Throughout the past couple of weeks, as the various commentators have weighed in on what they've heard coming out of the trial of Mike Duffy, they have repeatedly insisted that somehow this is all about "putting the Senate on trial."  Subscribing to that theory, however, would seem to imply that there's no such thing as personal responsibility the Senate, with its loose rules, apparently made Duffy do it, and everything he did was okay anyway.  It's certainly what Duffy's lawyer, Donald Bayne, would have you believe because this kind of legalistic argument is what he hopes will get his client off, and it also feeds the kinds of facile arguments put forward by those opposed to the very notion of the Senate.

Watching the pundit class on the evening political shows tends to boil down to repeating Bayne's arguments that there are no rules, and gives the impression that the Senate is apparently this bastion of free money for the taking.  "It must be nice I wish I could make these claims," they say smugly.  Of course, if it were really above board to expense all and sundry, then why would Duffy be funnelling them through his friend in PEI?  The fact of the matter is that while the rules are loose, they do exist, and Senators are expected to act with taxpayers in mind an explicit expectation in writing that Bayne conveniently omitted when going through those guidelines.

The other problem with this narrative of the Senate being on trial is that it also absolves the actions of the Prime Minister, who does bear a great deal of responsibility for what has happened.  Not for the expenses themselves, because again, Duffy himself bears the personal responsibility for his conduct once he was in office and the Senate does not report to the PMO, but rather it was Harper who put him there, and that can't be overlooked.  We live in a system of Responsible Government, and that means that the government who holds the confidence of the chamber can make the appointments it sees fit.  It also means that when those appointments go wrong, the responsibility rests on the shoulders of the one who made the appointment Harper.

Normally when a Prime Minister makes a recommendation for an appointment, the person is vetted pretty thoroughly.  The person in the PMO responsible for that vetting makes sure that the would-be senator is indeed a resident in that province, complete with driver's licence and health card on top of owning property.  If on occasion, and it did happen, that they wanted to appoint someone who had since moved to Ottawa from their original province, they ensured that those ducks were in a row before the appointment was even announced or they appointed them as an Ontario senator, as was the case with Progressive Conservative Senator Lowell Murray.  They would check to ensure that there are no red flags in their backgrounds, and to ensure that it was unlikely that an issue would happen post-appointment.  And yes, you got some fundraisers and party bagmen, and MPs whose seats they wanted to open up, but in all, the vast majority of appointments were never a problem.

This was not the case with the Class of 2008.  In the panic around the coalition crisis, Stephen Harper announced 18 Senate appointments in one fell swoop, and among them were Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau.  The appointments office in the PMO hadn't done any vetting because Harper had previously made the high-minded (but constitutionally unsound) promise to never appoint "unelected" senators, until he did.  That meant that things like Duffy's prior troubles in the Tax Court for unsuccessfully claiming his expensive suits were CTV property didn't get raised and yet that would seem to be a pretty big red flag.  Likewise, the questions raised about Pamela Wallin's expenses when she was Consul General in New York were not addressed, nor were the various allegations against Patrick Brazeau from his time as Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples brought up as an indicator of potential future problems.  Whoops.

For his part, Mike Duffy never lived up to the obligation of being a PEI senator, and didn't ensure that his primary residence was indeed in PEI in both fact as well as in name, but rather sought assurances that things would be fine just the way they were, while he claimed his per diems for having dinner in the house he had been for years in Ottawa.  This is before he started making Senate expense claims while allegedly doing partisan fundraising work, and before he set up the "consulting" contract with his friend that later was used to pay out his other friends for the work they did for him that the Senate either had already vetoed, or was likely to put their foot down and say no to.  It sounds hard to blame the Senate for those actions, and yet that is the narrative people are trying to build.

Putting the focus on the institution itself leads only to dead ends.  While yes, they have started implementing better financial controls a process that was already well underway before these three or four errant senators made headlines it doesn't address the underlying problems of a Prime Minister who didn't take his responsibilities to make good and qualified appointments seriously, nor does it hold the person who abused those rules to personal account.  And yes, we've seen a rash of new polls that claim people want senate reform because of this, but it's as useful as asking if they'd like a unicorn because "reform" could mean anything, and the vast majority of proposals are far worse than the status quo.

While the courts will make their determination, there is still one person whose judgement that voters can hold to account, and that's Stephen Harper's.  He made the appointment, and it's something people need to consider when they go to the polls on October 19^th.

