The debate about how the Senate should audit its members has been a live one since the height of the expenses scandal typified by the trial of Senator Mike Duffy. In his report, the Auditor General was horrified by the notion that senators were judging senators and making up their own rules, and wanted to have a completely external audit committee that would oversee the expenses going forward.
As I've written about in this space several times, that kind of a suggestion should be a non-starter because Parliament is self-governing, and instituting an external body to do that kind of oversight is detrimental to that very notion. That the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, has signed onto this particular vision of accountability and tried to scour the length and breadth of other Westminster parliaments in order to prove his point ignoring the different constitutional or statutory frameworks and then going so far as to ensuring that his vision of an independent oversight body that wouldn't have binding authority, was a bit of a confused mess. And that, unfortunately, is something that we've come to expect from Harder and his office, who still seem to be having a difficult time in grasping some of the finer intricacies of how the institution operates.
Where this debate has progressed is in at the Senate's internal economy committee, which is in the middle of changing up its leadership thanks to the recent round of committee shuffling that happened at the end of last week as the interim order to accommodate the new senators expired. As part of this shake-up in order to rebalance committee representation and leadership to better represent the changed make-up of the Senate with so many independents now in the chamber, the Independent Senators Group (ISG) has been given control of the Senate's internal economy committee, with former Liberal Senator Larry Campbell now being given that chair.
As was reported in the Hill Times on Monday, the issue of the proposed Senate Committee on Audit and Oversight is one where the proposal going forward would have the five-member committee's membership be comprised entirely of senators, who would hire and direct an external auditor to review the expenses of senators and senate administration, with the reports being public and published. The new committee would be separate from Internal Economy and report directly to the Chamber, while its membership would be barred from also sitting on the Internal Economy committee a laudable idea.
This goes entirely against the wishes of Auditor General Michael Ferguson and Senator Harder, and while much of what is proposed looks good on the surface, I nevertheless find myself a bit queasy by the fact that the proposed make-up of this committee is entirely internal to the Senate, without any outside membership. The reason that's concerning is because it certainly makes it look like senators haven't entirely taken to heart the lessons of the expenses scandal, and that it looks a little too much like they are protecting their own interests.
It's why I think that the Senate has to rethink the proposed membership, and to go back to the idea floated by former ISG facilitator, Senator Elaine McCoy, back when the expenses scandal was raging. McCoy looked to the House of Lords in the UK for their audit committee solution, which translated in to Canadian terms would see three senators on the five-member committee, while still retaining two external members to provide some of the oversight that the public demands. McCoy's suggestion is that those external members include an auditor as well as a former judge who can help to adjudicate disputes that come up around expenses much like former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Ian Binnie continues to do for the Senate post-Auditor General's report.
Having three members out of five be Senators would be important it keeps control of the committee within Parliament, and ensures that it respects the self-governing nature of the institution. That self-governing ability is important because it ensures that the Senate retains the ability to discipline its own members part of the privileges that the chamber enjoys under the constitution, and ensures the separation of powers between Parliament and the courts. This is one of the reasons why a totally independent audit committee would be a problem constitutionally, since it would blur that separation of powers, making Parliament's ability to be self-governing a problem going forward. (This issue is going to be a very big sticking point in the Commons as the Federal Court challenge regarding the NDP satellite offices goes ahead, as the decision MPs made to have their Board of Internal Economy be a statutory rather than parliamentary body could have a very real impact on their ability to claim parliamentary privilege and to maintain the separation of powers as the Court feels that it can weigh in on the Board's decisions).
Conservative Senator David Wells, the former chair of Internal Economy, favoured the five-senator model of the committee's make-up, but given the changing membership of the committee, the debate over the audit committee's make-up will happen in earnest. This make-up will certainly be an optics problem because there will always be suggestions that its reports won't be credible. Having external members of the committee will help to mitigate that appearance, especially if they are credible individuals like an auditor and a former judge.
As the ISG now takes over the chair committee and a greater proportional say as to what goes on, it will be up to them to weigh in and decide how they want the audit committee's make-up to go ahead. One hopes that they won't be swayed by Harder's plans, which will damage the Senate going ahead, while one suspects that they will reject the Conservatives' proposal by virtue of their genesis a pattern that is emerging in how the Senate is operating these days. This decision could very well have lasting repercussions for the Senate and Parliament itself, so let's hope they make the right, balanced choice of a mixed three-senator, two-external member committee.