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Anatomy of a Scandal

We can learn a lot about a place from the kind of scandal it generates. From 2012 to 2014 our attention has been held in fascinated disbelief watching the Senate of Canada, an exception in just about everything, spinning at the centre of a unique scandal.

Typically, a scandal requires three elements: a nefarious deed being done, knowledge of the act becoming public, and people who hear the news becoming scandalized by it. But such a barebones anatomy does not begin to outline what happened with the Senate expenses scandal. It began smouldering when news came to light that claims for reimbursement of expenses by several senators were being reviewed by the independent auditing firm Deloitte. As the months passed, what had seemed like a minor accounting issue flared into a national obsession as the circle of scandal spread outward, important public careers ended, investigations deepened, and a desire to abolish the Senate escalated. It reached a point by the end of 2013 that the government seemed so embattled by the ongoing scandal the prime minister’s press secretary had to issue a denial of the rumour that he was going to leave office.

A relatively small scandal had become a major national one. It dominated media coverage, overtook the national conversation, and distracted attention from a raft of other initiatives by the Harper government. Procedures conflicted, rules were bent, “solutions” turned out to be counter-productive. One senator, unable to repay his contested expenses for lack of funds, found his salary garnisheed by the Senate to recoup the amount, but then was suspended by senators without pay, an action that, in the process, defeated their own plan to get the money back. That’s how surrealistic it all became.

The Senate’s unique institutional status, when combined with its outdated administrative operations, made Parliament’s upper house the epicentre of a national scandal so far beyond normal that the whole fiasco became as stunning an aberration in the realm of political ethics as the Senate itself is in the life of our country.

The Senate is not an isolated entity. Like all institutions, it functions in relation to other institutions, to the individuals who serve it and are molded by it, and to the political culture of which it is an expression and which it in turn influences.

So the “Senate expenses scandal” is a much bigger story than the “breaking news” reports about Mike Duffy or Pamela Wallin, Stephen Harper or Nigel Wright. It is a window onto the state of public affairs in contemporary Canada, through which can be seen the role of journalism, the power of the Official Opposition, the nature of the Prime Minister’s Office, political party fund-raising, police work, and the cumulative effects of the failure to modernize our country’s senior legislative assembly.

If only viewed in a narrow context — Did senators Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau scam the public over fraudulent housing claims? Why did Senator Wallin pay back so much money while claiming the process that flushed out her improper billing was “flawed”? What did Senator Duffy have on the prime minister that caused his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, to inappropriately protect him? — the Senate expenses scandal might not have warranted such intense interest. After all, this story of greed and political backroom deals seems somewhat routine in relation to other news of the day: the deadly train wreck at Lac Mégantic in Québec; a stunning rise of flood waters in heavily populated parts of Alberta and Ontario; Canada’s new trade treaty with the Europeans; the government’s claim of Canadian Arctic sovereignty all the way to the North Pole. Foreign wars, natural disasters, genocide in Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, government spying operations — on and on ran news from a larger universe busy with transcending matters. Yet the Senate expenses scandal resiliently outlasted news of most of these other developments. Clearly something deep was stirring.

Even when considered alongside other Canadian political scandals of the time, the expense claims of several members of Parliament’s upper house might have seemed fairly colourless news. The hard-core political corruption being exposed by stunning revelations at the Charbonneau Commission’s inquiry into how Québec’s construction industry and provincial political parties were infiltrated by organized crime got only intermittent coverage beyond Québec’s own media, which carried the story with a true sense of the gravity of this situation. When scandal erupted over Canada’s electronic espionage on Brazil, a friendly nation and important trading partner, it stayed news for only a brief time. The smouldering scandal over the string of unsolved murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women in Canada could not generate enough shame to prod any government to launch a public inquiry into the matter. In Ontario, the billion dollar cost — a figure calculated by the province’s auditor general — of the McGuinty government’s decision to abort construction of two generating plants to win nearby seats during a provincial election, seemed to gain modest traction, but mostly just within the province.

The only Canadian news triggering comparable intensity of public outrage, garnering as much national attention, indeed, even creating reaction around the globe, was, oddly enough, a matter of municipal government — the unending circus of controversy Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford proved capable of generating. In Canada’s scandal department, Mr. Ford alone could distract attention from the Senate expenses fiasco.

