AUDIT SNAGS TOP SENATORS
Claimed ineligible expenses, report says
OTTAWA • The Senate’s three most powerful members are among those singled out by the auditor general for filing ineligible expenses.
Senate Speaker Leo Housakos, government leader Claude Carignan and Opposition Leader James Cowan are among 21 senators found by auditor general Michael Ferguson to have made questionable claims.
In addition to the 21, another nine had involved spending problems so serious that Ferguson will recommend they be referred to the RCMP for a criminal investigation. Seven of them involve senators who are no longer in the upper chamber. The other two are sitting senators — one Conservative and one Liberal — were expected to be asked to resign.
Cowan defended himself and the other Senate leaders on Thursday after the audit findings were leaked to reporters. Ferguson’s report was delivered to the Senate on Thursday and will be publicly released on Tuesday.
“I’m sure none of us would love to be here, but that’s not our choice. But we are where we are. I think the leaders of the Senate behaved entirely responsibly,” Cowan said.
Cowan added he had a “respectful disagreement” with Ferguson over travel expenses from 2011 that total “a little over $10,000.”
“Those claims were made for trips that I undertook as part of my duties as a senator,” said Cowan, a Senator since 2005.
“I submitted claims in 2011 on Senate forms. They were properly supported by all of the invoices, boarding passes and all that sort of thing.”
He said the auditor general says his office should have kept more information and he believes he was not required to do so.
He said he will have the matter reviewed by an arbitration process the Senate has set up to review instances where senators disagree with Ferguson’s findings.
The fact that Housakos, Carignan and Cowan are named in the auditor general’s report takes on special significance because they are members of a Senate subcommittee handling the Senate’s response to the audits.
They recently decided to hire an outside arbitrator — former Supreme Court justice Ian Binnie — to hear complaints from senators who are asked to reimburse expenses flagged in the audit.
It’s expected that questions will be raised about whether the threeperson Senate leadership should have been involved at all in setting up the mechanisms to settle disputes on the auditor general’s findings.
Carignan confirmed he is named in the report, but said it was in reference to a staff member’s travel expenses, not his own.
The staff member charged the Senate about $3,000 for about 10 to 12 trips between Ottawa and the Montreal area, Carignan said. The staff member was representing Carignan at various events, the senator said.
“He misunderstood the rules and made a mistake with the clarification of the rules,” Carignan said.
He said the money has been paid back to the Senate, “so it’s done. I will not have to use the arbitration process because it’s paid.”
Housakos told The Canadian Press that he also disagrees with some of Ferguson’s findings, although he’s already repaid $1,600 in disputed travel expenses that a staffer claimed for mileage between Ottawa and Montreal.
Housakos said the staff member was helping him as the co-chair of a fundraising event for a non-profit organization in Montreal.
Housakos said the auditor general is also challenging him on about $6,000 worth of contracts he issued rather than hire a full-time policy adviser. Ferguson had taken exception to the wording of the contracts, but Housakos said he plans to appeal the decision, saying there was no deliberate attempt to mislead the Senate.
“I think the auditor is being, in my particular case, nitpicky,” Housakos said, arguing that his contracting arrangements actually saved the Senate money.
In an interview last month after being named the new Speaker, Housakos said the auditor general’s report was going to be a “watershed moment in the history of the Senate.” He vowed that any senator with a pattern of abuse would be suspended without pay, as were Patrick Brazeau, Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin.
“If there are any improprieties discovered by the auditor general, we will deal with it as aggressively as we have in the past,” he said. “There could be cases where there are administrative errors, senators have made mistakes in good faith — they’re errors of good faith. When you have patterns of inappropriate expense claims, that’s a whole other story.”
Thursday evening Senator Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu announced he was resigning from the Conservative caucus and will sit as an independent.
In a statement, he said he made the decision voluntarily after learning he will be the subject of an RCMP investigation.
The NDP — which advocates the abolition of the Senate and has no members in the upper chamber — reacted quickly Thursday to news that the Senate’s leadership is implicated in the audit’s findings.
“What we’re dealing with here is an issue of unprecedented crisis in terms of the legitimacy of the upper house,” said NDP MP Charlie Angus.
Ferguson’s audit teams have reviewed two years of spending receipts from senators. The two-year probe focused on the spending of 117 past and current senators. The most problematic expense claims have been pegged by Senate sources as being worth more than $100,000, with housing and travel claims at the root of concerns.