Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer

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.