New Brunswick, Carolyn Stewart became a registered nurse, working at hospitals in her home province, then in Québec and Ontario. By 1986, she’d become head nurse of ambulatory care at Ottawa’s Grace Hospital, and later served as nursing manager for four primary health care departments at Carleton Place Hospital. As her twenty-year nursing career specializing in emergency and trauma care progressed, Carolyn witnessed enough wasteful practices in public administration and health care spending to make her receptive to Preston Manning’s trumpet call for stringent fiscal management and accountability. Bureaucratic duplication, waste of money, and practices that put institutions and professionals ahead of patients could all be surgically removed, she believed, if the right person held the scalpel.
In 1993, Carolyn turned from nursing to politics, first volunteering in the Reform Party’s communications office, then being hired on staff as a press aide working under Preston Manning, who now was leading a major party in the Commons with fifty-two MPs. She continued through the turbulent emergence of Reform’s first successor party, the United Alternative, and then its second, the Canadian Alliance. When Stockwell Day, an MP who’d been Alberta’s Progressive Conservative finance minister, defeated Manning for the Alliance leadership, Carolyn lost her job. Still dedicated to the Reform cause, she began working for Deborah Grey, the first Reform MP to have been elected and also a Manning loyalist. By 2001, Carolyn emerged as press aide to the “Democratic Representative Caucus,” a dissident group of MPs, including Grey, who’d bolted from the third version of Reform, the Alliance, as led by Mr. Day.
As Carolyn Stewart-Olsen came to know Medicine Hat MP Monte Solberg, another of the dissident Alberta MPs in the group, she formed a productive working relationship with Alison Stodin, a skillful Parliament Hill staffer hired by Mr. Solberg when he’d first arrived in Ottawa as a freshly elected Reform MP in 1993 carrying a book of political science definitions as part of a crash-course on Parliament.
Stodin quickly became a trusted, respected, and reliable resource to Solberg, Stewart, and other neophyte Reformers on The Hill, imparting what she knew about the Commons Order Paper, drafting parliamentary resolutions, researching issues by tapping directly into the resources of the Parliamentary Library, printing and mailing free reports to constituents, ordering supplies, and the intricacies of House of Commons budget administration. Her prior years with Progressive Conservative riding associations in her hometown of Hamilton, her university studies in politics, on-going reading of books on political philosophy, and her years of dedicated work for several parliamentarians made Stodin an indispensible human pillar supporting Reform’s parliamentary presence. Carolyn and Alison worked effectively together.
The following year, 2002, when Stephen Harper challenged Stockwell Day for the leadership of the Alliance, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen signed on as Mr. Harper’s press secretary in what became a successful campaign. During their battle to prevail, a strong bond of loyalty and mutual respect was forged between the two. It fused even stronger in 2004 when Stephen Harper campaigned for, and won, the leadership of the reconstituted Conservative Party of Canada. Stewart-Olsen was frequently in contact with the party leader and had more ready access to Mr. Harper than even political staffers senior to her. When Mr. Harper