as a field of Prairie wheat after a summer’s heavy hailstorm. He set about rebuilding the party from the ground up, turning it into an effective political force that carried Grant Devine into office. David accompanied Saskatchewan’s new premier to the Regina Legislative Buildings as his principal secretary.
Mr. Tkachuk’s commitment to the PC cause extended into the national realm as well. After becoming chair of the John Diefenbaker Society in 1992, he arranged funding to keep the former prime minister’s papers at the University of Saskatchewan’s John G. Diefenbaker Centre. In June the next year, a grateful Brian Mulroney appointed Tkachuk to the Senate. In 1997, from the Senate, he co-chaired the Progressive Conservative national election campaign, and in 2005 Conservative leader Stephen Harper named him “Senate Chair” for the general election that took place in 2006, when the Conservatives formed a national government. Senator David Tkachuk had earned his respected reputation in Conservative Party circles.
Liberal Senator George Furey of Newfoundland and Labrador had plenty of experience with Senate administration by the time the elements of the Senate expenses scandal came together, having himself chaired the committee from October 2004 to March 2010. He was now deputy chair of the Internal Economy Committee, in keeping with the tradition of partisan balance.
George Furey had also started his career as teacher, but after leaving the profession, he went on to qualify to practise law in 1984, specializing in labour arbitration at his St. John’s firm. He also volunteered with community groups, and served on professional boards and provincial commissions. The pull of politics was strong. In 1989, he had a senior role in the provincial Liberal election campaign that brought Clyde Wells to power, and in 1995 chaired Brian Tobin’s leadership campaign as the federal minister of fisheries and oceans became the province’s new premier. He then chaired the Liberal landslide victory campaign in the ensuing general election.
On the federal front, George Furey was equally impressive, co-chairing successful general election campaigns in Newfoundland and Labrador for Prime Minister Chrétien in 1993 and 1997. In August 1999, Mr. Chrétien brought campaign organizer Furey closer to hand, placing him on the public payroll in the Senate of Canada from where he chaired the Liberal’s 2000 general election win in the province. From 2012 on, when the Senate expenses issues began to grow complicated, Senator Furey would by instinct as an administrator, lawyer, and partisan maintain a close watch on Liberal interests and keep his colleagues informed, but keep his public profile low.
Joining them on the Internal Economy Committee, Senator Carolyn Stewart-Olsen played a pivotal role developing the Senate expenses scandal. Born in Sackville, New Brunswick, Carolyn Stewart became a registered nurse, working at hospitals in her home province, then in Québec and Ontario. By 1986, she’d become head nurse of ambulatory care at Ottawa’s Grace Hospital, and later served as nursing manager for four primary health care departments at Carleton Place Hospital. As her twenty-year nursing career specializing in emergency and trauma care progressed, Carolyn witnessed enough wasteful practices in public administration and health care spending to make her receptive to Preston Manning’s trumpet call for stringent fiscal management and accountability. Bureaucratic duplication, waste of money, and practices that put institutions and professionals ahead of patients could all be surgically removed, she believed, if the right person held the scalpel.
In 1993, Carolyn turned from nursing to politics, first volunteering in the Reform Party’s communications office, then being hired on staff as a press aide working under Preston Manning, who now was leading a major party in the Commons with fifty-two MPs. She continued through the turbulent emergence of Reform’s first successor party, the United Alternative, and then its second, the Canadian Alliance. When Stockwell Day, an MP who’d been Alberta’s Progressive Conservative finance minister, defeated Manning for the Alliance leadership, Carolyn lost her job. Still dedicated to the Reform cause, she began working for Deborah Grey, the first Reform MP to have been elected and also a Manning loyalist. By 2001, Carolyn emerged as press aide to the “Democratic Representative Caucus,” a dissident group of MPs, including Grey, who’d bolted from the third version of Reform, the Alliance, as led by Mr. Day.
As Carolyn Stewart-Olsen came to know Medicine Hat MP Monte Solberg, another of the dissident Alberta MPs in the group, she formed a productive working relationship with Alison Stodin, a skillful Parliament Hill staffer hired by Mr. Solberg when he’d first arrived in Ottawa as a freshly elected Reform MP in 1993 carrying a book of political science definitions as part of a crash-course on Parliament.
Stodin quickly became a trusted, respected, and reliable resource to Solberg, Stewart, and other neophyte Reformers on The Hill, imparting what she knew about the Commons Order Paper, drafting parliamentary resolutions, researching issues by tapping directly into the resources of the Parliamentary Library, printing and mailing free reports to constituents, ordering supplies, and the intricacies of House of Commons budget administration. Her prior years with Progressive Conservative riding associations in her hometown of Hamilton, her university studies in politics, on-going reading of books on political philosophy, and her years of dedicated work for several parliamentarians made Stodin an indispensible human pillar supporting Reform’s parliamentary presence. Carolyn and Alison worked effectively together.
The following year, 2002, when Stephen Harper challenged Stockwell Day for the leadership of the Alliance, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen signed on as Mr. Harper’s press secretary in what became a successful campaign. During their battle to prevail, a strong bond of loyalty and mutual respect was forged between the two. It fused even stronger in 2004 when Stephen Harper campaigned for, and won, the leadership of the reconstituted Conservative Party of Canada. Stewart-Olsen was frequently in contact with the party leader and had more ready access to Mr. Harper than even political staffers senior to her. When Mr. Harper became prime minister in 2006, she followed him into the PMO as his press secretary and director of strategic communication. In August 2009, the PM announced that Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, a resident of New Brunswick, where she and her husband have a home at Cape Spear, would become a senator. Prime Minister Harper now had a tested and trusted confidant in the upper house, an active supporter seasoned in the backrooms of parliamentary politics. She joined Senator Tkachuk on the Internal Economy Committee’s smaller, and even more powerful, steering committee, where delicate decisions needed to be taken on how to handle the problematic expenses of Stephen Harper’s celebrity senators.
In 2010, veteran journalist Peter Worthington made one of his formidable forays into the operations of Canadian public affairs by recommending, in the Toronto Sun’s December 22 edition, that the Senate of Canada needed “a watchdog.” It was his way of saying the Internal Economy Committee was coming up short, that independent eyes were needed to ensure senators complied with rules and did not waste public money.
Although Worthington’s slant on issues was often at odds with the conventional wisdom prevailing in Canadian political circles, on this issue he was the exponent of a fairly widely held view. Anyone who paid attention knew the Senate did not meet present-day standards in any department. The puzzle was that anybody would even waste their time or talent bothering to mention it. Especially for so skilled a marksman as Peter Worthington, the hoary Senate seemed too easy a target.
But in the eyes of the Internal Economy Committee’s chair David Tkachuk, Worthington’s in-bound missile required some counter-fire. “One matter that has drawn media attention, and which unfortunately has been misinterpreted, concerns the manner in which our expenses are approved,” the senator responded.
“Senators,” Tkachuk explained, “are responsible and accountable for their expenses.” He was referring, of course, to the long-established “honour system” whereby members of the upper house submit chits, or stubs, or receipts, or scrawled notes, or nothing at all, then declare that the spending was for “Senate business” on a covering sheet and sign it. Tkachuk claimed that this system of individual accountability and responsibility was backed up by a strong administrative regime. “The Senate also has rules and limits to govern what is paid, and a vigorous process that ensures only legitimate
