How to abolish the Senate of Canada

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Improper expenses. Senate resignations. Unaccountable senators. Such are the words enveloping Ottawa this week, this month, this year. The current crisis of legitimacy in the Senate, which has seen three of its own resign from their caucuses and either pay back or dispute improperly claimed expenses, has people talking about scrapping the whole thing. The NDP is at the front of the line. Tom Mulcair, the Leader of the Official Opposition, says it’s time to “roll up the red carpet” and empty the Red Chamber. He’ll campaign on abolition during the next election campaign. Amid all the bluster, there’s an important question: If Canada wanted to abolish its Senate, how would it do that? Continue…

The new anti-Trudeau book: I’m in there, just not recognizably

By John Geddes - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 4:47 PM - 0 Comments

Finding your name in the index of a real, honest-to-goodness, hardcover book, especially if you toil making short-lived works of journalism, is generally an ego-replenishing moment. So it was for me—if only fleetingly—when I saw a little something I’d written cited in Bob Plamandon’s The Truth About Trudeau, the Conservative commentator’s newly published bid to “set the record straight” about Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Plamondon touches on a blog post I dashed off for the Maclean’s website one morning back in the fall of 2011. With my coffee that day, as I recall, I read a David Frum piece in the paper about what a terrible failure Trudeau had been, and I found his arguments flimsy. To sum up very briefly, Frum slammed Trudeau for mismanaging the economy and fomenting national disunity. But hadn’t governments all over, I thought, struggled in much the same way Trudeau did with 1970s stagflation? And wasn’t Trudeau the guy who held off René Levesque’s compelling brand of separatism in the anxious 1976-1980 period?

Continue…

The paper chase

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments

The RCMP has asked the Senate for documents related to the expenses of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau. Justin Trudeau has formally requested, through the House, documents from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding the payment of Nigel Wright to Mr. Duffy. The CBC has obtained correspondence between Mr. Duffy and Conservative Senator David Tkachuk and the CBC delves further into Mr. Duffy’s expense claims during the last election.

Meanwhile, Postmedia talks to Mr. Tkachuk and fellow senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen.

Tkachuk, chairman of the Senate’s internal economy committee, told Postmedia News Harper’s office got in touch with him asking about the audit process — and wondering when the final report from auditors would be made public. “This was a political problem that was becoming worse because it was spinning out of control,” Tkachuk said from his home in Saskatchewan where he is recovering from surgery. “They never asked me to do anything wrong,” he said. Later, he clarified this, saying, “I was never directed to do anything.”

My interview with Senator Tkachuk is here.

Maclean’s exclusive: David Tkachuk on Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright and the Senate

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

Conservative Senator David Tkachuk is the chair of the Senate’s internal economy committee and a member of that committee’s steering committee—the two committees involved in the investigation of Senator Mike Duffy’s expenses. Senator Tkachuk spoke with Maclean’s this morning about the deliberations of those committees, the report on Senator Duffy’s expenses and Nigel Wright, the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff. The following transcript has been abridged and slightly edited for clarity.

Q: First of all, in terms of the committee report, there’s obviously this controversy over certain sections that seem to have been taken out of an original draft to the report that we see now. Can you explain why those portions were taken out?

A: The original draft was a first draft that would have been written by the clerk of the committee for us after we had a long discussion about what the audit had said. The audit itself, we disagreed with parts of the audit, some major parts of the audit. In the case of Duffy, the audit was recommending that he pay back $1,200, that he said he was confused. Our view was that he shouldn’t have been and that he should not have invoiced for that money and that we should keep what he had already given us. There were some changes in the report, of course. It’s our report. We wrote the report. So steering committee writes the report, we then took the report to internal, there was an amendment made in internal and internal then presented the report into the Senate chamber for debate.

Q: What about though the impression that the portions that were taken out of that report made it less hard on Senator Duffy?

A: We didn’t try to make it less hard on him. What we tried to do was … what we did is we acknowledged the fact, in a way, that he had paid back the money and he said he might have been mistaken. We had hoped for an apology, but that wasn’t quite there, but he did pay back the money. And we thought that it was a little bit different and that we should be careful with our language. His money was paid back and so we were quite happy with that.

Q: So in a way was he given a bit of a break in that regard because he’d paid the money back?

A: Let’s put in this way: there were two recommendations in that report. The first one was that we keep the money. The second one was that we watch, that we put a sort of a cover over his expenses over the next year and both those were unanimously accepted by steering before it was presented to internal economy. So I don’t think he was given a break. He was given no break whatsoever actually. He suffered the same fate as everybody else. Was it as harshly written as the other two? No. But he had already said he was mistaken and he had paid back the money, so we didn’t think we should harshly write the report as the other two.

Q: There’s an incident, I believe after the report gets tabled, where Senator Furey stands up in the Senate and says there’s a dissent, or a Liberal dissent, to this report, or at least this is my understanding, correct me if I’m wrong. So was there some disagreement within the committee over how to handle the report on Senator Duffy?

