OTTAWA – After more than two weeks of startling, acrimonious and sometimes emotional debate, the Senate of Canada Tuesday suspended three of its members – Pamela Wallin, Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau – without pay for the next two years.
Motions to strip them of everything except their titles and benefits were approved Tuesday evening, marking only the second time in the history of the upper chamber that this has been done. The three are now senators in name only.
Furthermore, tough sanctions may await other senators found in violation of spending rules in future. The government leader in the Senate, Claude Carignan – who proposed and led the motions to suspend the three – suggested any other findings of wrongdoing by the auditor general would earn similar punishment.
“It’s a question of (whether it’s) gross negligence versus a simple error,” Carignan said. “If there are other people who behaved in the same way, we have to expect the same type of sanctions.”
The federal auditor general is in the midst of a comprehensive audit of Senate spending oversight and senators’ spending.
The vote to suspend Wallin passed 52 to 27, with 12 abstentions. Duffy’s suspension passed 52 to 28, with 11 abstentions. The vote to suspend Brazeau passed 50 to 29, with 13 abstentions.
***FREELANCE PHOTO – POSTMEDIA NETWORK USE ONLY*** OTTAWA, ON: NOVEMBER 5, 2013– Senator Pamela Wallin steps after speaking to reporters as she leaves the Senate on Parliament Hill after being suspended along with Senators Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy for their improper expenses in Ottawa on Tuesday, November 5, 2013. The Senate voted to suspend Wallin without pay 52 yays, 27 nays and 12 abstentions. (Justin Tang for National Post)
Duffy was not present for the vote. Brazeau stayed still in his seat for a few moments after the vote, then walked quickly to the seat of Sen. Jim Munson, who had voted against the suspensions, and shook the Liberal senator’s hand. He tapped Sen. Anne Cools, who also opposed the suspensions, on the shoulder.
Then he left the chamber without comment.
Wallin abstained from voting against her own suspension. But she stopped for a moment as she left the Senate chamber to call the vote “a flawed process.
“It is an extremely sad day for democracy. If we can’t expect the rule of law in Canada, then where on Earth can we expect it?” she asked, her voice breaking slightly.
Liberal Senate leader James Cowan called the suspensions “a severe disciplinary action against three senators who clearly had a pattern of behaviour which clearly abused the rules of the Senate. That’s quite different than making an honest mistake.
“I don’t think that this sets a precedent which would carry forward into the future to other parliamentarians, but I think it’s a bad day for the Senate.”
Several senators abstained from voting Tuesday night, leaving little opposition to the Conservatives’ plan to suspend the trio.
“It’s never easy,” Conservative Sen. Vern White said after the vote. “When I was a police chief, the most difficult thing you ever do is discipline people. It’s extremely difficult, but you have to do what you have to do.”
Some Liberals had expressed discomfort with voting outright against the suspension motions, because, they said, they didn’t want to be seen as condoning misspending. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau had also suggested his senators should abstain on the final votes and six did, including Cowan and his deputy, Joan Fraser. Also abstaining were some Conservative senators, including Don Plett, Nancy Ruth and Don Meredith, who said he couldn’t take part in a vote to “expel my colleagues from the Senate.”
“I believe that we have rushed to judgment pending an RCMP investigation and I don’t believe that we have taken all the facts into consideration,” said Meredith, a Harper appointee. “If I was accused tomorrow morning of breaking a Senate rule, I would like to be able to come before my Senate colleagues and be able to defend myself.”
The suspensions are in place until the end of the parliamentary session, which could last until 2015 when the next federal election is expected. The Senate left the door open to any of them returning sooner, should a majority of senators vote to overturn the suspensions. That appeared very unlikely, however: the Harper government has made clear it wants Wallin, Duffy and Brazeau off the public payroll.
The suspensions were expected to help heal a political headache for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but he was still peppered with tough questions in the House of Commons about the role of his office in an alleged cover-up of the repayment of Duffy’s expenses.
On Tuesday morning, an RCMP letter released to reporters in Ottawa showed that the force’s sensitive investigations unit wants emails alleged to show how the Prime Minister’s Office orchestrated the public statements Sen. Mike Duffy was to make about the repayment of his expenses.
OTTAWA, ON: NOVEMBER 5, 2013– A woman holds a box labeled “Sen Duffy” as she waits for a bus outside the Senate on Parliament Hill as the senate votes to suspend Senators Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy for their improper expenses in Ottawa on Tuesday, November 5, 2013. (Justin Tang for National Post)
Duffy has alleged that officials in Harper’s office told him to say he took out a loan from RBC to cover the repayment of $90,000 for his irregular housing claims. It was one of many politically explosive allegations Duffy has made in the Senate in the last two weeks.
“The existence of such documentation may potentially be evidence of criminal wrongdoing by others,” says the RCMP letter, sent Nov. 1 from Biage Carrese, the officer in charge of the unit.
“My investigators are interesting in gathering all evidence respecting this matter in order to conduct a thorough investigation.”
Duffy is currently being investigated by the RCMP over allegations of breach of trust and frauds on the government. Brazeau and former senator Mac Harb are facing similar allegations. Wallin is being investigated for breach of trust and fraud.
None of the allegations has been tested in court and no charges have been laid.
Brazeau had made one last pitch to keep his job, late Monday. In an address to the Senate that he said was for his children, he said, “I am not guilty of what some of these people are accusing me of.”
“It is very important that you know that I am not a thief, a scammer, a drunken Indian, a drug addict, a failed experiment or a human tragedy,” Brazeau said, taking a shot at comments former government Senate leader Marjory LeBreton made to Global News.
“Your father is a man who took things at face value, who maybe didn’t question things enough. I never deliberately sought to take anything that did not belong to me. I was trying to follow the rules but, somewhere along the way, something went wrong and I’m here for it now, and I don’t understand why.”
Brazeau and other senators referred to an outside audit of his housing expenses that determined Senate spending rules were unclear. While auditors concluded they couldn’t determine if Brazeau broke spending rules, a committee of his peers, reviewing the audit, felt otherwise and ordered Brazeau to repay $49,000 in housing claims.
The Senate had debated Monday until after midnight.
“I said to one senator ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in the Senate,’ ” Liberal Sen. Jim Munson told reporters outside the Senate chamber in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. “I’m not here today to pass judgement on any of these senators, but I just feel pretty tied up about this whole issue. What we’ve seen here is a trial, a very public trial, and in some ways it hurts to watch this happening this way.”
The debate came down to two arguments: Those in favour of the sanctions said the Senate must act to punish the three senators, found by a committee of their peers to have run afoul of spending rules. Those against the sanctions argued the trio should have a fuller chance to defend themselves against accusations of “gross negligence” with their expenses, as the motions against them were worded.
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