Tag Archives: MIke Duffy

Roundup: Getting ahead of the story

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As we inch toward the full release of the Auditor General’s report, more material is leaking out, while some senators are trying to get ahead of the story and highlighting what they see as problems with the audits. Conservative Senator Janis Johnson, for example, was flagged for a couple of flights, and she even provided ample documentation to show that it was parliamentary business, however the auditor made a value judgement – he “felt” the trips were personal, never mind that the personal aspects to said trips (also perfectly allowed and not billed to the Senate) were booked after the work trips had been arranged, and yes, documentation supports it. That the auditor insisted that the problem was that she didn’t use the Outlook calendar is an exceedingly bizarre criteria for finding the expenses questionable, despite other supporting documentation. Given the legitimate dispute over the audit report that he has expressed publicly, and that of Speaker Housakos, it’s no doubt that we’ll start to get a better taste of what could be a very problematic audit from the auditor’s side. Meanwhile, we’re starting to get more boneheaded commentary from the pundit class again, wondering why the government just can’t stop funding the Senate – as though it wasn’t a completely separate house of Parliament with institutional independence and not answer able to the government. Why not cut off funding to the Supreme Court as well? Oh, right – we have a thing called the Constitution. Other hosts are stoking this hysteria over what they are trying to claim is a conflict of interest between the Senate leadership and the establishment of the arbitration process with Justice Ian Binnie, but when you look at the facts, it’s just not supportable, as Senator Cowan amply pointed out on The House over the weekend. When it’s pointed out that Duffy and company didn’t get this kind of a process, Cowan said point blank that he didn’t agree with that process at the time and that two wrongs don’t make a right. Elsewhere, Thomas Mulcair vowed he would consult with the premiers to try to abolish the Senate if he should be elected, to which I say good luck with that. You think the Atlantic provinces will give up that representation, or that Quebec wouldn’t have a laundry list of other demands? Keep dreaming.

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Roundup: Disputing the AG’s claims

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The Senate feeding frenzy continues, complete with torqued headlines and inordinate amounts of time being given to the concern trolls in the NDP (who refuse to answer questions on whether they plan to campaign on opening the constitution if they truly believe in abolition). And why not? The Senate is an easy punching bag. More details continue to leak out, despite the fact that the full audit won’t be made public until Tuesday afternoon, which really makes one question who is doing the leaking and what their endgame is. The AG has hinted that it’s not his office doing the leaking, but if I were him, I’d be steaming mad about these leaks which are casting a pall over the report itself, and fuelling this breathless and hysterical coverage that remains to date largely devoid of a great many facts. The concern trolling over the two leaders and the Speaker has been particularly odious, and it’s hard to take these cries of apparent conflict of interest seriously when you look at the facts regarding their actual involvement and what they knew about their spending claims – just because they got requests for additional information, it didn’t mean that they knew they would be in the final report, and none of the three are being accused of any particular criminality. It was also made known that the Prime Minister wouldn’t have known that there were a couple of questioned expenses for Senator Housakos when he was appointed Speaker, but hey, PMO-conspiracy theorists won’t believe it regardless. While Senator Boisvenu stepped down from the Conservative caucus for the investigation, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny put out a release saying his response in the audit will speak for itself. Former Senator Gerry St. Germain disputes that he’s done anything wrong, as did Former Senator Don Oliver, and well, pretty much every one of the nine that were flagged for being egregious. It also bears mentioning that the audit itself cost over $21 million, and found less than a million in questionable spending, and that number is likely to drop dramatically once the arbitration process gets underway and a number of these cases are found to have been value judgements on the part of auditors (and yes, this is an actual problem with the way this was conducted). Some MPs and Senators think that MPs should have their own books looked over, and wouldn’t you know it, there are a whole lot of MPs who resist that notion – particularly the ones who have been so vocal about the Senate allegations. Meanwhile, the lawyers for suspended senators Wallin, Brazeau and Duffy are whinging that it’s not fair that their clients didn’t have access to this arbitration process, but there was a process at the time that they could have availed themselves to. There have been a lot of problems with procedural fairness with the way their cases were handled, and political expediency was the order of the day coming from the government’s side, but that doesn’t actually excuse any of the potential wrongdoing that they are alleged to have done, most of which far exceeds what most of the senators apparently named in the report did.

