Читать книгу Our Scandalous Senate - J. Patrick Boyer - Страница 10

Ignition

After Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s mid-June 2012 report embarrassed Senate administrators over lack of supporting documentation for expense claims by two of seven senators he’d audited, those fingered felt the blowback. They scrambled to shore up the unsupported claims. It was a matter of reputation.

But it wasn’t just the individuals the auditor general’s findings had made to look incompetent. The Senate itself did not wear this well, nor did the Harper Conservative government, pledged as it was to eradicate wasteful public spending. True, the amounts were like pennies compared to the billions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted in bungled defence procurements, but Canadians chatting at Tim Hortons could more readily latch onto amounts closer to their own budgets than those incomprehensible gazillions of dollars. News reports about senators’ expenses began to upset people. Reporters looked for more Senate wrongdoings and found enough to keep the story going.

For the individual senators impugned in the developing scandal, each case was unique. But collectively, I said in a CBC Radio interview, they revealed a “culture of entitlement” that had become part of the Senate. That explained why some senators, already well paid by the upper house and earning additional income in the private sector, felt they could acquire even more money through spurious reimbursement claims. With not one such case but a number, I suggested, greed was being incubated, rather than extinguished, by the Senate’s own privileged patterns of operation.

The Senate itself displayed a “pattern” of corruption. More than avaricious individuals were involved. The Senate’s style of administration had enabled this problem that was now coming to light. The news was not about a single event, but multiple acts over time in which the Senate itself was complicit.

The issue was not just whether Patrick Brazeau had pulled a fast one by claiming an in-law’s Maniwaki apartment as his “permanent home.” That bit of evidence was also a clue about something more questionable in the institutional practices of the Senate.

Besides the Parliamentary Press Gallery’s inquisitive reporters, a nation of citizens was now watching ever more attentively. Reporters like CTV’s Robert Fife and the Ottawa Citizen’s Glen McGregor looked deeper and found the problem was not just missing taxi chits or non-existent restaurant receipts. Senator Pamela Wallin’s air travel claims stood out like a mountain peak against the Prairie flatlands of other senators’ flight costs. Senator Mike Duffy claimed money for days he could not have been on “Senate business” because Parliament had been dissolved for a general election or he was vacationing in Florida, and some of his meal claims covered repasts he’d eaten at home.

Having publicly asserted to Peter Worthington that, “as in the private sector,” a senator “attaches receipts, according to strict rules,” the Internal Economy Committee’s chair Senator David Tkachuk wanted some paper filing, urgently, to justify or correct the humiliating lapses. Still, the chairman was uneasy. He hoped no payments had been made for amounts the Senate should not have reimbursed from public funds, especially to prominent Conservatives senators.

His fellow Saskatchewanian’s travel claims were high, even for a senator who “lives on an airplane.” Tkachuk knew the costs for his own flights between Ottawa and their same home Prairie province. Pamela Wallin announced she would review her claims, in light of the fact the forms and rules were so “confusing,” sounding the same note Senator Duffy was now playing about being confounded by a simple reimbursement form. Both of them had been able, as political broadcasters, to unravel from Parliament Hill the gnarled complexities of national politics and government policies for their television audiences. Now, as senators, they were stumped by a standard claims form.

Senator Wallin needed help, certainly, and underscoring the urgency was the fact the person handling administration in her Senate office had departed. Government Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton, trying to help Conservative caucus members in difficulty over their expenses, opened her bulging file of resumés. One person seeking Senate employment was especially promising. Alison Stodin’s sterling references attested to her solid experience as a Hill veteran who was honourable and, among many skills, adept at financial administration.

Why would such a talented individual be looking for work at the Senate? Back in 2006 Stodin, working with MP Monte Solberg and eager for new experience, had gone with the Alberta MP to help run his minister’s office when he’d been appointed to cabinet. But when Stolberg left politics after a few short years, Stodin had felt swallowed up by the departmental labyrinth where she’d remained, missing the political action of The Hill that had first drawn her to Ottawa as a politically active young woman with a university degree. She already knew the Commons, so, ever interested in something new, she applied to Parliament’s other house. In late June 2012 Marjory LeBreton arranged a Senate contract for Stodin to work for Senator Wallin.

LeBreton and Stodin had dedicated their careers to politics, primarily in attentive loyal service to senior elected representatives and party leaders. Each believed instinctively that rules governing senators’ expenses were not just administrative guidelines but a regime to protect the public interest. Stodin, as an individual endowed with deep political intelligence, was to help Senator Wallin administratively and in particular to clear up her expenses problem by meshing receipts, travel stubs, and other records with the rules and forms of the Senate Budget Office. Everyone concerned knew the flame had to be extinguished. The consequences of not doing so were too great.

