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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. He became a member of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party when it was as flat 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 and reasonable expenses are paid.”

That process involved expense claims being reviewed by the Senate’s Finance Directorate of accountants and bookkeepers. These employees, Tkachuk explained, “ensure that each expense passes the test of the Senate administration’s rules before payment is made,” adding that each claim was “reviewed line-by-line by two separate financial officers.” If they found “anything questionable,” Tkachuk as chair of the Internal Economy Committee would submit it to a committee of three other senators for review, “before payment was made.”

The system was so rigorous, apparently, that if this committee of three senators was not satisfied, chairman Tkachuk would take the questionable expense before a committee of fifteen other senators to defend the expense. He added that senators sometimes even referred an expense issue to outside auditors for independent review. The powerful senator than confidently concluded that the Senate’s own internal process of “a second set of eyes examining our expenses” was “more stringent and onerous” than any “second-level sign off involving auditors” would be.

While Senator Tkachuk dished out such public reassurances, behind the scenes this “stringent and onerous” verification process continued to examine the submitted expense claims of senators Duffy, Wallin, Harb, Brazeau and several others who would later come under scrutiny for seeking improper reimbursements or submitting claims unsupported by proper documentation. But at the time, following “line-by-line review by two separate financial officers,” the Senate approved and paid them all. This had actually been going on for years.

In his response to Peter Worthington, the chair of the Internal Economy Committee further noted how “the auditors found no evidence of wrongdoing. Most of the problems concerned paperwork and documentation, and we are attending to these problems.” He concluded with a final gratuitous salvo, “Senators are dedicated to moving forward in making the institution more accountable to the Canadians they serve, and will continue to strive to manage public funds conscientiously and carefully as we carry out our duties as parliamentarians.”

It was after two more years of this conscientious and careful management that the auditor general of Canada released a report on his audit of Senate administration, stating the upper house had “a reasonable financial management framework in place.” Because “reasonable” was obviously less than “first-rate,” the auditor general recommended that “Senate Administration should ensure it has sufficient documentation to clearly demonstrate that expenses are appropriate” and “should bring to the attention of the Internal Economy Committee any cases in which the Administration believes that required documentation is not sufficient to clearly demonstrate that expenses are appropriate.”

In response to that revealing recommendation, the Senate, still cocooned in its traditional culture of budget management, defensively asserted that it had “clearly defined rules for processing expense claims that are rigorously enforced. As in the private sector, the senator signs his or her expense claim form and attaches the receipts, according to strict rules and guidelines.”

In broader terms, through various public statements between 2010 and 2012, Senator Tkachuk further asserted that for senators’ expenses, “rules and limits govern what is paid,” a “vigorous process ensures only legitimate and reasonable expenses are paid,” and that “strict rules and guidelines” were in place and operating.

By this time, another twenty-four months of expense claims by senators who would subsequently be driven from office on the grounds they’d made false or inappropriate claims had been submitted, reviewed, approved, and paid. The most rigorous part of the Senate’s administrative process appeared to be its ability to cut cheques.

Almost any organization with sizeable amounts of money on tap will spring leaks. Employees may make mistakes on the paperwork, greed could entice one or two to float claims that will enrich them, and every now and then a fraudster might test how successfully he can scam the operation.

If the funds are not earned by an organization’s own hard efforts, but simply turned over from taxpayer revenues each year — for instance to a government department, Crown corporation, or body like the Senate of Canada — a further insidious element may also creep in. Many in government today view public money almost as being what economists call a “free good.” The numbers are abstract. Figures appear on a screen rather than printed on physical currency that is seen and touched and is able to impart a tangible sense of value.