A: First of all, what George said, actually he said this when I presented the reports and he moved a point of order, which was totally erroneous. His point of order was that because I was presenting the report that it was presumed to be unanimous, which isn’t true. No report is presumed to be unanimous, it’s just a report of the committee. So what he was trying to say is that it wasn’t unanimous. Well, so what? Very few reports are unanimous. A lot of reports aren’t unanimous. But there’s still reports of the committee because the majority rules. So in the case of the steering committee, there were certain amendments made that he agreed with and certain others that he did not. Then when we went to internal economy, there was an amendment made and it was passed.

Q: There’s also this question of a letter from Senator Duffy that refers to an informal conversation with you. That has been interpreted as a suggestion that you tipped him off to the problem. Can you explain that conversation that he is referring to?

A: What happened was that the auditors, what they do is they give you, to the audit committee, they did what they a call a presentation of facts, to make sure they got the facts correct. And then we have some debate, we have some discussion, with the auditors about what they’re trying to achieve and how long it’s going to take them and all this stuff. So when they came they said we have a telephone call that was from Florida and there was a billing made for a per diem that day. So I sort of put that in my noggin’ and thought to myself, oh, that’s interesting, I wonder how many other days there would have been. So I went to see Mike and I said, Mike, you have a problem. I said, you’ve got a phone call made from Florida and you were charging a per diem. And he said, gee, that was during my holidays. I said, well, how many days were there? And he looked at me and I said, well, you’d better straighten this out and you’d better get yourself organized and he said, well, what should I do? I said, I think you should write a letter to the auditors. He said, well, can I write it to you? And I said, I don’t care who you write it to, but it should go to the auditors. Which is exactly what he did. So I tipped him off about nothing. I actually helped the audit find out that he had, I think, 12 days billed during that time.

Q: So do you think there was anything inappropriate about contacting him at that point?

A: No. This is not a police investigation. This is an audit. I’m the chairman of the audit committee. I want the truth. That’s all I was interested in and it’s my job to seek the truth. I’m also chair of internal economy and when I hear something like this I have to take some action too. I mean, what am I going to do, close my eyes to it?

Q: The question of the agreement between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy. There’s some suggestion that that agreement had some bearing on the proceedings of your committee. Did you ever feel any pressure, or was it ever suggested to you, by Nigel Wright, that you should in any way go easy on Senator Duffy or treat him any differently in any way?

A: First of all, I have no idea if there was an agreement between him and Mike Duffy. Only Mike Duffy and Nigel Wright can tell you that. So at the time, I wouldn’t have known anything. Don’t forget, he paid the money back in March. This report wasn’t written until recently and we didn’t receive the audit… the audit continued on after he paid the money back. There was no indication that and no expectation that we would treat him any differently than the way he was treated. The audit was going on, he paid back the money, we said thank you very much, that was it.

Q: Just to be specific, did you ever have any conversation with Nigel Wright where it was suggested to you that…

A: That in return for something I should do something?

Q: … no, more specifically, regardless of whether there was an agreement, was it ever suggested to you that you should treat him differently? Did Nigel ever suggest that you should go easy on Mike Duffy?

A: No. I mean, you’ve got to remember I would have been having a number of discussions with Nigel, I had a few of them. He didn’t tell me to do anything, really. We discussed Mike and the situation that he was in. I mean, the Prime Minister’s Office was very concerned about this. They don’t like this scandal going on. It was hurting us politically. And I didn’t like it going on, but he never said, he never told me to whitewash anything or to let him off the hook or anything like that. I’m responsible for what goes in that report. The internal economy committee is responsible for what goes in that report and the steering committee is responsible for what goes in that report. But I get advice from the media, I get advice from my own leader, I got advice from Senator Cowan. Matter of fact, Senator Cowan wrote me a letter along with Marj LeBreton about what one of the major recommendations should be, which was to collect the money, was to have the money paid back. And we listened to them. That was the major part of the report and the major recommendation. Is that interference? I don’t think so.

Q: But again, just to clarify, was there pressure from anyone within the party or the Prime Minister’s Office or the government to go easy on Senator Duffy?

A: No, I never felt that I should make any excuse for Mike Duffy’s behaviour.

Q: It also seems to be the case that Senator Duffy stopped cooperating with the auditors after he made the payment. Did that bother you then? Does it bother you now?

A: He never cooperated with them before either.

Q: Okay.

A: He didn’t cooperate with them at all.

Q: Does that bother you?

A: No. It’s his right to do that. He doesn’t have to talk to them. We don’t live in a police state.

Q: Would it bother you if his not cooperating in some way linked to his agreement with Nigel Wright?

A: You know what I think? He paid the money. He said, that’s it. Here’s the money, I don’t owe any money, I’ve paid it back for four years. I don’t know what he was thinking, you’d have to talk to Mike about that. I don’t know what he was thinking, but that didn’t bother me too much at all. I would have liked him to cooperate, but he didn’t. Although when I did ask him to send a letter, he did cooperate. I said he was in trouble.

