The Senate rot goes far beyond Duffy, Wallin & Harb

Over the weekend, CTV aired photos of then-Conservative Senator Mike Duffy lounging aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 2012 — at the exact same time as he was claiming expenses for doing official Senate business. Mr. Duffy already has repaid these funds (but only after the release of audit results left him no choice) with cash he got from a personal sympathy cheque dashed off by former Prime Ministerial chief of staff Nigel Wright. But the images were considered newsworthy by CTV — because they further cement Sen. Duffy’s status as the perfect human embodiment of the ongoing Senate-expenses scandal. Indeed, as a cocky, money-hungry Ottawa insider who brazenly parlayed his willingness to act as a full-time Tory partisan in return for a $132,000-a-year Red Chamber sinecure, Sen. Duffy is straight out of central casting.

But it’s important to remember that Mike Duffy is not the only senator who’s been implicated in the scandal. Senator Mac Harb, for instance, resigned from the Liberal caucus in May after it was revealed that he’d improperly collected over $50,000 in Senate housing allowances (that number could go up as a possible RCMP criminal investigation moves forward). Like Sen. Duffy (who blamed his expenses mix-up on the allegedly “confusing” nature of Senate paperwork, and the alleged incompetence of an unidentified staffer), Sen. Harb’s initial response was a denial. As of this writing, he is still lawyered up and challenging the audit findings in court.

Then there’s Senator Pamela Wallin — a Conservative, until she resigned from caucus amidst reports of her own expense-report errors, which might turn out to be greater in scale than Sen. Duffy’s once all the beans are counted. Indeed, she must be quite thrilled that Mr. Duffy continues to dominate the headlines, as this has pushed her own indiscretions off the front pages.

Given the current climate, one might think that the completion and release of an independent audit into Sen. Wallin’s expenses would be a matter of some urgency for the Senate’s internal economy committee. But then, remember that this is the same committee whose Conservative members, apparently acting out of crass partisan loyalty, deliberately watered down a report on Mike Duffy’s finances. The scandal in the Senate isn’t just that senators are getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar — it’s that their colleagues care more about protecting party brand than the reputation and integrity of the Senate itself.

In fact, we don’t even know if the independent audit of Sen. Wallin’s finances has been completed. When the question was put last week to Conservative Senator David Tkachuk, the committee chair, his biggest priority seemed to be making excuses for keeping the report under wraps for the next three months — until Sept. 16, when the House and Senate resume sitting after the summer break. “We will deal with it in [committee] and then we’ll table the report as soon as Parliament meets,” the Senator told CBC News.

This delay tactic is predicated on the notion that it would somehow be improper to promulgate an audit report when Parliament isn’ t sitting. But if the senators truly wanted the numbers released in timely fashion, they could easily do so by tabling it in advance with the Clerk of the Senate. Moreover, as former Liberal MP Paul Szabo has observed, Senate committees can hold hearings at any time, by majority vote — even if both houses of Parliament aren’t sitting.

Given the extent of the Duffy disaster, one would think that the Tories would be cleaning up their act in the Red Chamber. But instead, we get more cynical obstructionism from the same group of senators who unsuccessfully tried to whitewash Sen. Duffy the first time around.

Sens. Wallin, Duffy and Harb eventually will have to answer for their indiscretions. But it is not just they who are embarrassing the Senate. David Tkachuk and his fellow Tories on the internal economy committee (Claude Carignan, Noël A. Kinsella, Judith G. Seidman, Gerald J. Comeau, Norman E. Doyle, Elizabeth Marshall, Larry Smith and Carolyn StewartOlsen), along with the Liberal senators who did their best to shield Mac Harb, also embody the culture of cronyism in the Red Chamber.

Few Canadians would complain if these specimens took early retirement. It would be a good first step in the Senate “reform” that Stephen Harper has long claimed to want.

Quebecers will be spending their summer enjoying government-subsidized comedy and music festivals. Meanwhile, the province’s Parti Québécois government will be doing its best to ensure an angry and tempestuous political season when Autumn arrives.

Hints from Bernard Drainville, the provincial minister responsible for democratic institutions, indicate that the PQ will seek to use identity politics as a springboard to a majority government, and eventually a referendum on sovereignty. He’ll be working on the PQ’s secularist “Charter of Quebec Values,” and a blueprint will be released in the fall. Quebec “secularism,” as the PQ defines it can be defined as the prohibition of religious accommodation and symbols in the public sector — unless they are associated with the French-Catholic majority.

There are Quebecers who might be drawn in by this lure. In a recent Léger Marketing survey commissioned by the government, 78% said they believed the accommodation issue was “important.” And it’s telling that few commentators criticized the Quebec Soccer Federation’s recent declaration that turban-wearing Sikh children should play soccer in their own backyards if they aren’t willing to remove their head covering for official league matches.

Mr. Drainville recently launched a couple of “reasonable accommodation” trial balloons of his own, in a throwback to the 2007 provincial election. After that vote, the former Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ) party leaped ahead of the PQ to form the official opposition, boosted by identity rhetoric. The town of Hérouxville famously passed a law banning ston-

In implementing a plan for fixed election dates, Mr. Dranville, with the backing of the Coalition Avenir Québec (the reincarnation of the old ADQ), set the next provincial election for Oct. 3, 2016, which happens to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

“There are more than 100 religious holidays,” Mr. Drainville said, arguing that the principles to be outlined in his version of state secularism meant that logistical accommodations for minorities should never, ever be a factor in setting election dates.