Mayor Ford’s court cases and shocking revelations not only competed with the Senate scandal, they even upstaged scandals and criminality of other mayors during the same period. In Montreal, Mayor Gerald Tremblay resigned after a public inquiry into corruption of the city’s construction industry included the accusation he’d turned a blind eye to illicit campaign financing of his political party. When stepping down in November 2012, saying he was doing so “for the good of the city,” the mayor denied the allegations.

His successor, Michael Applebaum, promised to combat corruption at city hall. But just seven months later, he too stepped down when charged with some fourteen corruption offences, including fraud and conspiracy, in June 2013. Mr. Applebaum also maintained his innocence, declaring as he departed, “I have never taken a penny from anybody.” In November 2013, Denis Coderre, who’d resigned earlier in the year as Liberal MP for Montreal’s Bourassa riding, ran for mayor. The public remained skeptical, with continuing testimony flowing from the Charbonneau Commission about kickbacks and illegal party financing at the municipal level, but Denis Coderre weathered attacks from his opponents about his party’s ties to members of the corruption-ridden, and since dissolved, Union Montréal Party, and was elected Montreal’s new mayor.

In Laval, Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt resigned in November 2012 after twenty-three years in office, following raids by the province’s anti-corruption squad throughout the city, including upon his own home. Mr. Vaillancourt was accused of getting kickbacks on construction contracts but denied the allegations. Police reported after the raid that, unlike incriminating paper currency that could be made to disappear in a panic as police were spied coming to the front door, Canada’s new plastic bills do not flush down toilets.

Meanwhile, in Ontario, London’s mayor, Joe Fontana, was ordered, on October 28, 2013, to stand trial on criminal charges of fraud under $5,000, breach of trust by a public official, and uttering forged documents. A year before, the London Free Press had published allegations the former federal cabinet minister and Liberal MP for London North Centre had used more than $20,000 in cheques from the Government of Canada to pay for his son’s wedding reception at the Marconi Club banquet hall, first with a deposit of $1,700, then with nearly $19,000 more. The RCMP, unable to get enough evidence to lay charges for the larger amount, proceeded with the smaller. The mayor denied wrong-doing, refused repeated calls to resign, and vowed to fight and clear his name before the November 2014 municipal elections.

On the surface, four senators getting reimbursed money they were apparently not entitled to, contrasted with contemporaneous issues of organized crime, murder, espionage, electoral calumny, and criminal charges against incumbent mayors, makes the tempest involving Parliament’s upper house seem relatively innocuous. The fact that it was not, and that it could spin into a national political scandal of such gravitas, brings us forceably back to the central problem of the Senate and the truer nature of its activities.

The expenses scandal was, and remains, a giant maze.

Everybody strode around in the maze with purposeful intent, but nobody could find a way out of its ever-twisting labyrinth. That much, at least, was understandable. As the Senate scandal, so the Senate itself: it is a clear and present reality that nobody really comprehends, despite all the narratives and interpretations in circulation to explain it.

What became even more inexplicable for Canadians, however, and a nightmare for those directly implicated, were not the facts themselves, but what became of them. So many players straying around this tortured course gave so many changing characterizations of events that we had the sensation of observing a drama unfolding through the lens of a kaleidoscope. With each twist, the pattern of “facts” became new. No prior arrangement of them ever reappeared; nothing was ever quite the same. As a result, it was certainly not a story that got stale. The Senate expenses scandal took, and still takes, new form almost every week.

Beyond peoples’ chagrined outrage, and in addition to all the confusing stories, what also intrigued us about this odd affair, month after month, was its mystery. The scandal did not die because people kept waiting for an explanation that made sense. The country’s prime minister stubbornly refused to give one.

