Wallin fights back at hearing
Senator says case against her just ‘personal vendetta’
OTTAWA — A move by the Senate to strip Sen. Pamela Wallin of all but her title is being driven by personal vendettas, she said, accusing two senior Tories of conspiring to destroy her career in the upper chamber.
Wallin accused two former Conservative colleagues — senators Marjory LeBreton, the former government Senate leader; and Carolyn Stewart Olsen, who sat on the committee overseeing Wallin’s audit — of co-ordinating leaks to media of personal information to force her out the party and the Senate.
The Senate’s current charges against her — that she showed “gross negligence” with her travel spending — are baseless, and politically driven so she can be turfed as a political irritant for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Wallin argued.
“You can’t concoct false charges on a whim,” she said, calling actions against her “backroom politics of a most odious kind.”
“The crux of this matter is the lack of due process and a flawed system that allows personal vendettas to be indulged,” Wallin said.
“She (Stewart Olsen) and Sen. LeBreton could not abide the fact that I was outspoken in caucus, or critical from time to time of their leadership, or that my level of activity brought me into the public eye and once garnered the praise of the prime minister.”
Wallin also said in a forceful speech to the Senate Wednesday that the auditors who reviewed her travel expense claims, which totalled more than $500,000 over the past four years, were given marching orders to retroactively apply new travel rules to her because senators didn’t want another case where independent auditors found spending rules unclear.
She suggested senators wanted to lay the blame on her, rather than their own oversight, a result that inflated her alleged misspending — a tab set at more than $110,000, not including the $38,000 she had previously paid back — and fuelled the public outcry against her.
The former Tory senator, who now sits as an independent, made the statements as the Senate debated whether to suspend her without pay for up to two years.
Similar motions are being considered for senators Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau of Quebec.
Her expenses are also being looked at by the RCMP, who have been questioning senators and Senate finance officials.
Wallin has alleged others in the Senate treated travel rules just as she had, by billing partisan political travel back to the upper chamber. She claimed other senators had privately come to her to express concern that sanctioning her for her travel spending could lead to others facing the same fate.
She had defenders in the packed Senate chamber, that for the second consecutive day focused debate on the three motions to suspend without pay. Sen. Hugh Segal took shots at his own party as he argued the motion to suspend Wallin was a judgment without trial.
Wallin, once a star for the party asked to speak around the country and fundraise, described a call she said she received from LeBreton and Ray Novak, now chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, telling her to resign from the Conservative caucus because the leaks about her expenses were causing the party political harm.
She claimed LeBreton and Novak told her they were speaking on behalf of Harper, who wanted her out of the caucus as quickly as possible, “no discussion.” Wallin said the three worked out a deal where she would recuse herself and announce that publicly.
But 10 minutes later, LeBreton broke that deal and publicly announced Wallin had resigned, Wallin said.
Wallin said that the motions against her now are a continuation of a vendetta by LeBreton, an accusation made against the backdrop of rumours that Wallin wanted Le Breton’s job as government house leader in the Senate.
LeBreton, however, denied any conspiracy.
“I hate to disappoint my colleagues, but I can’t imagine Carolyn Stewart Olsen and I ever spent more than two minutes talking about Sen. Wallin,” LeBreton responded in the Senate.
LeBreton said she only spoke with Wallin once about her expense claims.
That meeting came after Senate administration came to LeBreton with allegations of misspending against Wallin following a letter to Senate finance officials from an unnamed staffer in the Saskatchewan senator’s office.
LeBreton told the chamber that she hadn’t seen the letter, but called Wallin into her office after a Senate sitting to tell her to check her personal calendar against her expenses and correct any problems.
“I didn’t start any fire in any kitchen,” LeBreton said. “I simply reported to her what was reported to me by the Senate administration.
“The claim that she made that I had anything to do with the difficulty she’s in now, is false, false, false.”