from the nation’s capital over CBC and CTV airwaves. Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy basked in enthusiastic partisan approbation at centre stage, co-hosting the national Conservative convention in Ottawa.
Chapter 4
The Elements of Scandal Combine
In the spring of 2012, Canada’s auditor general, Michael Ferguson, released an audit report on several senators’ claims for expenses. In some cases, he noted on June 13, Senate administration did not have documents to support claims for travel and living expenses.
For anyone working inside Parliament familiar with Senate administration, this revelation was not news; it was a common thing, a picayune detail. But to someone unconditioned by senatorial norms, this matter of missing paperwork for expenses approved and paid was, well, scandalous. Even so, accounting sloppiness could not have become fodder for a titanic battle in Canadian politics unless other elements were also converging to make a truly major scandal.
Behind the stone-piled walls in the east end of the Parliament Buildings, the Senate of Canada is controlled by its all-powerful Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets, and Financial Administration. The Senate’s administrators report to this committee. Almost everyone refers to it as “the Internal Economy Committee” to conveniently shorten the long name; this subliminally leads to the overlooking of its role in supervising budgets and financial administration — a case of terminology revealing truth.
To appreciate the depth of the problems in the financial administration at the Senate, a comparison with Parliament’s other house provides a quick lesson. Over at the House of Commons, in the west end of the Parliament Buildings, MPs come and go quickly — the result of Canada having the highest turnover rate of elected representatives in any of the world’s democracies. The financial administrators are permanent employees with real power who take a firm hand in budget management. With passing years, they continue in office and get to know everything about the operations and weaknesses of parliamentarians. They lead each new intake of fresh MPs onto the approved financial pathways and become their firm guides along the journey. They have sharp pencils, even sharper eyes.
When a rule came in back in the 1980s that MPs could not hire family members, two of my colleagues winked as each one hired the other’s daughter to work in their offices for the summer. The Commons Budget Office could not be hoodwinked by such a ruse, because its employees knew what to watch out for and also had a comprehensive system in place for cross-checking and verifying all aspects of an MP’s expenses. The small scandal that resulted created red faces for the two Ontario MPs and loss of jobs for their girls, while serving as a morality play for all MPs: Never mock the budget rules or the financial administrators who enforce them.
Back in the Senate, in stark contrast, the appointed parliamentarians enjoy extended longevity in office while the hired staff come and go. The culture of lax budget control, which is the result, had already become well entrenched in the days when senators held office for life. The absence of administration was camouflaged by hallowed pretence of the Senate’s “honour system.”
The mythical “system” — it was actually an absence of system — continued to be the Senate’s operating cultural norm, even after the 1960s when the rules were changed so that senators could no longer hang around past age seventy-five, simply because it was embedded in the very fabric of the place and because new senators appeared on the scene just a few at a time, sometimes even one by one through a lone appointment. These scattered novices acclimatized themselves to long-established practices. They did not question the existing order — three readings needed for a legislative bill to pass, no expense chits needed for submitting a reimbursement bill — any more successfully than a novitiate entering the priesthood might challenge the intimidating power and dumb inertia of a system that had lumbered along for centuries. Even with mandatory retirement, most senators remain on Parliament Hill for decades. New arrivals acclimatize. There are plenty of old hands to teach inductees the ropes.
All of this means that senators can intimidate the staff ostensibly running budget operations. They do so with ease. Unlike the Commons, members of the Senate have an upper hand over those trying to impose modern administrative procedures and controls. “I’ll still be here long after you’re gone,” one senator asserted in one such showdown, forcing a staff administrator to relent. While not always expressed quite so bluntly, this attitude is part of the operating culture of the Senate. Its members are in charge of themselves and run this public institution more like their private club.
Reinforcing this order of things is the fact senators are appointed by the prime minister. Around Parliament Hill, the wish of a prime minister is as potent as a military commander’s order to a subordinate. Few working on The Hill, including staff at the Senate, are immune from this deference to power. Even with two factors that can offset somewhat this fear of the PM — being of a different political party, and supposedly having some independence as a senator — the reality is that budget officers and financial administrators working for the Senate have little incentive to stir things up, for example, by trying to impose tighter control over spending, or by causing embarrassment to the prime minister over the “minor” financial sloppiness of his appointees.
It is not the case that most of the financial issues that arise in connection with the Senate are the result of deliberate attempts to cheat the system. Senators are good people who’ve had fascinating lives before reaching the upper house, and whose life experiences make each one abidingly interesting as an individual. Any Canadian fortunate enough to do so is enriched by the educational experience of conversing with a senator. Each has so much to teach. Many have rich contributions to make to public affairs, and try gamely through the muted channels of the Senate to do so. Few of them, though, have been administrators seasoned in running a large, diverse, tradition-bound organization spending $92,500,000 a year in a politically contentious environment.
The result is that those appointed to advance partisan interests focus their attention on political organization and fund-raising; those appointed in recognition of their past accomplishments devote themselves mostly to basking in such glory as the Senate offers; those appointed to get them out of cabinet or remove them from some other public role where they have become an impediment to the prime minister generally resign themselves to drawing a generous salary and accepting that their future is behind them; and the ones with years of senatorship ahead who want to promote a worthy cause of special personal importance devote themselves to that. With all those subtractions from a total membership of 105, a relatively small number of senators remains available for, or is even interested in, dedicating energy and time to the internal economy, budgetary, and administrative matters of the place.
It is mostly the “political” senators, previously distinguished by devotion to party and elections, who want to be on the Internal Economy Committee. They have been drawn to power and its exercise in the past, and remain that way still. As a consequence, those running the upper house as members of the Internal Economy Committee tend to look at things less through the lens of a chartered accountant or a professor of public administration and more through the eyes of instinctive power wielders serving the best interests of their party, while in the process seeking the least embarrassment or controversy for the institution they are running. As members of the Senate’s most powerful committee, they are “players” in Ottawa’s power game.
And among those players, the three most pivotal when the expenses scandal exploded were senators David Tkachuk, George Furey, and Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, with Conservatives Tkachuck and Stewart-Olsen indispensable in arranging the elements of an explosive scandal.
Senator David Tkachuk of Saskatchewan became known to Canadians, when the expenses scandal broke, as chair of the committee.
A down-to-earth man who earned his B.A. from University of Saskatchewan in the 1960s and followed that with teaching, David found politics a bigger draw by the 1970s.
