Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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over Ottawa, and Parliament Hill sat abandoned to summer heat and busloads of tourists, Stodin settled down at the start of July 2012 to take advantage of the season’s minimal interruptions. She started in to clear up the senator’s expenses backlog. Stodin found the stale and littered money trail a confusing challenge, in arrears and in a mess, but this was condition normal for Wallin. The paperwork details that first became a by-product of her hectic life at CTV, and later with CBC, got out of hand during her years as consul general in New York, and had now reached maturity in the Senate, where her pile of travel and expense records accumulated as the unattended detritus of a stellar career.
Stodin sorted through the records and unbilled costs, making piles and writing notes, but still found them a confusing challenge to fit within applicable categories and rules. Over five weeks she interacted with her new senator employer mostly by telephone and through email, with little opportunity for bonding, let alone direct clarifications of expense details.
The core issue was not Pamela Wallin’s “primary residence” in Saskatchewan, a cottage she lived in during her times in the province, but how her travel to and from Saskatchewan for this purpose was complicated by the fact Wallin also had residences in Toronto and New York where she often stayed, and worked, sometimes for days, en route to or from Wadena.
The way the Senate administers the commuting costs of its members is not by budgeting dollars for individual senators but by allocating each of them sixty-four travel points for the year. A point is used up for each round-trip to and from the senator’s primary residence, wherever in Canada it may be. This plan provides equality. A senator from Toronto or St. John’s or Vancouver or Wadena would each use up a single point for a return flight, notwithstanding the difference in distance and price. Whatever the actual cost of a senator’s trip, be it $300 or $1,300, the Senate Budget Office pays the amount from its general fund for all senatorial travel. If a senator needed to go elsewhere in the country than home or to his or her own province or territory, the points could be used for that, too, but with some adjustment. For a longer distance than normal for that senator, or for a trip with many legs and stopovers, a number of additional travel points would get used up in the process. Figuring out just how many is an accounting art.
Pamela Wallin might sometimes fly home from Ottawa to Saskatoon via Halifax and Toronto, with layovers of several days in both intermediate cities where she had work that included Senate duties, and claim it as one point for a trip to her province. Normally, such a multi-leg, multiple-day flight might consume three or four points. Senator Wallin would say that she never used more than a single point for a trip, and never exceeded the annual limit of sixty-four travel points, “otherwise I would have paid personally,” without accounting for the fact she conflated some unconnected flights over a number of days into “a single trip” home to make everything fit her heavy workload and overbooked schedule. Notionally, she was right; administratively, not so much.
The reasons Pamela Wallin flew to other places in Canada related to both Senate work and private sector work alike, fulfilling the multiple dimensions of one workaholic person. In New York and Toronto, she engaged in remunerative private work, but did so in tandem with Senate roles that constantly engaged her too. Over lunches with officials at public events, her conversation could slip seamlessly back and forth between, say, government policy on civil aviation and trends she knew about as a director of Porter Airlines, and so on through various categories of her intense, many-faceted engagement with the world around her.
Like other senators doing the same thing, Pamela Wallin straddled several worlds simultaneously. It was not a conflict of interest but a confluence of interests. She was an integrator of her many roles: a star in business, the academic world, the creative arts, journalism, public office, and the Conservative Party of Canada. The biggest trick was to keep everything in its correct separate category when charging for the costs.
The private companies on whose boards Wallin sat were prepared to pay flight costs when she was travelling on their behalf, and sometimes did. The same was the case, more or less, with a number of the charitable and educational organizations for whom Senator Wallin performed services and added the star power they craved. But in the scramble of her unrefined record-keeping Wallin was always behind and, trying at intervals to catch up, hastily dumped costs onto the Senate for reimbursement from public funds.
The Senate’s relic “honour system” kicked in. Reimbursements were made to Senator Wallin, despite the extraordinary rigours of scrutiny Senator Tkachuk had boasted every claim was subject to in detail. Rather than acting as a brake on improper invoicing, the Senate Budget Office smoothed a pattern for Wallin to maintain her troublesome habit.
Of the many flights with ticket stubs and proofs of payment, the easiest for Alison Stodin to sort and claim were the ones exclusively for Pamela Wallin’s Senate work because they had been recorded by Senate staff while making the original booking. Yet mingled into the mishmash of materials she was sorting were receipts for other flights, trips with more than one leg, for instance to Manhattan and Toronto, and stopovers of several days’ duration. Those required more than a single travel point, but that was tricky to determine. On top of this, those trips mixed Senate work with other activity, for which there were also receipts to be claimed for reimbursement, and which might have been at least partly paid by others.
Some of those costs, not just the flights but the use of limousines, the meals, accommodation, and incidentals, seemed more appropriately allocable to the companies Pamela Wallin worked for in a well-remunerated capacity, or to at least some of the charitable organizations she served. Yet, here were those expense records, too, tossed onto the accumulated pile of Wallin’s pieces of paper. Credit card statements catalogued a swath of spending, but into which of the many categories, or for which of the particular trips, did each of the entries belong? The dates sometimes defied matchup. Stodin stared at the omelette and could not see how to turn it back into eggs.
After weeks of mounting exasperation, and with the senator not around to explain, Stodin called the finance people in Senate administration, “Can I meet with you to go over some files? I don’t know what to do.” She’d been trying to reconcile outstanding American Express accounts and travel expenses.
It was Friday, August 10, an extremely quiet day at the Senate. “Sure, come right over,” was the response.
When Wallin asked Stodin by telephone where she’d been when she’d tried to reach her earlier, “she ‘freaked’ when I told her I’d been to the Senate Budget Office to get some clarity about processing some of these. ‘Don’t ever go there again, they are not to see anything!’ she shouted.”
When Senator Wallin returned to her parliamentary office on August 22, she fired Stodin.
There are a couple of ways to interpret Wallin’s remark, “They are not to see anything!” One is that Pamela Wallin had something legally problematic to hide; the other that she was embarrassed by her inexcusable record keeping. You can be a radiant star in public and still not want fans to see the dust balls under your bed.
I tested the two possibilities with a senior lawyer who knows Wallin and a retired Deloitte partner who had himself previously conducted Senate audits. Both agreed the senator’s reaction could have erupted from either of those possibilities — something to hide from the authorities, or instinctive human embarrassment. Even so, both felt that given the nature of the relationship between the two, they’d have expected Stodin to review matters with Wallin — if only to agree how serious the confusion was and that guidance was needed from the Senate’s Budget Office — before the paperwork was seen by others outside her office in its raw and indigestible form.
Knowing both women, my sense is that Wallin wanted the mess cleaned up on her own terms, with any required corrections made with her knowledge, so she could present the finished product as a clean bundle with a bow ribbon to the Senate Budget Office and get on with larger matters. Stodin, I knew from the days she’d run my MP’s office so professionally in the 1990s, took pride in sorting out back-office details so that a busy parliamentarian could focus instead on public issues. She would not want to admit she was stumped and, as self-starter, would seek tips from a Senate budget officer on how to allocate a senator’s expenses in ways that legitimately complied with the rules.
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