Auditor general calls for culture change with senators’ expenses
OTTAWA — The Senate is facing one of the biggest crises of its existence after a sweeping audit found repeated abuses of taxpayer dollars and a need for wholesale culture change — even as some defiant senators staunchly maintained they’ve done nothing wrong.
Auditor general Michael Ferguson’s 116page audit report on the Senate released Tuesday found a “pervasive lack of evidence or significant contradictory evidence” to support expense claims for some senators, including members of the upper chamber who billed the public for activities such as a fishing trip, attending a family funeral or ski shows and travelling to a family member’s convocation.
In one case, a senator charged a per diem and taxis to dine in Montreal with a fellow Senate colleague on the same day he attended a “professional hockey game,” the report says. A couple of Conservative senators billed taxpayers for attending a 50th wedding anniversary of one of their Senate colleagues.
“We found that the oversight, accountability and transparency of senators’ expenses was quite simply not adequate,” Ferguson says in his report. “Senators often did not prioritize consideration of the cost to taxpayers.”
All told, the auditor general flagged 30 senators in his report for problematic or questionable expense claims totalling almost $1 million, including nine current and former senators whose files have been referred to the RCMP.
Five among that group of nine senators claimed tens of thousands of dollars in ineligible expenses by declaring their primary residence was outside Ottawa when in fact they spent most of their time in the nation’s capital. Another 21 current and former members of the upper chamber claimed thousands on travel and other expenses that had nothing to do with parliamentary business, the report says. Their cases will be sent to a Senate committee for review.
The report recommends the Senate create an independent oversight body to review expenses and calls on members of the upper chamber to usher in a new era of accountability in how they spend taxpayer dollars.
“The lack of transparency was something that was obvious fairly early on. But what struck me in terms of that was the depth to which a number of senators simply felt that they didn’t have to be transparent with their spending,” Ferguson told reporters.
The audit examined all expenses filed by 116 senators and now-former senators between April 1, 2011, and March 31, 2013.
Two of the nine senators whose files have been referred to the RCMP are sitting senators: Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu (who has resigned from the Tory caucus to sit as an independent) and Senate Liberal Colin Kenny. The other seven retired senators whose cases are being referred to the Mounties include Gerry St. Germain, Don Oliver, Sharon Carstairs, Rose-Marie Losier-Cool, Bill Rompkey, Rod Zimmer and Marie-Paule Charette-Poulin.