Q: Does it bother you at all now that the entire investigation of Senator Duffy is now subject to suspicion and allegation? Are you worried about the credibility of the investigation?

A: This has not been a healthy process. Let’s put it this way. I’d hate to have an audit done on me, I’d hate to have an audit done on any senator or any member of Parliament if this is the way politicians are going to treat it. What we did is we had an audit. It was an independent process. And then after the independent process is concerned, we had a report. The report was tabled in the Senate. Everything was done in public. Everything was done with the opposition present. The opposition presented no minority report. The opposition could have complained about it at the beginning. George Furey did not complain about it after the steering committee. They could have made amendments in the internal economy committee, they never made one. Not one. So this process then went into the Senate and somehow the process is wrong? I don’t see how the process is wrong. And you know what? The media has done more to assist it, in kind of a weird way, then anybody because there was that article, somebody did a lot of research … and that’s why the report is returned back because he may have invoiced during the election campaign, when he wasn’t even in Ottawa. Well, that’s not very good. So I’m kind of glad we got that information and now it’s coming back to internal [economy] to be discussed. But the process itself, we’ve got to deal with that and how we’re going to do this in the future because you can’t have kind of a Wild West, hang ‘em high mentality. There has to be due process. People have to be treated fairly. The emails that I get are beyond belief. The hatred that’s shown is beyond belief. And for what? For what purpose? None that I can think of.

Q: Emails from who, do you mean?

A: From ordinary citizens.

Q: Senator Cowan has suggested, or requested I guess, that the internal economy committee proceedings now, in terms of Senator Duffy, be held in public? Do you have any response to that?

A: You know what, Senator Cowan is a publicity-seeking hound. He has six members, he has the deputy chair. They can make that argument in internal economy to have the meeting public. He’s writing this to make himself look like the big guy. And then he’s talking about other people interfering in the process? There’s a guy who’s interfering in the process. If anybody’s done more damage to this process, it’s him.

Q: To come back to the question of Mr. Wright. Do you have any reason to believe that any other Conservative senators on that committee, either the steering committee or the main internal economy committee, were at all influenced by him or pressured by anyone else within the government to go easy on Mike Duffy?

A: I wouldn’t know about anybody else. But no one’s told me otherwise.

***

This portion of the interview ended there. But, at my request, we spoke again to return to a few points.

Q: Just to go back, we’ve established that the report was written a certain way because he had paid the money back. And I just want to make sure I’m using your words correctly here … You say, “He was given no break whatsoever actually. He suffered the same fate as everybody else. Was it as harshly written as the other two? No. But he had already said he was mistaken and he had paid the money back, so we didn’t think we should harshly write the report as the other two.” So the decision to not write the report as harshly as the other two, was that at all influenced by any discussion with Nigel Wright or anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office or anyone in the government?

A: No, it was influenced by the fact that he paid his money back. That’s the sort of the way Carolyn [Stewart Olsen] and I felt, that there was an opportunity here to send a message. These things sort of … they last a long time, like these reports, they’re not written in five minutes, you know what I mean? There’s so much discussion that takes place about, you know, what we should do and I’m sure that George [Furey] had discussion with his people, you know, and we had discussion with our people and we came to certain decisions and then we tried to put them in the report.

Q: But just to be as categorical as possible, the decision to not write the report as harshly as the others…

A: It didn’t come from someone else giving us an order to do this. Let’s put it that way.

Q: Or any advice to that regard?

A: Well, I got advice from all kinds of people. I’m not going to tell you who they are, but let’s put it this way: I talked to people in the PMO, I talked to media people, I talked to colleagues, I talked to my leadership, I talked to fellow senators. There’s tonnes of people that I would have sought advice [from] as to how we should proceed with this process. This was not a police investigation. There was an audit and there was a report and there were things done that were not correct, that were done wrong. And we felt these people should pay a price. And so we made the decision to have the money returned back for all the time that he had been a senator. You know, I can’t make it any clearer than that. There’s nothing nefarious about it or anything underhanded. Everything was done above board and everything was public. I mean, we didn’t do the report in a dingy room and throw it into the Senate floor, this was done with Liberals present.

Q: But the controversy now is on any suggestion of advice from the Prime Minister’s Office or Nigel Wright.

A: But whether I get advice from them doesn’t really matter, it’s whether I take it that matters. There’s the Prime Minister’s Office, these people are my colleagues and I have discussions with them from time to time. They have never asked me to do anything that I thought was wrong and I certainly did not listen to everything they said. So, you know, there’s nothing here that would be unusual for any report of any kind. It was a simple matter of, you know, we talked to people.

Q: But did Nigel Wright ever suggest to you how the report should be written?

A: Nigel Wright did not.

Q: Did anyone in the Prime Minister’s Office ever suggest to you how the report should be written?

A: Not really.

Q: What does that mean?

