Senate leaders benefit from spending oversight

But good news is: More than half of the Senate’s members aren’t being investigated for expense report malfeasance

Let’s focus on the positive. It’s easy to be a critic, but I would remind the naysayers that a great many senators, easily more than half, are not currently under investigation by the RCMP.

How, I might add, do we know that any of them are? Because the Senate agreed to allow their expenses to be audited. Not willingly, granted. In fact, they fought it tooth and nail. But in the end the auditor general was allowed to have a look at their books — all of them, not just some of them. So, that’s progress.

Not only that, but this time they didn’t even lean on the auditor to misrepresent his findings. You’ll recall that in the affair that has become the symbol for the whole Senate expenses ruckus, Mike Duffy’s allegedly false claims for his alleged expenses, senior Conservatives, having hired the party’s own auditors to review his claims, went to elaborate lengths, via personal connections, to find out what they were going to report and, if possible, alter it.

They apparently did not succeed, though they did manage to tamper with a Senate committee’s report of the audit’s findings, excising any text they found too critical, after which they announced that, since the senator had paid back the expenses in question, the matter was now closed. Which turned out to be every bit as true as the rest of the story.

Whereas this time all that happened was an unrelenting months-long campaign of anonymous leaks and spin suggesting the auditor general was out of control, a nitpicking zealot who didn’t fully understand Senate business, culminating in a crude attempt, via some hugely unincriminating leaks about the auditor general’s own expenses (sample: he had an annual lunch for his staff), to discredit him, or at least to imply he was no better than the people he was auditing, whichever is worse.

Oh, and of course, the strategic leaking of his findings, including the news that three top Senate leaders were among the 30 senators, current and former, with dubious expense claims, several days before the report’s actual release. This afforded senators a lengthy interlude in which to explain, on and off the record, why the auditor general got it wrong, without fear of contradiction by, say, the auditor general, who is bound by confidentiality rules. As are senators, if you want to get all legal about it.

But anyway, the point is, it’s all come out, hasn’t it? Or will. Senators who falsely claimed expenses from public funds to which they were not entitled will now have to pay the price for — well, they’ll darn well have to pay them back, at any rate. Or at least they will, if an adjudicator, former Supreme Court judge Ian Binnie, agrees they should. Because, you know, the auditor general might not have fully understood Senate business.

This was not a courtesy extended to Sen. Duffy, or to senators Wallin and Brazeau, all of whom were suspended from the Senate without pay over their expenses, by a vote of many of the same senators who now find themselves accused of much the same. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another example of an auditor’s findings, normally the last word, being taken simply as the starting point for a whole new inquiry to see whether he’d counted right.

But as I say the history of the Senate of Canada is the history of continuous forward progress, so now the rules have changed. (Technical note: there are no rules. See R. v. Duffy, passim.) Who ordered the change? Why, the three Senate leaders named in the auditor general’s report — Speaker Leo Housakos, Government Leader Claude Carignan and Opposition Leader James Cowan — in their capacities as members of the Senate committee responsible for liaising with the auditor general.

Mind, they were not originally members of the committee. But earlier this year, after the auditor general had sent out letters to the 30 senators with questionable expenses, the Senate Three took it upon themselves to replace the committee’s existing members, to devise and install the new adjudication process of which they will be the beneficiaries, and to hire the person who will sit in judgment of their claims. If this seems unusual to you, it is because you do not fully understand Senate business.

My only remaining concern is that this whole expenses hoo-ha, the work of at most a few dozen bad apples, will distract public attention from all the good work the Senate does. For example, senators have put in many long hours not dealing with several bills passed up to them by the House of Commons, working feverishly to a summer deadline to ensure the bills do not pass before then.

These would include not only Bill C- 586, the Reform Act, passed by the Commons in February by a vote of 260-17, about which much has been written, but also Bill C-290, legalizing single-event sports betting — passed by the House three years ago. Nitpicking democrats may question what kind of legitimacy the Senate, made up of people whose chief qualification for the job is a willingness to accept it, has to thwart the will of the people’s elected representatives. I would answer that senators have another source of legitimacy: their moral authority.

Oh, I almost forgot. There’s also Bill C-518, still on the order paper but, like the others, rapidly running out of time. What would it do? It would remove pension eligibility from any parliamentarian found to have fiddled his or her expenses. By parliamentarian, of course, I mean members not only of the Commons, but also the Senate.