Deafening disrespect of aggrieved senators
BY DAVID AKIN, PARLIAMENTARY BUREAU CHIEF
FIRST POSTED: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 2015
OTTAWA - It cost $23.5 million. It was 116 pages long. It looked at 80,000 individual expense claims made by 116 senators between 2011 and 2013.
But what was most remarkable about the auditor general report on senate spending this week was the sheer indignant tone.
Not the auditor general, mind you. No, Michael Ferguson was measured, careful, patient, and respectful.
The indignant tone was entirely from the 30 senators who had been fingered by Ferguson for allegedly fleecing us.
They were dismissive of Ferguson’s findings and haughty in their huffings and puffing.
And they play a starring role in Ferguson’s official report where each got 500 words worth of rope which most used to hang themselves.
Just who did Michael Ferguson think he was anyhow, they collectively harrumphed.
“I do not agree with the conclusions reached in this audit,” Senator Colin Kenny wrote in his response. Kenny (a Liberal) and Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu (a Conservative) are one of two sitting senators whose claims Ferguson has specifically flagged as RCMP-worthy.
Kenny is indignant that Ferguson’s auditors could not understand the $35,549 he is accused of misspending was all in support of writing vital newspaper columns, copies of which he clipped out and made ready for the AG’s inspection.
Rose-Marie Losier-Cool, who retired from the Senate in 2012, is shocked that Ferguson’s team “deliberately refuses to consider the particular features of both my work as an Acadian senator and the expense claims that I submitted.” Those claims total $110,051 and you should pay them, she contends, because she’s special.
Retired Senator Don Oliver — or “Dr. Oliver” as he refers to himself in his official response even though he is a professional lawyer and, so far as anyone knows, is not a licensed physician — spent $48,008 flying himself and his spouse to all sorts of events that were not even closely related to parliamentary business, but noted proudly that his expenses were “far below what the Senator was permitted to claim.” Doesn’t Ferguson realize how blessed we were to have “Dr.” Oliver as one of our senators.
Moreover, Oliver went on to say, what Ferguson’s team said about his wife in the audit — she got flown around on our dime too — is “scurrilous and irrelevant.”
And in some weird parting shot at Ferguson — a white guy from New Brunswick — Oliver would like to remind us that all his expenses were incurred promoting diversity issues “as the first Black man appointed to the Senate of Canada.”
I’m pretty sure the expense rules are the same for black, white, male, female, Acadian, Lutheran, or Martian senators.
Gerry St. Germain, a retired Conservative, told Ferguson’s team that he took “these apparent accusations to be a defamatory affront to my personal integrity.” St. Germain is accused of making $67,588 worth of inappropriate expense claims.
Marie-Paule Charette Poulin was imperious in silence. Ferguson had fingered her for $131,434 in questionable claims. She refused to answer any of Ferguson’s questions about the claims and was the only one who provided no response to his findings. It was the kind of complete silence that is deafening disrespect to every taxpayer.
Later, to reporters, Ferguson was undeterred. He will insist the RCMP probe the spending of Kenny, Boisvenu, St. Germain, Oliver, Losier-Cool and four others. And, then we’ll see who has a right to be indignant.