As haze settled over Ottawa, and Parliament Hill sat abandoned to summer heat and busloads of tourists, Stodin settled down at the start of July 2012 to take advantage of the season’s minimal interruptions. She started in to clear up the senator’s expenses backlog. Stodin found the stale and littered money trail a confusing challenge, in arrears and in a mess, but this was condition normal for Wallin. The paperwork details that first became a by-product of her hectic life at CTV, and later with CBC, got out of hand during her years as consul general in New York, and had now reached maturity in the Senate, where her pile of travel and expense records accumulated as the unattended detritus of a stellar career.

Stodin sorted through the records and unbilled costs, making piles and writing notes, but still found them a confusing challenge to fit within applicable categories and rules. Over five weeks she interacted with her new senator employer mostly by telephone and through email, with little opportunity for bonding, let alone direct clarifications of expense details.

The core issue was not Pamela Wallin’s “primary residence” in Saskatchewan, a cottage she lived in during her times in the province, but how her travel to and from Saskatchewan for this purpose was complicated by the fact Wallin also had residences in Toronto and New York where she often stayed, and worked, sometimes for days, en route to or from Wadena.

The way the Senate administers the commuting costs of its members is not by budgeting dollars for individual senators but by allocating each of them sixty-four travel points for the year. A point is used up for each round-trip to and from the senator’s primary residence, wherever in Canada it may be. This plan provides equality. A senator from Toronto or St. John’s or Vancouver or Wadena would each use up a single point for a return flight, notwithstanding the difference in distance and price. Whatever the actual cost of a senator’s trip, be it $300 or $1,300, the Senate Budget Office pays the amount from its general fund for all senatorial travel. If a senator needed to go elsewhere in the country than home or to his or her own province or territory, the points could be used for that, too, but with some adjustment. For a longer distance than normal for that senator, or for a trip with many legs and stopovers, a number of additional travel points would get used up in the process. Figuring out just how many is an accounting art.

Pamela Wallin might sometimes fly home from Ottawa to Saskatoon via Halifax and Toronto, with layovers of several days in both intermediate cities where she had work that included Senate duties, and claim it as one point for a trip to her province. Normally, such a multi-leg, multiple-day flight might consume three or four points. Senator Wallin would say that she never used more than a single point for a trip, and never exceeded the annual limit of sixty-four travel points, “otherwise I would have paid personally,” without accounting for the fact she conflated some unconnected flights over a number of days into “a single trip” home to make everything fit her heavy workload and overbooked schedule. Notionally, she was right; administratively, not so much.

The reasons Pamela Wallin flew to other places in Canada related to both Senate work and private sector work alike, fulfilling the multiple dimensions of one workaholic person. In New York and Toronto, she engaged in remunerative private work, but did so in tandem with Senate roles that constantly engaged her too. Over lunches with officials at public events, her conversation could slip seamlessly back and forth between, say, government policy on civil aviation and trends she knew about as a director of Porter Airlines, and so on through various categories of her intense, many-faceted engagement with the world around her.

Like other senators doing the same thing, Pamela Wallin straddled several worlds simultaneously. It was not a conflict of interest but a confluence of interests. She was an integrator of her many roles: a star in business, the academic world, the creative arts, journalism, public office, and the Conservative Party of Canada. The biggest trick was to keep everything in its correct separate category when charging for the costs.

The private companies on whose boards Wallin sat were prepared to pay flight costs when she was travelling on their behalf, and sometimes did. The same was the case, more or less, with a number of the charitable and educational organizations for whom Senator Wallin performed services and added the star power they craved. But in the scramble of her unrefined record-keeping Wallin was always behind and, trying at intervals to catch up, hastily dumped costs onto the Senate for reimbursement from public funds.

The Senate’s relic “honour system” kicked in. Reimbursements were made to Senator Wallin, despite the extraordinary rigours of scrutiny Senator Tkachuk had boasted every claim was subject to in detail. Rather than acting as a brake on improper invoicing, the Senate Budget Office smoothed a pattern for Wallin to maintain her troublesome habit.

