Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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Over her decades in politics and on Parliament Hill, Stodin had “never been treated with more abuse,” just as Wallin had never felt more betrayed.
Wallin believed, as she told me in October 2013, that hard-core right-wing elements in the Conservative caucus had it out for her because she didn’t “have an ‘R’ branded on my forehead” — she was not Reform enough. Also, she stated that many were jealous of her “good personal access to the prime minister,” which in part dated from the days Wallin served on the PM’s advisory panel about the future of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. Quite a few senators no doubt also sneered at her self-declared status as an “activist senator,” which implied her colleagues were inactive do-nothings. Revealing her expense claim materials to the Budget Office was, Wallin feared, their plot to get her. She now saw Stodin as a plant, sent into her office to nail down incriminating evidence. Wallin believed that whatever mess she had with her accounts paled in comparison to her personal vulnerability and political isolation among back-stabbers on The Hill.
Stung, Stodin faced a dilemma. She, too, was now feeling isolated after being fired near the end of her career; she was vulnerable, engaged in a serious dispute with a senator who threatened to trash her reputation, and she was ill. She needed advice. She telephoned Carolyn Stewart-Olsen. The two had known and worked together for two decades after the Reform Party swept into the House of Commons in 1993, and Carolyn was now on the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee. Stodin was more concerned than ever about the Senate of Canada’s finances mess, a growing problem that had now claimed her as a victim.
Senator Stewart-Olsen told her to put the facts in a letter to the Internal Economy Committee. “So I just put down on paper my concerns,” Stodin explained to me in December 2013, “and sent it confidentially to the Senate committee.”
The Stodin letter crystallized for Internal Economy Committee members a number of concerns that had been floating around the Senate for years.
Her August 24 document highlighted shortcomings that several dedicated staff budget officers and auditors had, in intermittent campaigns, sought to address to no effect. The Stodin letter now forced them to face directly the still smouldering smudge arising from the auditor general’s recent report about some senators’ expense claims, though undocumented, having been reimbursed anyway.
Unrelated to the letter’s actual contents, Alison Stodin’s message also excited worries already on the minds of committee members about several senators living full-time near Ottawa but claiming distant “primary residences” to get extra money from the Senate for their secondary accommodation allowance, a practice that had occurred with Senate approbation for several years. It troubled some of them that this pattern of the Senate Budget Office paying these housing allowances had now become well established. A couple even entertained doubts about their own claims, now that such payments were being reframed by the developing Senate scandal, although they could reassure themselves by remembering that whatever they were doing complied with the foggy Senate rules for reimbursements.
Stodin’s letter identified issues that ultimately were the Senate’s problems, as an institution, far more than they were Pamela Wallin’s headaches as an individual. Wallin’s shoddy financial practices only showed them up for what they were.
If those running the upper house’s administration had been stung by what Auditor General Ferguson revealed about their less than “rigorous” operation, they now were forced to realize it was no longer good enough just to look at any errant or sloppy or even criminally culpable acts of individual senators and their expense claims as if the fault belonged to those senators alone. The institution the Internal Economy Committee operated was the stage on which all this was playing out. Several budget officers had tried to upgrade Senate administration — a move that had also been a warning — only to be stonewalled by long-term senators protecting the status quo by deferring to the “honour system.”
With the stories reporters were now digging out, and the increasing demand for certain senators to pay back expense money to the Senate, surely it would dawn on people that somebody in the Senate had approved the claims, after they’d passed through the Senate administration’s “rigorous scrutiny” including, at least in theory, two sets of budget officer eyes. Only Franz Kafka could portray the Senate requiring reimbursement of reimbursements as normal, and he was, lamentably, dead.
Senate administrators needed to take responsibility for the Budget Office’s tolerant practices and the elasticity of the Senate’s “honour system,” but their self-protective instinct drove them to duck so all blame would reach, unimpeded, the highest heads on the public horizon — Stephen Harper’s readily identifiable celebrity scapegoats, the ones whose claims had all been paid.
The venerable “honour system” of the upper house had been in place since Confederation, a limp code in contrast to rigorous counterpart procedures governing Parliament’s lower house, the Commons.
A Senate administrative rule stated, like scripture: “Senators act on their personal honour and senators are presumed to have acted honourably in carrying out their administrative functions unless and until the Senate or the Internal Economy Committee determines otherwise.” It was a beautiful sentiment, ostensibly reflecting an idyllic earlier age, covering a practice that enabled Tory and Grit senators to do the honourable thing of working for their parties’ electoral and partisan interests, in Ottawa and across the country, without scrutiny. As a cover for public consumption, the notion of “honour” about money rode alongside the Senate’s two other well-publicized fictions, that it was a body offering “sober second thoughts” and that it was uniquely speaking for “regional” interests.
Under the honour system, senators would routinely claim an expense simply by noting the amount was for “Senate business.” In practice, no receipt was required, nor was any explanation of the nature of the “Senate business.” Nor was there even a requirement that the purpose of a Senate trip be stated. Most senators in the modern era, accustomed to submitting reimbursement claims over their adult careers, did so as second nature, and generally included receipts or proof of payment. Those who did not — contrary to what the Internal Economy Committee told the public was established practice to protect taxpayer dollars “more efficiently than any second-level sign-off” — still got reimbursed anyway, as Canada’s auditor general had discovered and reported.
So-called “Senate business” sometimes included attending a daughter’s ballet class or a film industry awards banquet, but often it entailed travelling the country for partisan work. Because the Senate was tacitly embraced by the Liberals and Conservatives as an adjunct operation of their parties, nothing was ever done to tighten up Senate budget administration. Foolish attempts to do so, by those who just didn’t get what the Senate was really all about, were routinely ignored. The powers-that-be did not want stringent rules that would constrain Liberals or clamp down on Conservatives fund-raising and working for campaigns while on the taxpayers’ tab.
The magic of the euphemism “honour system” by which Liberal and Conservative senators coded their approach to financial administration resided in the term’s vagueness. “Honour” was the expected hallmark for members of Canada’s most senior legislature, and “system” connoted order and efficiency of operation. The phrase served well to mist over partisan campaigning and reinforce the impression that senators were honourable people who could be trusted. The fact most could be, because of their personal ethical standards and trustworthiness, only reinforced the belief of incumbent senators that they truly were, as they were called, “Honourable.” This blinded them to the fact that there was no part of honour in enacting a strict election finance reform law in the 1970s yet continuing the vigorous operation of a system to circumvent that statute’s provisions for a level playing field in Canadian politics.
Canada’s senators live across the country but work in the Parliament Buildings at Ottawa. They have no choice because the Constitution stipulates a person must reside in his or her home province or territory to qualify for Senate membership.
To ease the cost of needing two living places and commuting across the country to and from work, the Senate contributes to the cost of a place to stay while in the National Capital Region and pays for travel between a