Sen. Beyak discredits herself and the Senate

Lynn Beyak’s best-before date in the Canadian Senate has just expired.

While the perennially outrageous senator has survived posting other people’s racist emails and thoroughly offending the country’s Indigenous community, her latest antics justify her permanent expulsion from the Red Chamber — even if in practice that will be difficult to accomplish.

Although it only recently became public, Sen. Beyak contributed $300 to U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in May, an action that violated American federal law and appears to have involved deliberate deception on her part.

The United States expressly prohibits campaigns from soliciting or accepting contributions from foreign nationals who do not hold U.S. citizenship. Beyak has not stepped forward to say she holds joint citizenship and dispel the reasonable conclusion that she broke American law. Instead, Beyak’s office confirmed she made the donation, but added the money “is being returned in its entirety, simply because (the contribution) was erroneous.”

That explanation simply doesn’t wash. “Erroneous?” How could that be? Public records from the American Federal Election Commission show Beyak listed her occupation as retired and her address as a post office box on Davis Point Road, in Dryden, N.Y. The trouble for Beyak is that no such road or address exists in the New York state community. Nor does anyone named Lynn Beyak live in town. Canada’s Sen. Lynn Beyak does, in fact, live in a place named Dryden; but it’s Dryden, Ont.

There might be some people out there who will believe Beyak made a donation to Trump’s campaign without being aware U.S. law prohibited it. We doubt anyone is gullible enough to believe she made a so-called “erroneous” contribution while unintentionally or accidentally giving her address as a place, in a state and in a country where she did not live. Who could innocently make such a litany of errors?

This is why Beyak’s donation was so egregiously wrong and grounds for expelling her from the Senate. The issue is not her political proclivities, which some Canadians may find objectionable or even bizarre. She has a right to her opinion. She has no right, however, to break the laws of another country or behave dishonestly. Nor is this by any means the first strike against Beyak. In 2017, the Conservative Senate caucus expelled her for advocating a program that would give Indigenous people cash in return for relinquishing their protected status and land.

Later, she refused to remove from her website messages widely condemned as racist attacks on Indigenous people. As a result of that controversy, she was suspended without pay from the Senate in 2019, up until the federal election. In February of this year, she was suspended again for failing to complete anti-racism training. But after a new session of Parliament began in September, she was back at her job collecting her full $157,600-a-year salary.

When it comes to bringing herself and the institution she is sworn to serve into disrepute, Beyak is a serial offender. Of course, the Senate should again review Beyak’s actions and, barring some unforeseen explanation, hold her accountable. Because the current rules do not permit the permanent expulsion of a senator, she can only be ousted for the rest of the current session of Parliament. That would be better than nothing.

Better, still, her latest misbehaviour should convince Parliament to change the rules so a senator can be thrown out of the Senate once and for all. If this can’t apply to Beyak, at least it could spare the Senate — and Canadians — from being stuck with such an embarrassment in the future.