Behaviour experts say upper house breeds sense of entitlement

OTTAWA — As Sen. Pamela Wallin’s damning expense audit becomes public knowledge, many Canadians have taken to social media and the op-ed pages of their local newspapers to express disgust at what they call the senator’s “sense of entitlement.”

Wallin — who is accused of improperly claiming more than $120,000 in travel expenses — has staunchly denied she feels any such thing.

“I do not have some sense of entitlement,” she told the CBC in June.

“I didn’t deliberately set out to abuse this system in any way.”

She insists Senate rules about what can be claimed are unclear and that the audit process was “fundamentally flawed and unfair.”

But behaviour experts say it’s not unusual for people in positions of power to feel entitled.

“People in the Senate, in the Canadian Senate, are there because they’re being rewarded for a lifetime of service to Canada,” said Del Paulhus, a psychology professor at University of British Columbia who studies narcissism.

“It seems that’s why they’re there: Because they deserve to be there and they deserve to get all the perks.”

Paulhus said Wallin “absolutely” displayed a sense of entitlement by charging taxpayers for travel not directly related to Senate duties and that her behaviour is not surprising.

After all, he said, Canada’s upper house — which is filled with successful people who are often told how important they are — breeds a culture of entitlement.

But Paulhus said some people are more likely than others to believe they deserve to use public funds for their own purposes.

Feelings of entitlement often come hand-in-hand with big egos, Paulhus said, and people who make their careers as television broadcasters — as Wallin did — could be more likely to fit that description.

And just as broadcast work draws people with a distorted sense of what they are owed, so too does the Senate, said Christian Jordan, a psychology professor and narcissism expert at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.

While he said there’s no reason to think the Senate as a whole has an inflated sense of entitlement, “there’s certainly evidence that narcissists are more likely to seek high-profile positions, be they celebrity positions or in politics, more than other people do.”

“And being in those positions leads people to feel a greater sense of entitlement and power as well,” Jordan said.

Jordan said people with this attitude believe they deserve more than others and don’t feel bad about claiming what they believe to be rightfully theirs.

The audit of Wallin’s expense claims, made public this week, has been turned over to the RCMP.