THE KEY TO THE RENASCENCE ... OF THE SENATE OF CANADA IS TO FILL IT WITH CAPABLE PEOPLE.

the investigation was over and that no charges would be laid. The Code (article 48), invites the Senate Ethics Officer to recommend remedial action, but Ms. Ricard found that “remedial measures are not available.”

The demand for Sen. Meredith’s resignation has ensued, and I saw one zealot on a CBC panel on March 14 declaim that he cannot be allowed to resign; he must be expelled. That is the first rung in the ladder that leads to Stalin’s demand that his police prevent his victims from committing suicide, because he wanted to be able to extract false confessions and denunciations from them by torture and then to use them in show trials and execute them.

There are several problems that the police decided that no charges would be laid because Ms. M said she didn’t want her name published, but it is more likely, on the facts as recounted by Ms. Ricard herself, that the police judged they had no case to claim a crime had been committed. The senator deserves, evidently, the benefit of the doubt Ms. M has created. And in determining that remedial action will not suffice, she admits that Sen. Meredith has materially reduced the likelihood of repetition by having “placed myself under the guidance of spiritual advisers, … engaged in continuous prayers of repentance and seeking forgiveness of (my) family (Meredith is a Christian pastor), engaged in professional” and peer counselling, completed a “professional development course,” and “carefully studied and reviewed the Code to ensure that my conduct going forward is consistent with its obligations.” Sen. Meredith ended the relationship in May 2015, after explaining to Ms. M that he felt God disapproved of it, and she expressed understanding and they parted apparently amicably.

Ms. Ricard scrambled backwards for jurisdiction, found against Sen. Meredith on all substantive issues, does not exercise her duty to report that he has been exonerated of crimes, and professes to find it impossible to find remedial action, though she does not contest the sincerity of his repentance and the unlikelihood of repetition. It is a shabby and, on its face, an unethical use of the Ethics Office of the Senate. President William J. Clinton committed much greater offences in a much greater office, was much less contrite, and was excused with the equivalent of a slapped wrist (and quite rightly — his impeachment was nonsense, apart from the question of perjury, where he came close but didn’t quite do it).

Ladies of Ms. M’s age at the time of the activities complained of can have abortions, procreate, marry and do what older people do. Ms. M seems to have generated this story out of vengeance and in a way designed to destroy Sen. Meredith’s career while concealing her own identity. The senator’s conduct was indisputably tawdry and contemptible, and almost insane, and especially unbecoming a clergyman and champion of youth empowerment. But there is no grounds to expel him from the Senate, and that house would do itself honour by tempering justice with mercy and by not being duped and manipulated to over-reactive severity in a case of imprudent but consensual intimacy with a young woman legally of age. Sen. Meredith should be censured, but his repentance should be accepted.

Sen. Beyak’s offence was