It’s as if the Senate of Canada has a death wish.Exactly one year after his retirement speech from the Senate, Hugh Segal penned a special article for the Globe and Mail about his former workplace. His words connect some interesting dots between events.
On June 12, 2014, Segal delivered a graceful farewell to his former colleagues that included these words on the proper role of the Senate:
“And finally, above all, the central and indisputable importance of the rule of law, due process, presumption of innocence as cornerstones of our democratic way of life, whatever dark forces elsewhere — sometimes in government, sometimes in opposition, the police or the media — might seek to dictate or impose upon us.”
Segal was clearly making reference, without naming names, to the arbitrary and unjust fashion in which senators Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau were suspended from the Senate without due process, including any right of appeal. The court was full of kangaroos when the deed was done. Segal was troubled by this, but kept his powder dry — and got out of Dodge.
A year later, Hugh Segal, private citizen, named names. In the Globe, the former senator laid out the things that should be done to pull the institution out of the swamp of the expenses scandal: external inspectors on the expenses side; a regular, transactional audit by the AG; and a referendum on Senate abolition attached to the October 19, 2015 election.
But it was the call for the resignation of the Government House Leader in the Senate that made the connection with Segal’s retirement speech of a year earlier. It is now clear that the “dark forces” had a name: Claude Carignan.
Segal was blunt and concise about his call for his former Conservative colleague’s head. Carignan had twice moved motions of suspension on three senators which were “a clear violation of due process, presumption of innocence, and the principles of Magna Carta.”
“These suspensions, unjustified then and odious today, were bad advice to the Senate …” Segal wrote.
Segal remains very concerned that Carignan’s motions, which he apparently drafted himself, are the existing precedent on how the Senate might deal with those cases now referred to the RCMP by the Auditor General.
In other words, senators like Colin Kenny and Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu might be suspended without any due process — exactly as Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau were. Segal finds that unacceptable. Bear in mind that at the time that Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau were suspended, the criminal investigations into their alleged misdeeds had not even finished. Though the current Senate leadership says otherwise, Segal is clearly not convinced.
“… the Senate cannot again play judge, jury and executioner. Mr. Carignan would do his government, party and the Senate a huge service by stepping aside,” Segal concluded.
The 800-pound gorilla haunting the whole Senate mess is the ill-conceived criminal prosecution of suspended Senator Mike Duffy. With each passing day of testimony at Courtroom 33 in downtown Ottawa, citizens could be forgiven for concluding that the Senate itself is on trial. The individual in the dock is a mere scapegoat.
And what a Senate it is, according to Segal — replete with rules that have been amended, re-amended, re-written and clarified so many times since 2012 that it amounts to an admission (probably unintended) that they were clear as mud in the first place.
Is Mike Duffy a criminal or just another senator making his merry way through the thicket of non-rules and open-ended entitlements explained to him as the norm? Segal, though careful not to prejudge the verdict in a case that has far to go, doesn’t see what’s been talked about so far as rising to the level of criminal conduct:
“… criminality is about violation of the law and the legitimate evidentiary proof that criminality occurred. Vague or imprecise rules, or disorganization and confusion, are not yet Criminal Code offences.”
It is the nagging doubt that Duffy’s day in court is a “show trial” that feeds the idea that the Senate itself is the real problem. The leadership in the Senate looks hypocritical, self-aggrandizing and screamingly at odds with any known concept of equal justice.
For starters, both the Government Leader in the Senate and the Senate Speaker made Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s bad apple list.
But Claude Carignan and Leo Housakos have options never afforded to Wallin, Duffy or Brazeau. They can simply write a cheque and walk away from their expense problems, (as Housakos did for $10,000) or appeal to Ian Binnie, a retired Supreme Court judge, whose conclusions as special arbitrator will trump the AG’s findings in his audit. Senate Speaker Housakos says “it’s all about guaranteeing fairness.”
Tell that to Mike Duffy with a straight face. And while you’re at it, Leo, explain how trying to stop the release of a 2013 internal Senate audit into the residency issue prepared by the Senate’s Director of Internal Audit and Strategic Planning, Jill Ann Joseph, is all about “fairness.” How can it be fair to suppress information that goes to the heart of the criminal allegations Duffy is facing?
If you really have the commitment to transparency and accountability which you spout, why try to use parliamentary privilege to block a document requested by the defence in a criminal case where the accused is facing prison? Is it because the Senate official who wrote the report found that there was, indeed, a lack of clarity for deciding the residency issue — just as Duffy’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, has argued in court? Does the report have to be suppressed because it points to Duffy’s innocence rather than his guilt?
The bottom line with Housakos and Carignan? These two Harper appointees to the Senate, both in leadership positions, were informed by letter from the Auditor General that they were on the list of senators with improper expenses. Despite that, they became the Senate liaison with the Auditor-General’s office and then set about creating a new process for senators with problematic expenses. All about fairness? Really?
That rattling sound the attentive can hear from the Duffy trial is more bones in the Senate closet soon to be on display. The PMO was directly and intimately involved in undercutting the independence of a supposedly independent parliamentary institution, got Senate reports changed, and interfered in a forensic audit being done for the Senate by Deloitte.
When the Senate had a chance to show its independence and integrity, it slunk away from getting to the bottom of these gross, institutional invasions.
Even though the PMO dispatched Senator Irving Gerstein to ask a buddy at Deloitte if the audit could be stopped if Duffy paid back his disputed housing expenses, the Conservative majority on the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee didn’t act. They refused to demand testimony from Senator Gerstein or the insider he turned to at Deloitte, Michael Runia. To this day, no one can explain how the PMO got the Deloitte audit weeks before it was delivered to a Senate committee.
As for Stephen Harper, he is deep into his hear-no-evil, see-no-evil schtick on the Senate crisis. He didn’t know that his choice for Speaker of the Senate was on the Auditor-General’s bad apple list.
Not telling the PM about personally paying off Duffy’s expenses apparently cost Nigel Wright his job. Housakos not telling the PM about being part of the problem before he was given the top job — no big deal, apparently. But it did produce one of the funniest lines in recent Canadian political history: “We are a chamber that is completely independent,” Speaker Housakos said.
Strangely enough, Housakos’s description of the Senate exactly matches Stephen Harper’s. Although his office turned the Senate into a gang of hypnotized zombies in the Duffy/Wright affair, the PM said this about the ongoing expenses scandal in the Red Chamber while visiting Ukraine on his way to the G7 Summit in Germany: “On this matter, though, as you know, the Senate is an independent body.”
Yes, as independent as Pierre Poilievre on a particularly submissive day.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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