A: Because when I ask for advice, people will give advice. I did ask for advice, I’m not denying that. But all I’m saying is, no one gave me any orders, no one came to my room and told me what to do. I did what I thought was right and I asked for advice from as many people as I could and I made up my own mind and I believe Carolyn made up her own mind and I’m sure George made up his own mind too and I’m sure he got advice from all kinds of people. He didn’t make this up on his own either. All I’m saying is that there was no pressure to do anything. That I’m responsible for what’s in that. That’s all I can say.

***

I attempted at this point to close any possible loopholes, but this next question was not well-worded. At this point, I might’ve been accused of badgering the witness. But, for the record, here is part of what followed.

Q: Can you say though that any of the Prime Minister’s Office’s advice ended up impacting how that report was written?

A: Well, I don’t know, I suppose. It’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to say. Only because I asked for advice from many, many people, so it’s all in the report.

Q: And specifically though, the decision to not write the report as harshly, can you say whose advice that was based on?

A: That would have been my advice to myself. That was Carolyn and me deciding that that’s the way we should write the report.

QP Live: Mike Duffy Week continues in the Commons

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s is your home for the daily political theatre that is Question Period, when opposition and government MPs trade barbs and take names for 45 minutes every day. Today, QP runs from 2 p.m. until just past 3 p.m. We tell you who to watch, we stream it live, and we liveblog all the action. Once a week, we’ll feature a guest blogger to sort through the madness. The whole thing only matters if you participate. Read our morning tease to catch up on the issues of the day, and then chime in on Twitter with #QP.

Continue…

Who is the government’s least favourite reporter?

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 8:18 AM - 0 Comments

Devaan Ingraham/CP

This morning, let’s play a fun game. I’m still workshopping its title, but the working moniker is What’s Bob Fife Working on Today? We can’t know, obviously, since we’re not inside the brain of CTV’s Ottawa bureau chief. But the man has been a machine for the past week—well, longer than that, but for this morning’s purposes, let’s stick to the Mike Duffy Affair.

Fife’s broken every major story in the past week that has made headaches, and occasionally migraines, for Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Nigel Wright, the PM’s former chief of staff; and Senator Mike Duffy. Fife’s the guy who told us about the $90,000 personal cheque Wright passed along to Duffy, to cover the repayment of  improperly claimed expenses. Fife told us a few other things, too, and then last night reported that two Senators—David Tkachuk and Carolyn Stewart Olsen—ordered edits to a report of the Senate’s internal economy committee.

That report reviewed an audit of Duffy’s expenses. The unedited version, which found its way to reporters’ hands, was much more critical of Duffy than the final copy that Tkachuk and Stewart Olsen reportedly had “whitewashed,” or “sanitized,” or whatever else you want to call selective editing. Worth noting is that Stewart Olsen is a former PMO operative. None of this makes things easier for the government.

So, what comes next in this saga? Your best bet is to go ask Bob Fife. Thanks for playing.

Continue…

The Senate’s investigation of Mike Duffy is like a game of Clue

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 10:54 PM - 0 Comments

While the Canadian Press and the Globe compare how the Senate report on Mike Duffy was edited—the Citizen posted the original report this afternoon—Global says it was Conservative Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen, Stephen Harper’s former press secretary, who moved the motion at the internal economy committee to make the revisions. CTV and the CBC say Stewart Olsen and Senator David Tkachuk, the chair of the committee, were involved.

Liberal Senate leader James Cowan, meanwhile, has written to the internal economy committee to ask that its meetings on Mike Duffy be held in public.

Yesterday, the Senate referred back to your Committee your twenty-second report (Examination of Senator Duffy’s Primary and Secondary Residence Status) so that it can be reconsidered in view of recent public allegations of double-billing and other questionable living expense claims by Senator Duffy.

In view of the widespread media stories questioning whether the proceedings of the committee on the original report were conducted in an impartial and independent manner, I request that you proceed with the reconsideration of the report in public.

In order to regain the public’s trust, Canadians need to be reassured that this crisis will be dealt with fairly, impartially and comprehensively, and that can only be achieved by ensuring that all future meetings on this matter are held in public.

In other news, the Star reports that Mr. Duffy seems to have claimed Senate expenses during a week when the Senate wasn’t sitting.

The Commons: The Conservatives run out of answers

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 6:10 PM - 0 Comments

The afternoon was not without new clarification. Or at least an attempt at such.

Picking up where yesterday had left off, Thomas Mulcair endeavoured to sort out the precise value of John Baird’s assurance that the matter of Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy had been referred to two independent authorities.

“Mr. Speaker, yesterday afternoon, 11 times the Minister of Foreign Affairs said that the Duffy affair was going to be investigated by independent authorities, independent bodies, independent officers. When my colleague, the House Leader of the Official Opposition asked him what those were, he could not give an answer,” Mr. Mulcair recounted. “Twice during the afternoon the Prime Minister’s Office said that they were referring to the Senate’s Ethics Officer. Later it corrected that to say that it is the Senate committee, the same one that whitewashed Mike Duffy the first time, that is carrying out the investigation.”

“Ahh!” sighed the New Democrats.