A reckless attitude about dollars emerged during the 1970s that would be abhorrent to an earlier era, when Prime Minister King’s finance minister James Ilsley treated money raised through taxes as a “trust fund” he and others in government operated, with a fiduciary duty, on behalf of the Canadian people. Such frugality gave way to an “Easy come, easy go!” outlook, a transition over several decades that included structural removal of safeguards. Financial controls were loosened, budgets swelled, national debt soared. I explore the causes for this in book-length detail in “Just Trust Us”: The Erosion of Accountability in Canada and also Hands-On Democracy: How You Can Take Part in Canada’s Renewal.

Throughout it all the Senate carried on with its antiquated honour system and loose financial administration, and so, as if in some perverse nightmare, the rest of public sector spending seemed to be finally catching up with senatorial standards of practice.

There have been, fortunately, several countervailing forces.

Partisans, auditors, and reporters were poised to curb those ripping off Senate money or just mindlessly splashing it away. Examining how the expenses of senators were being handled in practice, each would ensure, in their different ways, that the latent potential of the Senate expenses scandal would become real.

The “partisans” in the Senate are the Liberals and Conservatives who, from the upper house’s inception in the 1800s, have populated the place and run it.

Although they sometimes glow about the collegial bond they share and the reputed bi-partisan nature of their committee work, the truth is a large majority of senators arrive on the job as devoted and instinctive partisans. In moving to the Senate, they may become more relaxed, but they do not generally become less political. Each Tory or Grit habitually suspects the motives of his or her opposite numbers and keeps a trained eye on them while smiling pleasantly.

Counting on partisan rivalry to enhance accountability is as astute as it is economic, because sharp eyes and sensitive ears are necessarily present where the action takes place and law enforcement officers are generally absent. The practice has been embedded in Canadian political culture since the 1800s when two judges (one a Liberal appointee, the other Conservative) heard disputed election cases under the Dominion Controverted Elections Act, and in the statutorily enshrined tradition of appointing scrutineers from rival political parties at polling stations in elections, still in effect today under the Canada Elections Act. In the Commons, an Opposition MP chairs the Public Accounts Committee. In the Senate, opposing partisans are chair and deputy chair of the Internal Economy Committee.

Even so, partisans are only dependable for accountability to the extent they themselves are not complicit in some subversion of proper administration. Senators, working together and often forming friendships with colleagues, abetted by late night conversation over drinks or dinner, may gradually discover where each has skeletons buried. A truce of non-disclosure may be declared in certain cases, producing a tacit conspiracy of silence among fellow political players.

Looking the other way also fosters “the culture of entitlement” among senators, a number of whom feel they are owed whatever benefits they choose to claim. As a result, senators lose a sense of perspective and acquire a relatively lax approach to expenses. When confronted with the seeming transgressions in the expenses scandal, a number of senators, both Liberal and Conservative, would be outspoken about the expense claims of senators Harb, Duffy, Brazeau, and Wallin. But in the main, the partisans in the Senate were least effective in curbing abuses of any of those who might have transgressed.

Rather 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 Affairs, discovered that staff had defrauded taxpayers of more than $7 million and that the practice had been underway for some time. He told senior departmental officials, expecting the fraud would be stopped and the culprits held to account. A decade later, Allan Cutler, a senior procurement manager at Public Works and Government Services, noticed irregularities in spending Sponsorship Program funds in Québec, which he reported to his superiors. In both cases, officials tried to cover up the abuses and launched a campaign of reprisal against the civil service whistle-blowers.

Going over the head of those directly implicated, hoping to reach someone high enough in the hierarchy to act responsibly, is the preferred choice of many imbued with the corporate values of their organization.

In the case of the Senate expenses scandal, the whistle-blowing of Pamela Wallin’s assistant Alison Stodin would be credited for moving the issue from one of internal Senate management to an independent audit by Deloitte, the subsequent public unravelling of the expenses fiasco, and its ultimate investigation by the RCMP.

No fiction writer could credibly concoct all the shocking twists and improbable developments that kept unfolding around this national scandal over some thirty months. And few if any would imagine plotting such a riveting human story in so arcane a venue as Canada’s hoary Senate. Yet in real life, that is precisely where the elements combined.