it was partisans in the Commons, primarily the NDP, acting as the Official Opposition and on principle opposed to the Senate’s existence, who were the most effective politicians trying to cope with the issue. They, at least, kept the scandal alive, giving time for others to do their more effective work.
This is where auditors, the second force for bringing financial mismanagement and budget skullduggery to light, help keep behaviour in line. In the process, these arms-length vigilantees added a major new element to the emerging scandal of Senate financial administration.
In addition to reviews of Senate administration such as the auditor general of Canada carried out in 2012, the Senate itself retains professional auditing firms for dispassionate evaluation from time to time, as Senator Tkachuk noted in answering Peter Worthington. Between 2005 and 2012, outside auditors got the call nine times, principally to review overall spending, but also to examine several specific expenditures.
Typically, the auditor’s report on findings is generally worded, its recommendations cast in broad terms of process, and the Senate’s response one of saying that it agrees, is already implementing the proposed improvements, and remains dedicated to protecting public funds. Auditors are more regulators than revolutionaries in terms of what happens at the Senate, but nevertheless their presence does from time to time have a sobering, if not a corrective, effect.
A crucial third element among those investigating the Senate expenses scandal is the cadre of reporters covering Parliament for various news organizations. They would emerge as the most unsettling players amidst the Senate’s process of financial oversight and ethical vigilance. Without journalists, the problems at the Senate could not have been become the national preoccupation they did.
The Parliamentary Press Gallery, and the news organizations it feeds across Canada, transported the details out of Senate committee rooms and over the country’s airwaves, into newspapers, and onto hand-held screens.
Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief for CTV News, became an early and authoritative chronicler of the snags that several senators had hit with their expense claims. In March 2012 he broke stories about senators Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau being under the gun for money the Senate had paid them as an allowance for housing costs and meals. From then on, he became a leading Ottawa reporter for this story, steadily broadcasting new developments over the months to come, often the first to do so.
Mr. Fife is a seasoned political reporter who’d started in the parliamentary bureau of NewsRadio in 1978 and moved to UPI and next Canadian Press in the 1980s, emerging as a newspaper columnist for Sun Media and then the National Post before moving into television with CTV. He acquired an abiding interest in scandalous aspects of politics, in 1991 co-authoring a book entitled A Capital Scandal: Politics, Patronage and Payoff — Why Parliament Must Be Reformed. Robert Fife also has further media clout as executive producer of Power Play, CTV’s daily political affairs show from Ottawa that is the permanent replacement for Duffy Live, which ended when Mike Duffy left the network to become a senator at the end of 2008.
Robert Fife’s background knowledge of Parliament Hill, his fertile network of contacts, his national media platform as a network broadcaster, and his lead in scooping Senate scandal news all combined to make him a natural recipient for anyone at the Senate wanting to leak information about newsworthy senators who were overstepping ethical bounds on their expenses.
Fife reported as early as April 2013 that Nigel Wright had provided Mike Duffy some $90,000 to pay back the challenged expense claims. He also reported that there was another part of the deal, one of Duffy’s conditions; that condition specified that the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee would go easy on Duffy in its report, and that the Steering Committee — controlled by senators Tkachuk and Stewart-Olsen — would whitewash whatever the Deloitte report said after auditing the P.E.I. senator’s claims.
Whether Mr. Fife’s source was a member of the Internal Audit Committee, or a Senate staffer, or someone else, is hard to confirm. Fife himself sticks to his understandable practice of never giving interviews about his journalism. Protecting sources is as crucial as it is challenging. When the RCMP asked him for copies of emails or other documents about the deal between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy, which the CTV bureau chief had been reporting about authoritatively, he took a pass. It was not the role of journalists to do the work of the police. The work of all reporters continued, instead, to be to keep adding whatever new information they could to the story, giving it shape as a genuine political scandal.
In the days to come, senators offering “no comment” when scrummed, Prime Minister Harper being peppered with precise questions from Opposition Leader Mulcair, allegations in RCMP affidavits sworn to justify court orders for access to peoples’ private records — all would provide the Parliamentary Press Gallery with content to keep the story alive.
The politically rewarding nightly play Mr. Mulcair’s inquisition gave him and the NDP on national television would reinforce and extend a closed loop of spiralling fascination about the scandal. The intimacy and immediacy of live-streaming, unfiltered commentary, and trending tweets would lift the scandal like nothing in Canada before, causing CBC’s Peter Mansbridge to marvel on-air when being interviewed by CBC’s Ian Hanomansing about the scandal, or when himself hosting discussions with panels of insiders and political observers, over “how this story has legs.”
The connectivity of traditional news channels and individuals participating with tweets, real-time opinion surveys, and ready online access to financial records, RCMP affidavits, and auditors’ reports would create a cybernetic connection continuously feeding upon and reinforcing itself. People with cameras in their phones who captured developing scenes of the human drama — Mike Duffy walking by people in uncharacteristic sphinx-like silence, Patrick Brazeau coming down the steps of a Gatineau courthouse — and uploaded them, would often see their clip broadcast repeatedly over the major networks.
If Canada’s biggest political scandals erupt when an individual reporter persists in investigating, pushing ahead when auditors wilt, prodding relentlessly after law-enforcement agencies fade, it is often because he or she has clues nobody else does.
Supporting journalistic scrutiny are the so-called “whistle-blowers” who enter the scene unpredictably. Some “go public” and gain notoriety, burning their bridges and ensuring that they will never be able to return to their place of work, even picketing Parliament Hill or giving television interviews, the way Pascale Brisson did when publicly ventilating her complaints about her employer, Liberal senator Colin Kenny, in 2013.
Other tipsters demand secrecy and journalists are as resolved to protect them. In 2004, Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill received a dossier of privileged documents related to Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, and refused to disclose to the RCMP her source of information after her story about the extent of Mr. Arar’s alleged terrorist involvement was published. That brought the Mounties, armed with search warrants, in an 8 a.m. raid to her residence and the newspaper’s offices to seize notebooks, computer hard drives, files, and other records, and led to subsequent litigation on the constitutionality of such seizures.
No journalist knows when a tipster may intentionally spill information: a loose-lipped official may slip a secret after one drink too many in some relaxed setting distant from Ottawa’s chilly norms of secrecy; an anonymous email might arrive; or an unmarked envelope could come sliding under the office door. While “leads” to a story are normal, these special insider sources are random. Big journalistic scoops often hinge on a whistle-blower.
As intriguing as this role of journalists and their secret spies can be, such espionage is not the only dimension to whistle-blowing in Ottawa. Some insiders go not to the press but up the chain of command for redress of a wrong they discover being done. During the early 1980s, Bernard Payeur, a financial systems analyst in the Department of Foreign
