Senators need ‘wiggle room’ on expenses: Sen. Cordy

[Sen. Mike Duffy leaves the courthouse after being acquitted of all charges in Ottawa on April 21, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Wattie]

The Senate expense rules should have enough “wiggle room” that senators can conduct parliamentary business, says a leading member of a committee looking at a new oversight body for Senate expenses.

“It is politics. You can’t have the rules so straight and narrow that all senators are going to do is leave their homes on Monday, fly to Ottawa, fly back, and they can’t do anything in between,” said Sen. Jane Cordy, deputy chair of the Senate internal economy committee.

Ontario justice Charles Vaillancourt drew attention to Senate expenses last week when he cleared Mike Duffy of 31 charges of fraud, breach of trust and bribery related to the Conservative senator’s expenses and a $90,172 cheque from Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright.

The judge found a “certain uncomfortableness” with some of Duffy’s expenses, including claims for his personal trainer as a health adviser and questionable travel expenses, though the court said such claims were not “criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Vaillancourt said the expense claims were within the Senate rules at the time. Following his acquittal, the Senate said Duffy could resume his Senate duties in “full standing with full salary and office resources.”

Cordy referred to the report of Ian Binnie, a former Supreme Court justice who the Senate appointed as a special arbitrator to review the auditor general’s findings last year on Senate expenses. Binnie’s report, released last month, reduced by half the total travel and housing amounts that senators would have to repay.

“I think we have to have, as justice Binnie said, some wiggle room. Having said that, we have to ensure that the parliamentary business that senators are doing on the weekends is, in fact, parliamentary business,” Cordy said.

Michael Ferguson, the auditor general, has stood by his report, saying the Senate should revamp its oversight and management of expenses.

Cordy said she hadn’t yet read Vaillancourt’s decision but the Senate internal economy committee will soon be unveiling a new oversight body for expenses.

The committee is now working out details such as the responsibilities of the body and its representation, and Sen. Peter Harder, the Liberal government’s representative in the Senate, has been consulted for input and direction on the new oversight body, as well as Senate Speaker George Furey.

“The devil is in the details. You want to ensure that whatever oversight body that you set up in fact has got teeth,” Cordy said. “I think we have to be flexible and ensure that the parliamentary business is in fact parliamentary business and relates to either work that you’re doing in the Senate or the people who you represent in the Senate.”

Cordy noted that the Duffy judgment referred to previous Senate expense rules, and said the upper chamber has since changed some of them. She said senators can no longer claim any travel expenses to political party fundraising events, and they must disclose what kind of parliamentary business they are conducting and where.

She said senators who hire outside consultants will also be required to report the expense in a “proactive disclosure,” a publicly available report filed quarterly. “You have to show us the final result. What exactly did they do for you?” she said of hiring consultants.

“We’ll continue to take a look at the rules and if people are still finding out that they’re still not clear then we’ll certainly have a second look at them,” Cordy said. “I find it frustrating when people say the rules are nonexistant or really not there … Perhaps the interpretation wasn’t as clear as it should be.”

Nik Nanos, head of polling firm Nanos Research, said Justin Trudeau may not be expecting a bold response from Liberals in the Red Chamber to the expense controversy, because the prime minister has put a kind of “firewall” between himself and the Senate by requiring the Liberals in the Senate to be independents.

Trudeau wants to avoid talking about the Senate to keep his distance from it, he said. “When prime ministers talk about an issue, they own the issue,” Nanos said. “The Senate, euphemistically, is called ‘the other place,’ and I think Trudeau would like to keep it ‘the other place.’”

Trudeau may have an opportunity to set an example, Nanos added, by advocating for stronger expense rules in the House of Commons.