As the Senate scandal explodes, Canada’s major news organizations catalogue on their constantly updated websites wherever the bits and pieces land. This invaluable resource of parading news remains a work-in-progress because fresh developments, from revelations of more senatorial slip-ups to the laying of criminal charges by the RCMP, are steadily added to the list, while prior entries are revised to incorporate fresh information that casts different light on previously reported facts. Thanks to the way digitally recorded and paper-printed communications complement each other now, Our Scandalous Senate does not try to imitate what media websites do superbly: serve as detailed record-keepers for this evolving saga. Instead, this book seeks to synthesize the jumble of recent events into the larger story of which they are part — the continuing existence of this relic institution and its detrimental impact on the democratic well-being of our country.
The present-day Senate expenses fiasco and the century-old challenge posed by Parliament’s upper house are inextricably entwined, two faces of the same thing: the unfinished business of what to do about our scandalous Senate.
Chapter 1
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,