Along the government’s front row, Vic Toews grumbled in Mr. Mulcair’s direction about a “bribe” (seemingly a reference to the matter of Mr. Mulcair and the mayor of Laval).

“Does the minister not realize,” Mr. Mulcair asked, “that is about as credible as Paul Martin asking Jean Chrétien to investigate the sponsorship scandal?”

The New Democrats enjoyed this reference and stood to applaud their man.

Mr. Baird now stood to quote himself. “What I did say yesterday was, and I quote: ‘Furthermore, this matter has been referred to two independent bodies for review,’ which is nothing like what he just said,” Mr. Baird explained, seeming to stress the word referred.

So… there?

It is not actually clear what this should clarify, although, as it turns out, it now seems the Senate Ethics Officer is indeed reviewing the matter. So there’s that. Unfortunately, there is not much else on offer. Or, rather, not much else that the government seems either willing or able to offer. Continue…

Harper: ‘I’m frustrated and sorry and angry about all of this’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of the Canadian Press, the full transcript of the Prime Minister’s comments to reporters this afternoon about Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy.

Reporter: My question is about the resignation statement of your former chief of staff, which indicated that he merely did not tell you the means by which Sen. Mike Duffy got his money and, to date, neither he nor you have denied that you did know there was a deal. My question first is, what exactly did you know about the deal? Second, what were the terms of that deal? And third, what does it say about your leadership that your senior staff could even imagine this was ethical?

Stephen Harper: Just to correct that, I think we’ve been very clear that I did not know, but let me be very specific about this. I learned of this after stories appeared in the media last week speculating on the source of Mr. Duffy’s repayments.

Immediately upon learning that the source was indeed my chief of staff, Nigel Wright, I immediately asked that that information be released publicly. That is what I knew.

I think what’s more important about this is that, not simply that I did not know, but that I was not consulted. I was not asked to sign off on any such thing and had I obviously been consulted or known, I would not have agreed with it.

And it is obviously for those reasons that I accepted Mr. Wright’s resignation.

My belief, I should mention, my belief, of course, prior to all this was that Mr. Duffy had repaid. When I heard that Mr. Duffy had repaid, my assumption was that Mr. Duffy had repaid from his own resources and that’s how it should have been, in my judgment.

Reporter: You’re known for running a very tight ship in government. How do you expect Canadians to believe that you knew nothing about the cheque that was written to Sen. Duffy? And what in particular do you plan to do? What actions in particular do you plan to take to address this scandal? Could there be further resignations?

Stephen Harper: Look, I think my belief here was reasonable, what, I think, anybody would have expected, that when it was said that Mr. Duffy had repaid his expenses, that indeed he, and not someone else, had repaid his expenses. I know Mr. Wright assisted him or did this for him, because he wanted to see the taxpayers reimbursed. That’s the right motive, but nevertheless it was obviously not correct for that decision to be made and executed without my knowledge or without public transparency.

That is why, as I say, I have accepted the resignation of my chief of staff. As you know we’ve had a couple of senators also leave our caucus. My point is on this that there is accountability when things like this happen. We’ve also put in place the various authorities and mechanisms that will further look into these matters to see if any additional action has to be taken on any particular individuals.

I can assure you that we will certainly look at our systems, see what we have to do to better manage or, better yet, prevent any of these kinds of things in the future. Obviously, I am very sorry that this has occurred. I am not only sorry, I’ve been through the range of emotions. I’m sorry, I’m frustrated, I’m extremely angry about it. But that is the reality and I think we’ve dealt with it promptly.

I’m frustrated and sorry and angry about all of this. I don’t think there’s any better way to put it. In terms of my own office, it was Mr. Wright’s money, it was his personal money that he was repaying to the taxpayers on behalf of Mr. Duffy, it was his personal decision and he did this is his capacity as chief of staff, so he is solely responsible and that is why he has resigned.

Duffy: ‘My actions regarding expenses do not merit criticism’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 3:52 PM - 0 Comments

A Liberal member of the Senate’s internal economy committee alleges political interference in the investigation of Mike Duffy and the Ottawa Citizen has a copy of the pre-edited report on Mr. Duffy’s expenses.

Stephen Harper says he’s “sorry” and “upset” and “extremely angry,” but, in a written statement, Mr. Duffy seems relatively at peace with things.

Yesterday, the Senate referred the issue of my expenses to the Senate Board of Internal Economy.

I welcome this development. Canadians deserve to know all of the facts. I am confident that when they do they will conclude, as Deloitte has already concluded, that my actions regarding expenses do not merit criticism.

I intend to co-operate fully with the Board and with all other authorities. and will have no further public comments until those processes are complete.

The Senate’s conflict of interest committee, meanwhile, releases a statement that suggests the Senate Ethics Officer is now engaged with “matters currently of public interest.”

The Standing Committee on Conflict of Interest for Senators met last evening.

The Committee is exercising its oversight role of the process under the Conflict of Interest Code for Senators. As part of its work, the Committee met with the Senate Ethics Officer. The Committee is satisfied, at this stage, that the Senate Ethics Officer is reviewing matters currently of public interest.