On any given day, hard questions begged for answers. Why did a bright and ethical person like Nigel Wright, chief of staff to the prime minister of Canada, do such a dumb and improper thing as secretly pay Mike Duffy’s $90,000 debt to the Senate? Why was the Prime Minister’s Office even making itself an agent for the Senate’s recoupment of Mike Duffy’s ineligible expenses? How was Senator Duffy able to stipulate that he’d comply with the order to repay, provided that his reputation was not impaired and he would not be out of pocket at the end of it all? Why did Mr. Duffy get secret help repaying his expenses, and even his legal bills, but not the two other Conservative senators whom the same prime minister had appointed and who faced repayment orders too? What leverage did Mike Duffy have on Prime Minister Stephen Harper that Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin did not? Troubling curiosity would not let us give up our wait for answers.

Yet, likely the deepest cause of all that accounts for our seemingly inexplicable attachment to the Senate scandal is our subconscious antagonism toward the institution itself.

Discomfort about the Senate, a feeling that has existed for more than a century, has generated decades of reform proposals. They have cost Canadians unquantifiable time, money, and distraction. But all that enterprise and expense has produced no change. As time has passed and memories have faded, the countless Senate reform proposals have slipped away, to vanish like water poured down a drain. Who today knows of Prime Minister Robert Borden’s plan for a national referendum on the Senate in 1914, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s goal of converting the Senate to a House of the Federation in the 1970s, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s Herculean negotiations to make the Senate elected, more effective, and equitably representative of the entire country, especially Western Canada? All have disappeared down the same drain.

The deeper impulse that propelled those and other failed efforts at Senate reform endured, however, and not on the cold pages of history books or dusty parliamentary committee reports but in some troubled part of our collective consciousness. Our negative feelings about Parliament’s upper house had not disappeared. They’d just gone underground, waiting for a chance to resurface.

The Senate expenses scandal gave that opening. The highly contentious handling of senators’ expense claims, combined with our outrage that already privileged senators got greedy about taking even more money from the public treasury, dredged up this muted recollection that we were unhappy about the Senate before, and harboured deep visceral antagonism toward this superfluous and costly institution still.

Because the theatre for this morality play was the antiquated Senate itself, the whole affair became an especially embarrassing reminder of our political impotence in trying to rid ourselves of the ill-fitting upper house, even lacking the ability, despite more than a century of talk about it, to reform the place. The expense claims scandal could not have provoked the same high-voltage outrage from citizens, nor the unexpected chain of responses from those running the government, nor the obsessive interest of Canada’s news media, had it unfolded on any other stage.

Many Canadians, freshly scandalized, used phrases their ancestors voiced decades earlier, decrying anew Parliament’s upper house as a “bastion of privilege,” a “waste of taxpayers’ money,” and an “affront to democracy.” This resurfacing sentiment helped push the Senate expenses fiasco beyond any normal scandal’s contours.

For many scandals, the ignominious end comes quickly. An errant individual’s career evaporates over sexual impropriety or financial skulduggery, sometimes for theft or for substance abuse. The personal flameout seldom makes it into the history books, perhaps only getting dishonourable mention in a university text like one I wrote, Corruption, Scandal, & Political Ethics, to illustrate some academic principle.

But every now and then, a scandal breaks through that barrier of personal failure and individual misstep. It becomes a really big deal, taking on a life of its own powerful enough to change the course of public affairs.

The 1873 “Pacific Scandal” erupted after Conservative Prime Minister John A. Macdonald got $360,000 in election campaign funds from the intended builder of the government-sponsored railway to British Columbia. The “Beauharnois Scandal” of 1931 shocked Canadians when Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s Liberals took a $700,000 bribe and King himself an all-expenses paid holiday in Bermuda, the payments coming from Beauharnois Light, Heat & Power Company in exchange for the right to change the St. Lawrence River’s flow when building a hydro power station west of Montreal. The “Sponsorship Scandal” of 2004 undermined Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberals when it was revealed his government had paid Liberal-controlled firms and ad agencies in Québec $2 million in contracts without a proper bidding process, another $250,000 to top up one contract for no additional work, and $1.5 million for no services performed beyond making kick-backs to the Liberal party.

Scandals like those implicated governing political parties. They made it into the history books as seismic events that rocked and defeated governments, shifted political values, changed public expectations, and became turning points in our country’s evolution for the reforms they triggered.

How could those few senators, padding their expense claims, have imagined they were likewise setting off a series of events leading inexorably to a final solution for the Senate of Canada?