It's a time-honoured tradition among the NDP, dating back to the days of Stanley Knowles, where they try to move a motion every budget cycle to deny funds to the Senate.  Every year it fails, usually after Pat Martin says some comically misleading things about the Senate, and life carries on.  This past Sunday, while CTV's Question Period host Bob Fife was quizzing James Moore about the issues with Senators Duffy and Wallin, and the revelation that as many as 40 senators may have received letters from the Auditor General about the ongoing expense audit, Fife asked in all seriousness "Isn't it time for the government to turn off the money tap to the red chamber?"

And then my head exploded.

There were so many things wrong in that single question that it's hard to enumerate them.  For starters, the Senate is not a government department.  It's an independent chamber of parliament, and we have a bicameral legislature for good reason the Commons gets stuff wrong, and it's good to have a reviewing body that can catch errors before they become law.  The bigger and more important aspect is that the Senate acts as a check on the power of the government.  It's why they have the kind of institutional independence built into the system that they do so that they can't be punished by the government if they don't let it have its way, and given that the Senate knows that they don't have a democratic mandate, it's usually in very rare and important cases where this is an issue.  Granted, we have been in a period of a more pliant Senate than in other times past, but that is also a function of how the current Prime Minister has been mishandling the appointment process, and most of those senators will get more independent over time.  It's already happening in a number of cases.

Depriving the Senate of funds, as much as some people may think it's a grand idea, is unfathomably boneheaded.  It has work to do.  Constitutionally, bills can't pass or become law if it doesn't pass the Senate, and if you starve the Senate of funds, that legislation won't go anywhere.  And it's not enough to try and simply deny senators of their salaries or expenses, but it's a drastic move that would deny the whole machinery of the Senate clerks, translators, guards, administrators of their livelihoods as well, which would really slow things down.  A while ago, certain NDP MPs made the suggestion that senators simply work for free out of their civic obligation, never once volunteering to work for free themselves, or realising that the only people in a position to be able to work for free on that kind of basis would be the wealthiest of Canadians surely not the kinds of people that they would want to be exclusively doing this kind of necessary parliamentary work.

Oh, but it's costly!  Except that it's not.  Senators provide far better value-for-money than MPs on a per capita basis, and the savings are achieved further down the line, be it in catching major errors in legislation before they would have to be challenged in the courts, or in the kind of high-quality non-partisan reports that they produce, of equal or better quality than those done by royal commissions, and at a fraction of the cost.  It's parliament's built-in think tank, full of accomplished Canadians, and it already comes to us at a fixed, reasonable price.

None of this is to say that there haven't been problems, because we can clearly see from Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau, to name three, that there have been abuses of the system.  It's possible that spending rules have been lax, but we should also be mindful of the difference between abuse and between flexibility.  After all, the role of a senator is fraught and a complex question because you have accomplished people who want to take on policy areas and champion them in various ways around the country.  It's why there is great concern that the Auditor General will try and force a narrow definition of that role as part of his audit.

Let's also not forget that this audit process is becoming problematic in and of itself, with Senators being asked to turn over their personal diaries, to justify why their spouse travelled with them legitimately, or insisting that they should have had the lunch provided for them at a committee meeting rather than going out for a different one.  The fact that 40 senators may have received letters is also not indicative of guilt, as Fife seems to be implying requests for more information are not accusations of wrongdoing, particularly when there are legitimate differences of opinion regarding what constitutes the duty of a senator.

The other reason why accusations of abuse should not be a justification to turn off the "money taps" is that it's a terribly hypocritical proposition.  Senators have long been far more transparent about their expenses, and even their attendance, than MPs have been.  We're also seeing some pretty significant issues of abuse of expenses on the Commons side, particularly when you get to issues about NDP mailings that broke the rules, or the satellite offices.  It's only a couple of years ago that a number of MPs were found to have been in violation of rules around their housing expenses, so to claim that this is somehow unique to the "entitled" Senate is simply false.

Were the Auditor General to turn his attention to the Commons, we can be sure that there would be plenty of cases of broken rules and likely outright abuse to be found there as well, just as we saw when the provincial Auditor General was turned loose on MLAs in Nova Scotia, or with the expense scandals in the UK.  Singling out the Senate may sound like a politically saleable idea, but it's one that comes with long-term consequences that will come around to bite us in the end.