The Committee will await the next steps from the Senate Ethics Officer and will act accordingly as provided by the Code.

Thomas Mulcair announces catchy phrase for abolishing the Senate

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair has just announced that the New Democrats are embarking on a cross-country campaign—”Roll up the red carpet”—to abolish the Senate.

Standing in front of the Senate chamber, Mr. Mulcair was asked whether he didn’t see the value of sober second thought.

We’re going to stop trying to find excuses for keeping a bunch of party hacks, bagmen, political operatives and defeated candidates sitting in appeal of the decisions of the duly elected mmebers of the House of Commons. That’s a game of the past. That’s a mug’s game. Where you try to find an individual in the Senate who’s not so bad. Where you try to find something that they’ve done in the past that wasn’t horrible. The real question is, in 2013, how can you possibly continue to argue to keep an institution of unelected people who have the power to reverse the decisions of duly elected members of Parliament. That’s the fundamental discussion that we’re having today.

But how to go about abolishing the Senate?

One of the things that you have to do if you actually want to make this happen is you’ve got, one, to get the public on side because once you have public support, there’s nothing more important in a democracy than having the public on side, that’s what this program is about. The other thing that you have to do is you have to talk to the provinces and territories. Because whether you’re in Newfoundland and Labrador or in Quebec or in other areas, everyone’s going to have a word to say about this. But Stephen Harper doesn’t talk to the provinces and territories, so he can’t talk seriously about reforming the Senate either. So that’s one of the things that I’m going to be doing. As I continue to travel across Canada in the coming months, every time I do I’m going to be meeting with government leaders and I’m going to be meeting with opposition leaders, we’re going to be talking about this, they’ll share their opinions as well. We want to hear from all Canadians on this. But we are convinced, from having worked on this for a long time, that the vast majority of Canadians, the quasi-totality of Canadians, realize that in a free and democratic society, having a group of people who can sit in appeal of the decisions of elected members, who have never been elected and, indeed, are more often than not defeated candidates, is a scandal that it’s about time to…

His answer trailed off there.

As I’ve written before, the argument here has to be between an elected Senate (including what would be necessary to accomplish that and all of the complications that would come with having such an upper house) and abolishing the Senate (including what would be necessary to accomplish that and whatever considerations should be made in regards to no longer having an upper house). I agree wholeheartedly with the Prime Minister that the status quo is not acceptable. But I believe abolishing the Senate is much more preferable to an elected Senate.

All previous coverage of Senate reform is here.

QP Live: Few answers emerge on the Senate crisis

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 9:54 AM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s is your home for the daily political theatre that is Question Period, when opposition and government MPs trade barbs and take names for 45 minutes every day. Today, QP runs from 2 p.m. until just past 3 p.m. We tell you who to watch, we stream it live, and we liveblog all the action. Once a week, we’ll feature a guest blogger to sort through the madness. The whole thing only matters if you participate. Read our morning tease to catch up on the issues of the day, and then chime in on Twitter with #QP.

Continue…

Is this any way to treat a scandal?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 9:37 AM - 0 Comments

The Senate voted last night to send the matter of Mike Duffy’s expenses back to the internal economy committee—the same committee whose original investigation of Mr. Duffy’s expenses is now being questioned in light of Nigel Wright’s cheque to Mr. Duffy.

Liberal Senate leader James Cowan also rose on a question of privilege that could, if the Speaker agrees, create a second inquiry process in the Senate.

In our case, actual words are being used and, in the present circumstances, who would argue that “odium, contempt or ridicule” do not accurately reflect what the feelings of ordinary Canadians are about the Senate today? I will not read into the record the language Canadians have been using publicly to express what they think of the Senate and of us as senators. We have all heard them, through the media and personally. We cannot ignore them.

It is critically important to re-establish the confidence of Canadians in their public institutions. The public allegation of outside interference in the proceedings of the Senate needs to be thoroughly investigated, with all parties involved being given an opportunity to explain their respective roles.

Meanwhile, as noted yesterday, the Liberals want the House ethics committee to take up a study of the matter, but Conservative MPs represent a majority on the committee and so at least some of them will have to agree for any kind of study to go forward. Of course, should the committee decline to launch an investigation, Conservatives will (or at least should) have to explain why not. That the House of Commons would not take this matter up for investigation would seem to me to be a rather gross abdication, but for now I’ll merely pose the question: is there any particular reason the House of Commons ethics committee shouldn’t be investigating this?

Ottawa hurries up and waits for Senate crisis answers

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Wednesday, May 22, 2013 at 7:57 AM - 0 Comments

The prime minister is in South America, on a trade mission. The foreign minister is in the House of Commons, engaging in damage control. The Senate’s internal economy committee is down the hall, investigating Senator Mike Duffy‘s improperly claimed expenses. The federal ethics commissioner is in her office, investigating the conduct of Nigel Wright, who was Harper’s chief of staff until last Sunday.

