QUERY SENATE EXPENSES? PERISH THE VERY THOUGHT!
Parliament’s upper house gets back up over the auditor general doing his job
For the past several weeks, a steady procession of senators has been sidling up to Parliament Hill reporters to offer them a shocking exclusive. The story, generally presented “on condition of anonymity,” is always the same: a rogue auditor general has been rummaging through the minutiae of their expenses, making extravagant demands that they account for their extravagance, getting on their backs over every little thing.
Why, it’s intolerable, they will say. You wouldn’t believe the level of detail they’re going into: gum wrappers, pocket lint, the cellophane at the end of your shoelaces. Or as The Canadian Press reported, in a typical instalment: “Single phone calls, sandwiches eaten during committee meetings, postage stamps — the smallest details have come up for review in the auditor general’s study of Senate expenses.”
Not only that, but the auditor general’s investigators have been allegedly cross- referencing senators’ expense claims against their emails, agenda entries and cellphone records, to see if they stack up. Can you believe it? Why, it’s almost as if they didn’t just implicitly trust them.
As it has grown ( anonymously) louder, the complaint has evolved into a suggestion that maybe the auditor general and his staff simply do not understand the kind of work that a senator does — or worse, were trying to impose their own job description upon the members of the Upper House. “( The auditors) didn’t have the first clue about parliamentary business and public life in general,” an unnamed Liberal senator told CP. “They are bean counters, and they work in a very narrow environment.”
Whereas a senator’s work, why, it is the stuff of life itself — if that’s not too confining a description. Struggling to put it into words, one senator, an unnamed Conservative, essayed to CP “a senator’s job description is public service.” Another, identified as Sen. David Tkachuk ( he pretty much had to be: he was being interviewed by the RCMP), put the matter in more tautological terms. When may we say, for the purposes of filing expenses, that a senator is attending an event on Senate business? “If a senator was invited to an event as a senator, then that becomes Senate business.” I cannot imagine how this could ever have become a problem.
It’s gotten so bad that the speaker of the Senate was moved to write a letter to the auditor general in which he discussed, according to a report in the Ottawa Citizen, “the parameters of parliamentary privileges ... the role of senators and ... the Senate’s constitutionality.” You will have already grasped the issue. You start monkeying around with a senator’s inalienable right to claim expenses for pretty much whatever enters his head, you’re practically amending the Constitution. I mean, what else does a senator do but claim expenses?
It fell to Sen. Nancy Ruth, as it always does, to strike a blow for sanity. Protesting at the indignity of being asked why she didn’t just have the free breakfast on the plane when it was offered to her, rather than file a claim for a restaurant meal, the senator mused, in the key of Seinfeld: What’s up with airline food? “If you want ice- cold Camembert with broken crackers, have it.”
As if to illustrate how completely out to lunch — you should pardon the expression — the auditor general was about Senate business, she pointed out: “I’m a feminist activist, so my angle on Canadian life is to look at genderbased analysis on policy and things like that. I don’t think the auditor general particularly considers that Senate business.”
The senator’s logic — I’m a feminist activist, so I’ll have the champagne — may elude some readers. Indeed, if I sound skeptical, it’s because I’ve seen this movie before. After Sheila Fraser delivered her devastating report on the sponsorship scandal in 2004, there was a brief attempt at a whisper campaign against her: She’s outta control! She’s exceeded her mandate! She’s on a witch hunt!
When the current auditor general, Michael Ferguson, resoundingly confirmed the parliamentary budget officer’s analysis in the F- 35 matter, finding that the government had indeed understated the costs of the plane to the tune of many billions of dollars, Lawrie Hawn, the parliamentary secretary to the defence minister, popped up to suggest that the AG did not understand basic principles of accounting. Now he’s a nitpicker, who doesn’t understand the constitution.
Meh. Spiteful spineless spinning is what these people do, part of their job description. But if these bipartisanly nameless senators had hopes of using the time before the auditor general’s inquiry is released to frame him as a bean- counting, micro- managing nutjob, they were dashed by that incendiary CTV report revealing, based on “sources,” that “at least 40 current and former senators have received confidential letters ( from the AG) about questionable expense claims,” in one case amounting to more than $ 100,000. That’s a lot of gum wrappers.
I don’t want to suggest the auditor general’s people were indulging in a little quiet pushback. There’s no need. No amount of pre- emptive spinning is going to save the Senate’s reputation, if the report is anything like what it is expected to be. These are the people, remember, who sat in judgment on senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin; who peremptorily waved away their suggestions that the “rules were unclear” or that “it had always been done this way” as the self- serving twaddle it was.
If it is shown that large numbers of them were essentially guilty of the same thing, well, we’ll have to invent a new word to describe that level of hypocrisy.
I’m a feminist activist, so my angle on Canadian life is to look at gender- based analysis on policy and things like that. I don’t think the auditor general particularly considers that Senate business. — Sen. Nancy Ruth Spiteful spineless spinning is what these people do, part of their job description.