Of the many flights with ticket stubs and proofs of payment, the easiest for Alison Stodin to sort and claim were the ones exclusively for Pamela Wallin’s Senate work because they had been recorded by Senate staff while making the original booking. Yet mingled into the mishmash of materials she was sorting were receipts for other flights, trips with more than one leg, for instance to Manhattan and Toronto, and stopovers of several days’ duration. Those required more than a single travel point, but that was tricky to determine. On top of this, those trips mixed Senate work with other activity, for which there were also receipts to be claimed for reimbursement, and which might have been at least partly paid by others.

Some of those costs, not just the flights but the use of limousines, the meals, accommodation, and incidentals, seemed more appropriately allocable to the companies Pamela Wallin worked for in a well-remunerated capacity, or to at least some of the charitable organizations she served. Yet, here were those expense records, too, tossed onto the accumulated pile of Wallin’s pieces of paper. Credit card statements catalogued a swath of spending, but into which of the many categories, or for which of the particular trips, did each of the entries belong? The dates sometimes defied matchup. Stodin stared at the omelette and could not see how to turn it back into eggs.

After weeks of mounting exasperation, and with the senator not around to explain, Stodin called the finance people in Senate administration, “Can I meet with you to go over some files? I don’t know what to do.” She’d been trying to reconcile outstanding American Express accounts and travel expenses.

It was Friday, August 10, an extremely quiet day at the Senate. “Sure, come right over,” was the response.

When Wallin asked Stodin by telephone where she’d been when she’d tried to reach her earlier, “she ‘freaked’ when I told her I’d been to the Senate Budget Office to get some clarity about processing some of these. ‘Don’t ever go there again, they are not to see anything!’ she shouted.”

When Senator Wallin returned to her parliamentary office on August 22, she fired Stodin.

There are a couple of ways to interpret Wallin’s remark, “They are not to see anything!” One is that Pamela Wallin had something legally problematic to hide; the other that she was embarrassed by her inexcusable record keeping. You can be a radiant star in public and still not want fans to see the dust balls under your bed.

I tested the two possibilities with a senior lawyer who knows Wallin and a retired Deloitte partner who had himself previously conducted Senate audits. Both agreed the senator’s reaction could have erupted from either of those possibilities — something to hide from the authorities, or instinctive human embarrassment. Even so, both felt that given the nature of the relationship between the two, they’d have expected Stodin to review matters with Wallin — if only to agree how serious the confusion was and that guidance was needed from the Senate’s Budget Office — before the paperwork was seen by others outside her office in its raw and indigestible form.

Knowing both women, my sense is that Wallin wanted the mess cleaned up on her own terms, with any required corrections made with her knowledge, so she could present the finished product as a clean bundle with a bow ribbon to the Senate Budget Office and get on with larger matters. Stodin, I knew from the days she’d run my MP’s office so professionally in the 1990s, took pride in sorting out back-office details so that a busy parliamentarian could focus instead on public issues. She would not want to admit she was stumped and, as self-starter, would seek tips from a Senate budget officer on how to allocate a senator’s expenses in ways that legitimately complied with the rules.

In that heated moment when Wallin fired Stodin, the senator told the staffer she was incompetent and threatened to destroy her reputation. Over her decades in politics and on Parliament Hill, Stodin had “never been treated with more abuse,” just as Wallin had never felt more betrayed.

Wallin believed, as she told me in October 2013, that hard-core right-wing elements in the Conservative caucus had it out for her because she didn’t “have an ‘R’ branded on my forehead” — she was not Reform enough. Also, she stated that many were jealous of her “good personal access to the prime minister,” which in part dated from the days Wallin served on the PM’s advisory panel about the future of Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. Quite a few senators no doubt also sneered at her self-declared status as an “activist senator,” which implied her colleagues were inactive do-nothings. Revealing her expense claim materials to the Budget Office was, Wallin feared, their plot to get her. She now saw Stodin as a plant, sent into her office to nail down incriminating evidence. Wallin believed that whatever mess she had with her accounts paled in comparison to her personal vulnerability and political isolation among back-stabbers on The Hill.

Stung, Stodin faced a dilemma. She, too, was now feeling isolated after being fired near the end of her career; she was vulnerable, engaged in a serious dispute with a senator who threatened to trash her reputation, and she was ill. She needed advice. She telephoned Carolyn Stewart-Olsen. The two had known and worked together for two decades after the Reform Party swept into the House of Commons in 1993, and Carolyn was now on the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee. Stodin was more concerned than ever about the Senate of Canada’s finances mess, a growing problem that had now claimed her as a victim.

Senator Stewart-Olsen told her to put the facts in a letter to the Internal Economy Committee. “So I just put down on paper my concerns,” Stodin explained to me in December 2013, “and sent it confidentially to the Senate committee.”

