Michael den Tandt: A reputation in tatters.
So this is the venerable Senate of Canada, headed toward the fall of 2013: an ever-exploding, metastasizing mess, rippling outward in concentric rings, tainting everything it touches. With Sen. Pamela Wallin now under RCMP scrutiny alongside her erstwhile colleague, Mike Duffy, and with her reputation too in tatters, savaged by an audit clinical in its detail, it’s difficult to see where it ends.
Certainly, any hope the Conservatives had of putting their annus horribilis behind them is now slim to gone. Deloitte’s report on Wallin, released Tuesday, immediately pushes parliamentary spending reform and broader issues of corruption back to the top of the agenda. It begins with the Senate, but won’t end there.
As so often seems the case, it’s the hurried attempts at rectification that do the most harm. Consider this reference, from section 4.2.1.1 of Deloitte’s audit: “Eighty-three calendar entries were identified only residing in the Senator’s 2013 calendar which referred to calendar entries. These 83 entries referred to calendar entries (appointments etc.) predating April 26, 2011. As these entries did not exist in off-line calendars, it appears they were made sometime in 2013. A last written date was indicated for 77 out of the 83 entries in February, April, May and June 2013.”
And this: “Thirty-four calendar entries were identified in the Senator’s 2013 live calendar which referred to calendar entries prior to Oct. 28, 2011, where the subject lines of the calendar entries (appointments etc.) had been modified or changed from the entry that existed in the off-line calendars.”
And finally, this: “Three hundred and ninety one calendar entries appeared both in the 2011 and 2012 off-line calendars, however were not located in the Senator’s 2013 calendar. We were unable to determine the dates on which these items were deleted from the live calendar, as our analysis was not performed on a forensic image of the calendars. Many of the items that were deleted were in respect of calendar entries for Senator Wallin’s activities on various boards of directors.”
The auditors may as well have added: The prosecution rests. Monday, Wallin took pains to explain these discrepancies. “I was advised part way through the process that I should only include information relevant to the actual expenses being claimed. So we formatted our calendar accordingly…”
“Re-formatted” would have been a more apt verb. Appended to the audit is a longer apologia. In this letter, dated July 26, Wallin’s lawyer Terrence O’Sullivan asserts the changes were made on the advice of Sen. David Tkachuk, then the Conservative chair of the Senate committee on internal economy. “… Taking what seemed to be perfectly logical advice from Senator Tkachuk to heart, the decision was made to create spreadsheet calendars for Deloitte which contained as much information on Senate related activities as possible but which did not contain information regarding events unrelated to the Senate …”
Setting aside that Tkachuk denies he gave such advice: Logical? An official faces a forensic examination, intended to determine how much of $532,508 in claimed travel between January 2009 and September 2012 was legitimate. The crux, surely, must be a comparison of that which is personal, that which is partisan, that which is businessrelated but not Senate-related, that which is both partisan and Senate-related, and that which is purely Senate-related and in the broader public interest. How, logically, could deleting “events unrelated to the Senate” facilitate such a comparison?
Tkachuk, who stepped down as head of the committee in June citing poor health, faces new questions of his own. O’Sullivan asserts in his letter that Tkachuk told Wallin “he would have allowed all the claims (with the possible exception of 1 or 2) but that he had been ‘voted down’ ” by other MPs. In his appended response, Tkachuk flatly denies that. No surprise, there: Wallin’s claim is the political equivalent of a drive-by shooting, suggesting that, far from being an outrider, she was adhering to established practice.
And that gets us to the nub of the broader issues now raised. “Senator Wallin indicated … that discussions with Senator Tkachuk early in her tenure regarding various roles she had (such as Chancellor of the University of Guelph) confirmed that travel expenses to such events would be eligible for reimbursement,” the audit reads. “In this regard, we note that we have not assessed or reviewed any travel expense claims by other Senators, and therefore cannot comment on whether activities such as those undertaken by Senator Wallin were or were not undertaken by other Senators …”
It’s an echo of earlier hints, emerging from the Duffy file, that he’d been led to believe, or allowed to assume, that he had carte blanche with the Senate credit card. Here’s what that demands: a broader, deeper examination of Senate spending, and beyond that of the relationship between political parties, fundraising, their use of public resources, and public institutions. They are all now paddling frantically in this direction, for lack of any better alternative. They can do little but keep paddling, and hope to keep ahead of the wave.