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Roundup: Leaks and leaping to judgement

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Even before the Auditor General had turned over to the Senate his report on their expenses, the leaks were already coming out fast and furious, starting with the knowledge that the two leaders in the Senate as well as the Speaker had expenses that were questioned, and in the cases of the Liberal leader and the Speaker, they planned to challenge those claims before the independent arbiter that has been set up to deal with these issues, while the Conservative leader’s expenses were already paid back as they related to a staffer who had improperly filed claims. The Liberal leader, Senator Cowan, got out in front of it – there are $10,000 in travel expenses from four years ago that had to do with parliamentary business that he no longer had supporting documentation for because the claims had been dealt with at the time and not retained, but the auditors are making a big deal of it – and that seems perfectly fair and reasonable. By this point, however, certain breathless types in the media started hyperventilating about how the fact that these were the people who established the arbitration process, so this was supposedly some kind of “conflict of interest,” which not only sounds ridiculous on its face, but it impugns the integrity of former Justice Ian Binnie, who will hear the cases. I mean, come on. It also smacked of the presumption of guilt, never mind that there is plenty of indication that in many cases, the auditors made value judgements about what should qualify and what should not, and of these 29 total files, one has to assume that a good chunk of them will come out of the arbitration process favourably. As time went on, the nine senators whose audits were found to be egregious were revealed, two of those senators still sitting – Senator Boisvenu for the Conservatives (who immediately removed himself from caucus pending the outcome of the investigation), and Senator Kenny for the Liberals (who was recently out of caucus during a sexual harassment investigation that he was cleared in). All of this before the report has been made public. The fact that we don’t have facts and figures before us, that we have a number of claims going before the arbiter, that some of these claims were simply errors and not done with malicious intent, and that there were demonstrable problems with the auditors during the process means that we should all take a deep breath and not rush to proclaim everyone guilty, or the institution as a whole to be tarnished. Yes, it’s a rough patch, and it’s the price they are paying for increasing their transparency. It’s funny that all of the MPs sanctimoniously lining up to denounce the Senate – or worse, concern troll about its credibility or legitimacy – won’t let the AG look at their own books. Funny that.

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Roundup: More responsibility from failure

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The OPP report on the October 22nd shooting is out, and highlights a number of lapses that happened on that day, but among them all, it should probably be highlighted that a lot of the problem seems to be with the RCMP who are patrolling the exterior of the buildings on the Hill, and that they had a minute-and-a-half to do something about the shooter and didn’t. (Some of what people saw during the shooting is described here). Not that there weren’t problems inside, as some of the bullets that flew were from security personnel and not the shooter, including the one that lodged itself in to the door of the Railway Room, where the NDP were having their caucus meeting. It was also raised in the report that the RCMP were dealing with budget cuts, so it does raise the question as to whether their limited resources played a factor in what happened, be it in resourcing or equipment. It also raises a lot of questions moving forward because the government made a particularly top-down move to have the RCMP take over the oversight of all Hill security from its previous silos (remember that Commons and Senate security forces are separate because of privilege issues). If the RCMP couldn’t manage the situation outside of the buildings, how will they be any better overseeing and coordinating things inside? As well, it needs to be stressed that this new system, under RCMP management, has been imposed hastily and without enough discussion and consultation – the government put the motion under closure, and its implementation is in the omnibudget bill with not enough time for proper scrutiny, particularly as many of the questions about what it all means still haven’t been answered yet, like what the role for the Sergeant-at-Arms will be under this new regime. Speaker Scheer did acknowledge that parliamentarians are complaining, but he seems to think that everything will work out fine. How can we be sure of that if we’re rushing this through and not thinking clearly enough about it, or consulting enough with all of the stakeholders and taking this report into consideration, which hadn’t been completed when the motion was passed and the implementation put into the budget bill. Meanwhile, the fact that RCMP are now carrying submachine guns on the Hill has a lot of its denizens unsettled.