So, while Harper shakes hands and Baird deflects and Senators re-open books and the ethics commissioner pores over the rules, everyone else waits. The slow-moving train that is the ongoing Senate expenses scandal, where only the reporting of CTV’s Robert Fife shovels coal into the engine, lumbers on.

John Ibbitson, writing in The Globe and Mail, explains this hurry-up-and-wait approach to crisis management. The government, as it has done before, can “punt the issue to a neutral third party and then refuse to answer any further questions, claiming officials must be allowed to do their jobs.” The thing that the government must remember, and it’s something Toronto Mayor Rob Ford knows all too well, is that when a scandal is too big to just disappear, the harshest of critics are willing to wait. And wait. And wait for answers.

Continue…

The Commons: John Baird tries to explain what he understands to be true

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 5:54 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair stood to a hearty cheer from his caucus and, when the applause had quieted, he attempted a joke.

“Mr. Speaker, when the going gets tough, the tough get going, to Peru apparently,” he quipped.

There were grumbles and complaints from the government side—it being unparliamentary to refer to the presence, or at least the lack thereof, of anyone in the House of Commons. Mr. Mulcair hadn’t quite done that here, but the Speaker was compelled to intervene here anyway and call for order.

The floor was returned to Mr. Mulcair and the NDP leader now proceeded to recap the story so far, a mix of the acknowledged, the alleged and the reported. Continue…

Benjamin Perrin: ‘I was not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 5:11 PM - 0 Comments

A statement from Benjamin Perrin, former legal advisor to the Prime Minister, in regards to last night’s story from CTV.

Last night’s CTV story in relation to me, which is based on unattributed sources, is false.

I was not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision to write a personal cheque to reimburse Senator Duffy’s expenses.

I have never communicated with the Prime Minister on this matter.

In all my work, I have been committed to making our country a better place and I hope my record of service speaks for itself.

Liberals want Prime Minister, PMO staff and Mike Duffy to appear before ethics committee

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 5:04 PM - 0 Comments

A statement from Liberal MP Scott Andrews.

“The revelations about ethical misconduct in the Prime Minister’s Office are truly outrageous to Canadians. That is why today I gave notice of motion at the House of Commons Ethics committee calling for a thorough investigation into this matter.

The Liberal Party will be calling on the Ethics committee to invite as witnesses the Prime Minister, former and current senior PMO staffers, as well as Conservative Senate leaders and Senator Mike Duffy.

It is of paramount importance that Canadians be assured of transparency and full disclosure by this government, and thus far, Mr. Harper has failed to answer Canadians’ very valid questions.

We trust we will receive the support of all parties – including Conservative MPs – in order to get to the bottom of this troubling scandal. While Mr. Harper may call it a ‘distraction’, Canadians expect real answers and the truth, and Liberals will continue to work on their behalf.”

Senators Smith and Greene Raine on expenses and the last election

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 1:15 PM - 0 Comments

In his letter to the elections commissioner last Friday about whether Mike Duffy had claimed Senate expenses while campaigning for the Conservatives in the last election, NDP MP Craig Scott named several other senators whose expenses might be scrutinized.

As noted, Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell told me on Friday that he claimed no expenses during the writ period. Today, Liberal Senator David Smith called me to say he had not claimed expenses during the last election and the office of Conservative Senator Nancy Greene Raine emailed me with a statement from the senator.

“I was very careful during the writ period not to claim any expenses connected with campaigning on my Senate budget.”

QP Live: Amidst a crisis in the Senate

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 12:44 PM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s is your home for the daily political theatre that is Question Period, when opposition and government MPs trade barbs and take names for 45 minutes every day. Today, QP runs from 2 p.m. until just past 3 p.m. We tell you who to watch, we stream it live, and we liveblog all the action. Once a week, we’ll feature a guest blogger to sort through the madness. The whole thing only matters if you participate. Read our morning tease to catch up on the issues of the day, and then chime in on Twitter with #QP.

Continue…

Rest assured, Mr. Harper is very upset about all of this

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister arrived to the stage with a slight smile, an acknowledgement perhaps of his caucus’ willingness to stand and applaud his presence at this particular moment. He quickly turned serious.

“Good morning, everyone. Colleagues, obviously the reason I’m speaking to you this morning is I want to talk about some events that have transpired recently. And I don’t think any of you are going to be very surprised to hear that I’m not happy,” he said. “I’m very upset…”

So upset that he would commit here and now to release any and all relevant documents and correspondence in the possession of his office? So upset that he would submit to a news conference today to address the allegations concerning his former top aide? So upset that he would detail precisely what he knows about the arrangement between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy? So upset that he would offer any kind of explanation here now with all these cameras summoned to transmit his remarks to the nation?

No, no, not that upset. Just upset enough to feel it necessary to tell everyone that he was indeed upset. A revelation that even he conceded was not much of a surprise.

“… about some conduct we have witnessed, the conduct of some parliamentarians and the conduct of my own office.”

