Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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