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QP: More reconciliation scripts

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Even though it was a Wednesday, all of the party leaders were off in Rideau Hall for the closing ceremony of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That left Megan Leslie to lead off, asking about the refusal of the government to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Mark Strahl responded by reading a talking point about those rights already being entrenched in the constitution. Leslie listed off the various ways in which the government was failing Aboriginals, to which Strahl listed their successes, like the apology and striking the TRC in the first place. Leslie demanded the education funding gap for First Nations be closed, and Strahl read a condemnation of the attitudes that gave rise to the residential schools. Peter Julian then picked up, repeating Leslie’s first question in English. Strahl gave a list of accomplishments, and when Julian closed with a blanket condemnation, Strahl repeated his admonishment that the NDP voted against the good things they did. Dominic LeBlanc led off for the Liberals in French, saying that his party immediately accepted all 94 recommendations in the report and wondered if the government would do the same. Strahl said that they would consider the recommendations in light of the full report, to be delivered at the end of the year. Ralph Goodale then picked up in English on the same topic, and got much the same answer from Strahl. For the final question, Marc Garneau called out Conservative contradictions on supply management as part of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, and Maxime Bernier  gave a single-word response that they would protect it.

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Roundup: Last-minute legislation

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With less than three sitting weeks left, the government has announced that they will introduce yet another bill, this time to give the Minister of Transport enhanced powers when it comes to ordering vehicle recalls. The bill won’t be tabled until later in the week, and there’s no timeline for its passage, but Lisa Raitt is confident she’ll get all-party support for the bill to expedite it. Of course, it’s not guaranteed, and in the light of the recent Takata airbag recall, it does start to smack a little bit of desperation, that the government is doing one last push to show that they’re on top of things, even though they knew this deadline was coming, and this recall issue has been going on for weeks now. As well, they have nearly twenty more bills that they want to pass before the Commons rises, and as it stands, it looks like some of their showcase bills, like the “life means life” parole bill, aren’t going to make it, and Peter MacKay is admitting as much. This speaks to a couple of different issues – one is that there are doubtlessly bills that they’re going to allow to die so that they can campaign on them, both as unfinished business and under the falsehood that the opposition held them up (which really, they can’t do given that this government has the time allocation hammer and aren’t afraid to use it) so they need another majority in order to get these kinds of measures through. Of course, it also showcases that this government – and Peter Van Loan as House Leader – has been spectacularly terrible when it comes to the basic management of getting bills through (not that it’s all Van Loan’s fault – the NDP haven’t exactly played ball when it comes to any routine House management either, and it has been said several times that Peter Julian has managed to make Van Loan look downright reasonable). Suffice to say, good luck to Raitt, because she’s probably going to need it if she wants to get this bill through.

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Roundup: Truth and Reconciliation report due

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its first report on Tuesday, wrapping up the commission itself, and after hosting a number of Reconciliation events around the country, the last of them here in Ottawa over the weekend. They found that at least 6,000 children died in residential schools as a result of a policy of “aggressive assimilation” or cultural genocide, a term that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court made at a speech lat week (which may prove problematic, as Emmett Macfarlane explains). Part of the Reconciliation events in the past few weeks have been to try and bring an understanding on both sides of the cultural divide, so as to bring healing in symbolic ways. One such is the bentwood box that has collected some 1300 items since the Commission began, which created a sacred space to bring forward the promise of reconciliation. One hopes that the chapters will turn to something more positive, but I also have a sinking feeling that this will become politicised over the coming weeks, and possibly even over the course of the campaign in the fall.

