The Harper Conservatives are suddenly like the Keystone Cops, sirens howling, rushing to the scene of an empty bank vault long after the robbers have escaped with the loot.
It’s hardly a late-breaking news flash that there’s trouble in Ottawa with how politicians spend taxpayers’ money when it comes to providing themselves with travel, housing and other expense perks.
It’s a year since auditor general Michael Ferguson first asked the Senate to require better documentation to back up expense claims submitted by senators, after an initial review found there was insufficient detail for many claims.
But there has been trouble on the Hill long before that.
Remember a woman named Bev Oda? The oranges that produced that $16 glass of juice at the tony Savoy hotel in London were grown years ago. The former Harper cabinet minister resigned her Commons seat in 2012 over an inappropriate expense scandal that dated back several years.
Some time after the 2006 Juno Awards, staged in Halifax, it was determined that Oda dinged taxpayers for $5,500 in limousine expenses. There was more limousine trouble after that, with the Prime Minister’s Office demanding that she pay back some expenses. She quit when she learned Prime Minister Stephen Harper was about to drop her from cabinet.
The sour aroma of scandal certainly didn’t start with the current uproar over Senate expenses, but to watch the Conservatives over the past few days, one would think the issue of politicians and expenses had just exploded into public view.
This week, Marjory LeBreton, the Conservative leader in the Senate, has pushed forward a motion to have federal auditor general Michael Ferguson conduct an audit of Senate expenses overall, plus individual audits of each senator’s expenses.
The next battleground is sure to be MPs’ expenses. While the expenses submitted by MPs are already published online, with more details than what has been provided by senators, both the House of Commons and the Senate could be auditing much further.
As has been pointed out already, Nova Scotia’s system stands out as perhaps the most rigid in the nation in terms of the detail provided to the public about politicians’ expenses. But this didn’t happen until the NDP government, in the second year of its mandate, followed through on its commitment to tighten the expense rules in the wake of a scandal that touched all three parties and resulted in three former MLAs pleading guilty to expense fraud.
In the wake of the housing expense allowances paid out to Sen. Mike Duffy and Sen. Pamela Wallin, the outrage being expressed by taxpayers already points toward a system for which there will be no turning back.
Meanwhile, the controversy over Duffy’s expenses continues. It’s looks increasingly as though, while the Conservatives may have received good value for the P.E.I. senator’s fundraising efforts for the party, Canadian taxpayers were definitely getting the short end of the deal. CBC reported Wednesday that Duffy’s attendance record at Senate committee meetings was 55 per cent, compared with 82 per cent to 100 per cent for P.E.I.’s other senators.
I’m sure former auditor general Sheila Fraser would be chuckling somewhere, if she weren’t such a responsible guardian of taxpayers’ dollars. It is likely no laughing matter to her that, four years after she attempted to take a more detailed look at MPs’ expenses, it appears her successor, Ferguson, is headed in that direction.
It may start with the Senate, but there will surely be an eventual domino effect, not only for senators, but MPs and top bureaucrats as well.
At this point, LeBreton’s motion will result in another layer of investigation into the expenses on Parliament Hill. The RCMP and the ethics commissioners are already involved in reviews and investigations.
In fact, much of this work could have been completed already, with tighter rules already in place, had the government paid closer attention to earlier signs of trouble, rather than ducking the issue. In fact, even the damaging incident of former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright paying $90,000 to reimburse taxpayers on Duffy’s behalf could have been avoided, had the Conservatives been more decisive this time last year.
There will be no ducking the issue now.
Asking the auditor general to look at past expenses certainly isn’t a bad decision, but given that Ferguson first sounded the alarm a year ago, the Harper Conservatives are certainly late getting to the crime scene.
Original Article
Source: thechronicleherald.ca
Author: MARILLA STEPHENSON
It’s hardly a late-breaking news flash that there’s trouble in Ottawa with how politicians spend taxpayers’ money when it comes to providing themselves with travel, housing and other expense perks.
It’s a year since auditor general Michael Ferguson first asked the Senate to require better documentation to back up expense claims submitted by senators, after an initial review found there was insufficient detail for many claims.
But there has been trouble on the Hill long before that.
Remember a woman named Bev Oda? The oranges that produced that $16 glass of juice at the tony Savoy hotel in London were grown years ago. The former Harper cabinet minister resigned her Commons seat in 2012 over an inappropriate expense scandal that dated back several years.
Some time after the 2006 Juno Awards, staged in Halifax, it was determined that Oda dinged taxpayers for $5,500 in limousine expenses. There was more limousine trouble after that, with the Prime Minister’s Office demanding that she pay back some expenses. She quit when she learned Prime Minister Stephen Harper was about to drop her from cabinet.
The sour aroma of scandal certainly didn’t start with the current uproar over Senate expenses, but to watch the Conservatives over the past few days, one would think the issue of politicians and expenses had just exploded into public view.
This week, Marjory LeBreton, the Conservative leader in the Senate, has pushed forward a motion to have federal auditor general Michael Ferguson conduct an audit of Senate expenses overall, plus individual audits of each senator’s expenses.
The next battleground is sure to be MPs’ expenses. While the expenses submitted by MPs are already published online, with more details than what has been provided by senators, both the House of Commons and the Senate could be auditing much further.
As has been pointed out already, Nova Scotia’s system stands out as perhaps the most rigid in the nation in terms of the detail provided to the public about politicians’ expenses. But this didn’t happen until the NDP government, in the second year of its mandate, followed through on its commitment to tighten the expense rules in the wake of a scandal that touched all three parties and resulted in three former MLAs pleading guilty to expense fraud.
In the wake of the housing expense allowances paid out to Sen. Mike Duffy and Sen. Pamela Wallin, the outrage being expressed by taxpayers already points toward a system for which there will be no turning back.
Meanwhile, the controversy over Duffy’s expenses continues. It’s looks increasingly as though, while the Conservatives may have received good value for the P.E.I. senator’s fundraising efforts for the party, Canadian taxpayers were definitely getting the short end of the deal. CBC reported Wednesday that Duffy’s attendance record at Senate committee meetings was 55 per cent, compared with 82 per cent to 100 per cent for P.E.I.’s other senators.
I’m sure former auditor general Sheila Fraser would be chuckling somewhere, if she weren’t such a responsible guardian of taxpayers’ dollars. It is likely no laughing matter to her that, four years after she attempted to take a more detailed look at MPs’ expenses, it appears her successor, Ferguson, is headed in that direction.
It may start with the Senate, but there will surely be an eventual domino effect, not only for senators, but MPs and top bureaucrats as well.
At this point, LeBreton’s motion will result in another layer of investigation into the expenses on Parliament Hill. The RCMP and the ethics commissioners are already involved in reviews and investigations.
In fact, much of this work could have been completed already, with tighter rules already in place, had the government paid closer attention to earlier signs of trouble, rather than ducking the issue. In fact, even the damaging incident of former PMO chief of staff Nigel Wright paying $90,000 to reimburse taxpayers on Duffy’s behalf could have been avoided, had the Conservatives been more decisive this time last year.
There will be no ducking the issue now.
Asking the auditor general to look at past expenses certainly isn’t a bad decision, but given that Ferguson first sounded the alarm a year ago, the Harper Conservatives are certainly late getting to the crime scene.
Original Article
Source: thechronicleherald.ca
Author: MARILLA STEPHENSON
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