Tkachuk in Liberal sights
Cowan wants review of Duffy affair
The opposition Liberals in the Senate are poised to force the former chairman of the committee overseeing an audit of Sen. Mike Duffy to answer new questions about the affair.
Liberal Senate leader James Cowan said Wednesday that his senators on the internal economy committee intend to have the body review whether its former chairman, Sen. David Tkachuk, acted inappropriately by allegedly speaking more than once with Duffy while the latter was being audited.
Tkachuk denied a report this week that he allegedly tried to coerce Duffy into taking a bailout from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former right-hand man, Nigel Wright, calling the alleged conversation a “fabrication.” CTV News, which reported the original story, has stood by its report, causing a war of words that Cowan said requires answers for the Senate committee that oversaw spending audits of Duffy and three other senators.
“I don’t know who is telling the truth,” Cowan said from P.E.I. “There are more questions every day, and no one is providing the answers.”
Cowan said that talks with the committee’s vice-chairman, Liberal Sen. George Furey, have already started about what could be done to determine what, if anything, went wrong with the committee’s internal processes, and whether any changes for future audits are required.
The questions and political posturing come days after a CTV News report alleged that Tkachuk threatened Duffy with using his majority on the internal economy committee executive to have Duffy booted from the Senate because he didn’t meet the constitutional residency requirement. That report alleged that Tkachuk “told Duffy that if he went along with Wright’s bailout offer, the Senate committee would throw out the residency issue and go easy on him in the audit of his expenses,” CTV News wrote in an online version of the story.
CTV News did not publish the emails purportedly outlining the alleged conversation, citing the need to protect a source. Postmedia News has not seen the emails and cannot verify their authenticity.
On Tuesday, Tkachuk denied such a conversation took place and said in a statement with Sen. Carolyn Stewart Olsen — who was referenced in the report — that anyone suggesting the duo knew of Wright’s deal with Duffy before it was revealed in May “is lying.”
Booting a senator from the upper chamber couldn’t have been done by the executive of the internal economy committee. The Constitution says senators lose their seat if they declare bankruptcy while in office, or if they are convicted of an indictable offence with a sentence of at least two years.
The Senate as a whole can vote to make a seat vacant, thereby throwing out one of their own through a simple majority vote. “It’s up to the Senate to make those decisions,” Cowan said. “It’s a simple majority vote.”