Senate ethics committee to finalize report detailing fate of Don Meredith
The Senate’s ethics committee, pondering a range of sanctions from reprimanding Sen. Don Meredith to his outright expulsion is to meet on Tuesday to go over its draft report on the punishment he’ll face for having a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl.
The content of the committee’s report will not be released until it is finalized and tabled this week in the Senate, which must sign off on any sanctions recommended by the committee.
It’s not known whether it might be delayed in light of a report Sunday by the online Huff-Post Canada news site in which three former female staffers — whose identifies were withheld at their request — alleged “some alarming workplace behaviours”, including harassment and sexual abuse, in his Ottawa office for years.
Huffington Post said Meredith’s office declined an interview request with the Senators and that his lawyer, Bill Trudell, did not reply to requests to speak about his client.
“We’re coming to the final end of the process,” ethics committee chair Raynell Andreychuk said following a three-hour, closed-door meeting last week.
Andreychuk said that while the objective is to table the final report this week, she acknowledged that might yet prove too ambitious.
“We want to be fair. We want to weigh all of the interests: the institution, the senators, the public and Sen. Meredith. And so, while we have to be prompt, we also have to be correct in following the process and being fair to everyone.”
The committee’s deliberations were sparked by a damning report last month from the Senate’s ethics officer, Lyse Ricard, who concluded that Meredith didn’t uphold the “highest standards of dignity inherent to the position of senator” and acted in a way that could damage the Senate itself.
According to Ricard, Meredith began a relationship with the girl when she was just 16; it progressed from flirtatious online chats to fondling and sexually explicit live videos and, eventually, to sexual intercourse — once shortly before the teen turned 18 and twice after.