In fact, we have not witnessed anything except the spectacle of a government attempting to slowly explain how one of the Prime Minister’s appointees in the Senate had come to pay back some unfortunately claimed expenses and how the Prime Minister’s chief of staff had come to be involved in the return of those funds. The actual events in question occurred entirely in secret.

Now though we would witness self-congratulation paraded for all to see. Continue…

Marjory LeBreton on the Senate investigation

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

Last night, via email, I asked Senator Marjory LeBreton, the government’s leader in the Senate, about the Senate’s investigation of Mike Duffy. Specifically: Do you have any reason to believe the Senate investigation and audit of Mr. Duffy’s expenses were affected by the agreement between Mr. Duffy and Mr. Wright?

Here is her response.

The audits tabled are those received from Deloitte. The covering reports from Internal Economy used language for Harb and Brazeau to facilitate the recovery of the money. The language was not used in the Report on Duffy because the money had been paid back. These reports were written and approved by the Internal Economy Committee and no one else.

Stephen Harper and the knowledge economy: perfect strangers

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

This story will get buried by all the other news today. That’s understandable, but I wish it weren’t so. It’s about a long-term government failure.

In 2007 Maxime Bernier created the Science, Technology and Innovation Council to measure Canada’s science and technology performance against that of comparable countries around the world. It’s produced reports every two years. The latest was released this morning while most of us were caught up in some other hilarity on the Hill.

The STIC council, as it’s called, is a big-name panel of advisors both inside government and outside. Its current membership includes the deputy ministers of Industry, Trade and Health; the presidents of Western, Alberta and McGill Universities; and a brochette of CEOs, principally from the energy sector.

Its third biennial report is devastating. Well, maybe I shouldn’t be throwing a word like that around in a week like this one, but it’s full of bad news anyway. Here’s some jargon, which I’ll translate:

State of the Nation 2012 shows that Canada’s gross domestic expenditures on R&D (GERD) declined from their peak in 2008 and, when measured in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), since 2001. In contrast, the GERD and GERD intensity of most other countries have been increasing. Canada’s declining GERD intensity has pushed its rank down from 16th position in 2006 to 17th in 2008 and to 23rd in 2011 (among 41 economies).

That means that by the broadest measure of expenditure on research and development, Canada has fallen from 16th out of 41 comparable countries in the year Stephen Harper became prime minister, to 23rd in 2011.  Continue…

Will the Duffy scandal stick?

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Amid the wreckage, the Conservatives in Ottawa still must govern. How they do that when two of their own Senators quit caucus late last week, and then their boss’s top aide resigned in the middle of a long weekend, is no easy task. Their headaches, mostly fuelled by the relentless reporting of CTV’s Robert Fife, will pound all week. Aaron Wherry and Paul Wells and John Geddes explain why this will be a long week.

• Related coverage: 12 thoughts on the Duffy scandal 

The Toronto Star calls the current conniption enveloping Ottawa—the Mike Duffy Affair, let’s call it—the “worst scandal” that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s gang has faced since they took power on the promise of unprecedented transparency and accountability in 2006. In Ottawa, what anyone usually means by scandal is a thing the government has done to piss off its critics. Harper’s scandals have gone mostly unpunished by voters, despite its critics being so routinely pissed off by so many things. Even when Conservatives were found guilty during the “in-and-out” affair  that saw them improperly shuffle money around during the election campaign that brought them to power, John Geddes recalls, the party claimed victory. They were also found in contempt of Parliament, and we all know what real victory they claimed not long after, in May 2011. They’ve always found a way.

But the last week in federal politics would actually have made good television—depending on your tastes, obviously. Maybe that’s the barometer of what counts as real controversy. The Liberals’ demise a few years back, the Sponsorship Scandal, would have kind-of-sort-of made good TV. There was lots of corruption, anyway. So, when Harper stands up to address his caucus this morning, with cameras rolling, we’ll see how he looks on stage.

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And now, soon, a word from the Prime Minister

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 20, 2013 at 10:33 PM - 0 Comments

CTV reports tonight that the Prime Minister’s legal advisor was involved in drafting the agreement between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy.

Sources told CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife that back in February, Benjamin Perrin helped draft the letter of understanding that called for Duffy to publicly declare that he would repay the money. In return, sources say, Wright would give a personal cheque to Duffy to cover the $90,000. Sources say the agreement also stipulated that a Senate investigation into expense claims would go easy on Duffy.

So will the Prime Minister’s Office now release the terms of that agreement? Apparently not.

The PMO also declined to release the letter of agreement, saying it is now in the hands of Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, who is investigating Wright’s $90,000 cheque to Duffy.

What the Prime Minister’s Office has done is invite reporters to watch the Prime Minister deliver a speech to the Conservative caucus tomorrow morning. If Mr. Harper is later going to entertain questions from reporters, the PMO has yet to say so. But perhaps the Prime Minister’s remarks could involve reading aloud the agreement between Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy.

Meanwhile, the Globe has video of Mike Duffy declining to explain himself as he’s chased through the Ottawa airport.