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QP: He was talking about Greece

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Thursday, and wouldn’t you know it, and to my great surprise, Stephen Harper was actually present for a change. Neither Thomas Mulcair nor Justin Trudeau were present to face off against him, however, so make of that what you will. That left Peter Julian to lead off, and wouldn’t you know it, he started off with yet another Mike Duffy question, on the altered audit report. Harper, of course, rejected the premise of the question and noted that Duffy was before the court for his own actions. Julian moved to the pro forma question about Duffy’s residency, and Harper responded with a pro forma response about the NDP satellite offices. Julian moved onto the Senate invoking privilege to keep their internal audit from the court — not actually government business — and Harper responded again with the satellite offices. Niki Ashton was up next, and asked about the lack of response to the First Nations housing fund, and Bernard Valcourt read a statement about significant resources being allocated to meeting housing needs. A second round was much the same. Scott Brison led off for the Liberals, asking about relaxing labour laws that would make it easier to fire Canadians, which Joe Oliver supported. Harper insisted that Oliver was talking about Greece, not Canada, and slammed the Liberal record. Brison pushed on the issue, and Harper read the latest Conservative attack line about how Trudeau apparently wants a new mandatory payroll tax. Marc Garneau closed the round, asking about the same issue in French, and got the same answer about it being a discussion about Greece, and that the Liberals would raise payroll taxes.

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QP: CPP consultations and fictitious allegations

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Even though the king and queen of the Netherlands were visiting, all of the leaders actually showed up for QP for a change. Thomas Mulcair led off, asking for the declaration of Mike Duffy’s residence. Stephen Harper responded that Duffy’s actions were before the courts. Mulcair threatened that if Harper didn’t answer now, he would at the debates, and then demanded that the full Duffy audit be released. Mulcair gave some vaguely coherent muttering about the PMO covering up the cover-up in the Senate, to which Harper reminded them that the NDP faces their own repayment problem for their satellite offices. Mulcair moved onto the retirement age, demanding it be lowered to 65 (not that it actually changed — just OAS), to which Harper listed off their other measures for seniors. Mulcair closed with a quote from Jim Flaherty regarding CPP, to which Harper insisted the NDP would raise taxes on seniors. Justin Trudeau was up for the Liberals, and wondered why the government made their CPP announcement with no consultation by the provinces. Harper said that their record of supporting voluntary options was clear, while the Liberals would raise taxes. Trudeau reminded Harper of his record of statements on breaking up the CPP. Harper said that was false, and touted the options they created to help Canadians save. When Trudeau insisted that experts agreed with them, Harper said that Trudeau’s experts were imaginary, and that Trudeau would show leadership in raising taxes.

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QP: Shoehorning in the Duffy issue

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Despite it being a Tuesday, only two leaders were present — Thomas Mulcair, and Elizabeth May. Alas. Mulcair led off, asking about the destruction of records on the long-gun registry despite the Access to Information requests. Stephen Blaney insisted that the RCMP respects all laws and the will of parliament — which, you know, hadn’t been recorded because it was simply a bill at the time. Mulcair demanded to know who ordered the records deleted, and Blaney didn’t deviate. Mulcair tried to stretch it to the audit on Senate residencies, and Blaney insisted the NDP should be given a free vote on an upcoming gun bill. Mulcair insisted that the PM release the statement that Duffy apparently signed about his residency, to which Paul Calandra stood up and reminded the NDP about their satellite offices. Mulcair kept trying to tie the Duffy affair into things, and Calandra repeated his demanded that the NDP pay back the money from those offices. Dominic LeBlanc led off for the Liberals, decrying the focus on TFSAs instead of focusing on those who need help. Pierre Poilievre listed a couple of scenarios where seniors use the accounts. Scott Brison hammered on the TFSAs and the PBO’s statements on them, and Joe Oliver actually answered, listing some figures about them as a kind of non sequitur. Brison noted the GIS payments affected by TFSAs, but Oliver quoted some people who support their moves.

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