Note: This is a piece I wrote on spec a few weeks ago for publication that didn’t get picked up. I figured I would share it here, and hopefully it’s not too dated.
With her suspension lifted after the dissolution of parliament, Senator Pamela Wallin is reportedly back on the job. Shortly after her suspension was lifted, it was reported that she had requested her BlackBerry back, and my own Senate sources confirmed this fact. And recently it was reported in the Toronto Star that she is back at work, splitting her time between Saskatchewan and Ottawa.
You’ll forgive me if I shake my head a little at this news, because I’m not exactly sure what it is she expects to do with Parliament currently dissolved and there literally being nothing she can do. Just what she has to “catch up on” for the past two years is a little unclear because she literally hasn’t had an office to be away from. If it’s two years’ worth of activity in the Senate, well, I’m not sure why she couldn’t have kept abreast of it during her suspension given that everything is public: reports, committee hearings, the audio stream of the Chamber itself during debates. If she had nothing better to do for the past two years, then I’m not sure what she exactly missed.
With parliament dissolved, there is no work for her to catch up on. There no bills on the Order Paper, there is no committee work that she can poke around on and do on her own initiative, because she’s not on any committees. Add to that, as an independent senator, she’s going to have to fight tooth and nail to get on any committees, and she might be lucky to find herself on something like the Senate Rules Committee. Maybe. After all, she didn’t exactly make herself popular when she muscled her way to the chair of the National Security and Defence committee and transformed it from a tough parliamentary body that was scathing in its criticisms of whatever government was in power, to one that devoted itself to praising the current Conservative government. Even her own Conservative colleagues grumbled about her antics.
The part about her splitting her time with Ottawa is also mystifying because there is nothing going on here. Nothing. It may be that she’s planning on re-opening her office and hiring a new assistant, but none of my Senate contacts have confirmed that fact, nor has there been any talk of anyone going over and welcoming her back. Any move to re-open her office would probably be all for naught because the RCMP has turned her file over to the Director of Public Prosecutions after a lengthy investigation, and there stands a very good chance that she’ll be facing charges related to her travel claims, and those meetings that she put into her calendar that apparently didn’t take place. Once charges are laid, the Senate is going to put her on a leave of absence, as they have done with her fellow ex-Conservative senators, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau.
As for her attending events in Saskatchewan, she says she is “meeting with people to discuss issues and the challenges facing our province,” which is all well and good, but to what end? During her defence for her questionable travel claims, Wallin claimed to be an “activist senator,” as though to say that all other senators don’t do anything, but she never had anything to show for her activism. She didn’t have any particular policy areas that she focused on or tangible proof of said activism, like Senator Jim Munson with his advocacy for autism and the Special Olympics, Senator James Cowan with his bill on genetic discrimination and promoting awareness of it, Senator Janis Johnson with her work on protecting Lake Winnipeg and promoting the arts in Manitoba, or Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette, who on her own initiative produced an independent report on the institutional barriers that Canadian exporters are facing when it comes to getting their products and services to market. Those sound like some pretty solid examples of “activist senators” who have something to show for it.
All of this leads me to wonder how much of her return to work is about Wallin carrying on with the particular shamelessness that she exhibited while she was a sitting senator, and the sense of entitlement that she brought to the job – the same kind of shamelessness we continue to see from both Duffy and Brazeau as their own court battles carry on. While I will concede that Wallin got the short end of the procedural stick when the political decision came down to cut her loose before she further damaged the reputation of the Senate, it still looks to me like she lacks the self-awareness to know that she’s still not doing herself or the institution any favours by not keeping her head down.