Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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Brisson did when publicly ventilating her complaints about her employer, Liberal senator Colin Kenny, in 2013.
Other tipsters demand secrecy and journalists are as resolved to protect them. In 2004, Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill received a dossier of privileged documents related to Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, and refused to disclose to the RCMP her source of information after her story about the extent of Mr. Arar’s alleged terrorist involvement was published. That brought the Mounties, armed with search warrants, in an 8 a.m. raid to her residence and the newspaper’s offices to seize notebooks, computer hard drives, files, and other records, and led to subsequent litigation on the constitutionality of such seizures.
No journalist knows when a tipster may intentionally spill information: a loose-lipped official may slip a secret after one drink too many in some relaxed setting distant from Ottawa’s chilly norms of secrecy; an anonymous email might arrive; or an unmarked envelope could come sliding under the office door. While “leads” to a story are normal, these special insider sources are random. Big journalistic scoops often hinge on a whistle-blower.
As intriguing as this role of journalists and their secret spies can be, such espionage is not the only dimension to whistle-blowing in Ottawa. Some insiders go not to the press but up the chain of command for redress of a wrong they discover being done. During the early 1980s, Bernard Payeur, a financial systems analyst in the Department of Foreign Affairs, discovered that staff had defrauded taxpayers of more than $7 million and that the practice had been underway for some time. He told senior departmental officials, expecting the fraud would be stopped and the culprits held to account. A decade later, Allan Cutler, a senior procurement manager at Public Works and Government Services, noticed irregularities in spending Sponsorship Program funds in Québec, which he reported to his superiors. In both cases, officials tried to cover up the abuses and launched a campaign of reprisal against the civil service whistle-blowers.
Going over the head of those directly implicated, hoping to reach someone high enough in the hierarchy to act responsibly, is the preferred choice of many imbued with the corporate values of their organization.
In the case of the Senate expenses scandal, the whistle-blowing of Pamela Wallin’s assistant Alison Stodin would be credited for moving the issue from one of internal Senate management to an independent audit by Deloitte, the subsequent public unravelling of the expenses fiasco, and its ultimate investigation by the RCMP.
No fiction writer could credibly concoct all the shocking twists and improbable developments that kept unfolding around this national scandal over some thirty months. And few if any would imagine plotting such a riveting human story in so arcane a venue as Canada’s hoary Senate. Yet in real life, that is precisely where the elements combined.
Chapter 5
Ignition
After Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s mid-June 2012 report embarrassed Senate administrators over lack of supporting documentation for expense claims by two of seven senators he’d audited, those fingered felt the blowback. They scrambled to shore up the unsupported claims. It was a matter of reputation.
But it wasn’t just the individuals the auditor general’s findings had made to look incompetent. The Senate itself did not wear this well, nor did the Harper Conservative government, pledged as it was to eradicate wasteful public spending. True, the amounts were like pennies compared to the billions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted in bungled defence procurements, but Canadians chatting at Tim Hortons could more readily latch onto amounts closer to their own budgets than those incomprehensible gazillions of dollars. News reports about senators’ expenses began to upset people. Reporters looked for more Senate wrongdoings and found enough to keep the story going.
For the individual senators impugned in the developing scandal, each case was unique. But collectively, I said in a CBC Radio interview, they revealed a “culture of entitlement” that had become part of the Senate. That explained why some senators, already well paid by the upper house and earning additional income in the private sector, felt they could acquire even more money through spurious reimbursement claims. With not one such case but a number, I suggested, greed was being incubated, rather than extinguished, by the Senate’s own privileged patterns of operation.
The Senate itself displayed a “pattern” of corruption. More than avaricious individuals were involved. The Senate’s style of administration had enabled this problem that was now coming to light. The news was not about a single event, but multiple acts over time in which the Senate itself was complicit.
The issue was not just whether Patrick Brazeau had pulled a fast one by claiming an in-law’s Maniwaki apartment as his “permanent home.” That bit of evidence was also a clue about something more questionable in the institutional practices of the Senate.
Besides the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s inquisitive reporters, a nation of citizens was now watching ever more attentively. Reporters like CTV’s Robert Fife and the Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor looked deeper and found the problem was not just missing taxi chits or non-existent restaurant receipts. Senator Pamela Wallin’s air travel claims stood out like a mountain peak against the Prairie flatlands of other senators’ flight costs. Senator Mike Duffy claimed money for days he could not have been on “Senate business” because Parliament had been dissolved for a general election or he was vacationing in Florida, and some of his meal claims covered repasts he’d eaten at home.
Having publicly asserted to Peter Worthington that, “as in the private sector,” a senator “attaches receipts, according to strict rules,” the Internal Economy Committee’s chair Senator David Tkachuk wanted some paper filing, urgently, to justify or correct the humiliating lapses. Still, the chairman was uneasy. He hoped no payments had been made for amounts the Senate should not have reimbursed from public funds, especially to prominent Conservatives senators.
His fellow Saskatchewanian’s travel claims were high, even for a senator who “lives on an airplane.” Tkachuk knew the costs for his own flights between Ottawa and their same home Prairie province. Pamela Wallin announced she would review her claims, in light of the fact the forms and rules were so “confusing,” sounding the same note Senator Duffy was now playing about being confounded by a simple reimbursement form. Both of them had been able, as political broadcasters, to unravel from Parliament Hill the gnarled complexities of national politics and government policies for their television audiences. Now, as senators, they were stumped by a standard claims form.
Senator Wallin needed help, certainly, and underscoring the urgency was the fact the person handling administration in her Senate office had departed. Government Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton, trying to help Conservative caucus members in difficulty over their expenses, opened her bulging file of resumés. One person seeking Senate employment was especially promising. Alison Stodin’s sterling references attested to her solid experience as a Hill veteran who was honourable and, among many skills, adept at financial administration.
Why would such a talented individual be looking for work at the Senate? Back in 2006 Stodin, working with MP Monte Solberg and eager for new experience, had gone with the Alberta MP to help run his minister’s office when he’d been appointed to cabinet. But when Stolberg left politics after a few short years, Stodin had felt swallowed up by the departmental labyrinth where she’d remained, missing the political action of The Hill that had first drawn her to Ottawa as a politically active young woman with a university degree. She already knew the Commons, so, ever interested in something new, she applied to Parliament’s other house. In late June 2012 Marjory LeBreton arranged a Senate contract for Stodin to work for Senator Wallin.
LeBreton and Stodin had dedicated their careers to politics, primarily in attentive loyal service to senior elected representatives and party leaders. Each believed instinctively that rules governing senators’ expenses were not just administrative guidelines but a regime to protect the public interest. Stodin, as an individual endowed with deep political intelligence, was to help Senator Wallin administratively and in particular to clear up her expenses problem by meshing receipts, travel stubs, and other records with the rules and forms of the Senate Budget Office. Everyone concerned knew the flame had to be extinguished. The consequences