The Stodin letter crystallized for Internal Economy Committee members a number of concerns that had been floating around the Senate for years.

Her August 24 document highlighted shortcomings that several dedicated staff budget officers and auditors had, in intermittent campaigns, sought to address to no effect. The Stodin letter now forced them to face directly the still smouldering smudge arising from the auditor general’s recent report about some senators’ expense claims, though undocumented, having been reimbursed anyway.

Unrelated to the letter’s actual contents, Alison Stodin’s message also excited worries already on the minds of committee members about several senators living full-time near Ottawa but claiming distant “primary residences” to get extra money from the Senate for their secondary accommodation allowance, a practice that had occurred with Senate approbation for several years. It troubled some of them that this pattern of the Senate Budget Office paying these housing allowances had now become well established. A couple even entertained doubts about their own claims, now that such payments were being reframed by the developing Senate scandal, although they could reassure themselves by remembering that whatever they were doing complied with the foggy Senate rules for reimbursements.

Stodin’s letter identified issues that ultimately were the Senate’s problems, as an institution, far more than they were Pamela Wallin’s headaches as an individual. Wallin’s shoddy financial practices only showed them up for what they were.

If those running the upper house’s administration had been stung by what Auditor General Ferguson revealed about their less than “rigorous” operation, they now were forced to realize it was no longer good enough just to look at any errant or sloppy or even criminally culpable acts of individual senators and their expense claims as if the fault belonged to those senators alone. The institution the Internal Economy Committee operated was the stage on which all this was playing out. Several budget officers had tried to upgrade Senate administration — a move that had also been a warning — only to be stonewalled by long-term senators protecting the status quo by deferring to the “honour system.”

With the stories reporters were now digging out, and the increasing demand for certain senators to pay back expense money to the Senate, surely it would dawn on people that somebody in the Senate had approved the claims, after they’d passed through the Senate administration’s “rigorous scrutiny” including, at least in theory, two sets of budget officer eyes. Only Franz Kafka could portray the Senate requiring reimbursement of reimbursements as normal, and he was, lamentably, dead.

Senate administrators needed to take responsibility for the Budget Office’s tolerant practices and the elasticity of the Senate’s “honour system,” but their self-protective instinct drove them to duck so all blame would reach, unimpeded, the highest heads on the public horizon — Stephen Harper’s readily identifiable celebrity scapegoats, the ones whose claims had all been paid.

The venerable “honour system” of the upper house had been in place since Confederation, a limp code in contrast to rigorous counterpart procedures governing Parliament’s lower house, the Commons.

A Senate administrative rule stated, like scripture: “Senators act on their personal honour and senators are presumed to have acted honourably in carrying out their administrative functions unless and until the Senate or the Internal Economy Committee determines otherwise.” It was a beautiful sentiment, ostensibly reflecting an idyllic earlier age, covering a practice that enabled Tory and Grit senators to do the honourable thing of working for their parties’ electoral and partisan interests, in Ottawa and across the country, without scrutiny. As a cover for public consumption, the notion of “honour” about money rode alongside the Senate’s two other well-publicized fictions, that it was a body offering “sober second thoughts” and that it was uniquely speaking for “regional” interests.

Under the honour system, senators would routinely claim an expense simply by noting the amount was for “Senate business.” In practice, no receipt was required, nor was any explanation of the nature of the “Senate business.” Nor was there even a requirement that the purpose of a Senate trip be stated. Most senators in the modern era, accustomed to submitting reimbursement claims over their adult careers, did so as second nature, and generally included receipts or proof of payment. Those who did not — contrary to what the Internal Economy Committee told the public was established practice to protect taxpayer dollars “more efficiently than any second-level sign-off” — still got reimbursed anyway, as Canada’s auditor general had discovered and reported.

So-called “Senate business” sometimes included attending a daughter’s ballet class or a film industry awards banquet, but often it entailed travelling the country for partisan work. Because the Senate was tacitly embraced by the Liberals and Conservatives as an adjunct operation of their parties, nothing was ever done to tighten up Senate budget administration. Foolish attempts to do so, by those who just didn’t get what the Senate was really all about, were routinely ignored. The powers-that-be did not want stringent rules that would constrain Liberals or clamp down on Conservatives fund-raising and working for campaigns while on the taxpayers’ tab.

