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?
Chapter 2
Taking a Risk with Celebrity Senators
The Senate of Canada is an odd place for famous people to end up. “An ornament to the legislature” is sometimes how a renowned public personality from a non-political field is described by those seeking a diplomatic turn of phrase for an exotic bird landed among the Senate’s flock of seasoned politicians. Quite often the reason for the celebrity’s surprise appearance is a complete mystery — is there some childhood connection with the prime minister, perhaps, or could it be some personified tribute to Canada’s secular religion,