The magic of the euphemism “honour system” by which Liberal and Conservative senators coded their approach to financial administration resided in the term’s vagueness. “Honour” was the expected hallmark for members of Canada’s most senior legislature, and “system” connoted order and efficiency of operation. The phrase served well to mist over partisan campaigning and reinforce the impression that senators were honourable people who could be trusted. The fact most could be, because of their personal ethical standards and trustworthiness, only reinforced the belief of incumbent senators that they truly were, as they were called, “Honourable.” This blinded them to the fact that there was no part of honour in enacting a strict election finance reform law in the 1970s yet continuing the vigorous operation of a system to circumvent that statute’s provisions for a level playing field in Canadian politics.

Canada’s senators live across the country but work in the Parliament Buildings at Ottawa. They have no choice because the Constitution stipulates a person must reside in his or her home province or territory to qualify for Senate membership.

To ease the cost of needing two living places and commuting across the country to and from work, the Senate contributes to the cost of a place to stay while in the National Capital Region and pays for travel between a senator’s home and Parliament.

The Senate’s Internal Economy Committee made few rules about the allowance, just enough to cover several basics: a senator’s primary residence had to be more that one hundred kilometres from Parliament; the secondary accommodation in the National Capital Region whose costs the senators could claim reimbursement for could be either a hotel suite or a private rental unit, provided they didn’t lease from a family member; and the daily rate of $30 reaches its upper limit at $900 per month. An out-of-town senator would need to be in the National Capital full-time to exceed $10,000 a year, which of course would never happen since the Senate typically only sits about three months out of every twelve.

Nothing else was specified. That left it up to senators to figure things out for themselves. Although there was no uniform practice, the Internal Economy Committee was reviewing the thorny cases of certain senators who’d received the housing subsidy, in some instances for several years. Both Conservative and Liberal senators were involved, so the issue did not fall along partisan lines. The dubious allowance claims included at least a couple of senators who’d pre-cleared their arrangement with the Senate administration, so any “problem” that was starting to scandalize the public could not be blamed on those senators alone. The Senate itself was implicated.

For lawyers who pondered this problem, a stumbling block was the legal doctrine of estoppel. The Senate’s own financial officers had approved the set-up, received the claims, approved them, and cut the cheques to reimburse these out-of-town senators. They had not done so once by inadvertent error, but repeatedly, over a number of years, establishing a clear pattern of acts that established Senate policy through official practice. The Senate was consequently prevented, or estopped, from now ordering those senators to repay the money. If this point had come to serious debate, lawyers might have found arguments for the other side of this case, too, invoking doctrines and precedents to countermand the interpretation that, for the Senate housing allowance, customary practice had created an accepted, even if unwritten, rule.

But no such debate resolved the issue. It wasn’t the Senate’s way. In a place where an easy-going approach was the administrative norm, there were no other rules about the accommodation allowance, beyond those just noted, to invoke.

Taxpayers with two or more living places know about designating one as their “primary residence” to qualify for the financial benefit of being exempt from capital gains tax when selling the place. In an analogous way, legally if not ethically, Mike Duffy or Mac Harb or Patrick Brazeau or others figured they could designate a place one hundred kilometres or more from Ottawa as their “primary residence” to get the accommodation allowance for out-of-town senators coming to Ottawa for parliamentary duties.

As far-fetched as this practice appeared once reporters published photos of Mike Duffy’s “permanent residence” — a snowbound cottage in the P.E.I. village of Cavendish — and Mac Harb’s undisturbed “permanent” home in a village up the Ottawa Valley, these arrangements had been acceptable to the Senate of Canada, which, as already noted several times, had approved and paid their Ottawa accommodation allowances for several years.

Yet other senators saw the accommodation benefit differently. They understood it to be a subsidy to make it financially easier only for “out-of-town” senators forced to maintain two residences, not those within driving distance of Parliament Hill. Such senators living in the Ottawa area as Marjory LeBreton, Jim Munson, Colin Kenny, and Vern White made no claim for the secondary accommodation subsidy, the way an Ottawa senator like Mac Harb did. At the same time, it was revealing — in the context of this ill-defined plan — how other senators living outside the one hundred–kilometre exclusion zone, and therefore eligible for the housing allowance, chose not to claim it. Senators Anne Cools, Marie Charette-Poulin, and Pierre De Bané felt they were already well enough paid, and respected public funds enough to not draw on them without need.

Overall, from 2010 to 2012, senators collectively claimed more than $2.5 million in National Capital Region living expenses. Uniform practice did not exist. Apart from those senators who had a moral compass about what was proper and claimed nothing, the Senate’s vague criteria for determining one’s “primary” residence produced conflicting interpretations by a number of their Senate colleagues.