In Monday morning's Globe and Mail was the headline that the "Senate quietly loosens financial accountability rules; critics say honour system leads to spending Scandals."  It's overly dramatic, and not really what went on, but when you're trying to gin up a Senate expenses story, actual facts don't seem to matter.  But as time goes on, trying to come up with Senate expense "scandal" stories is becoming a bit of a mug's game.  The outrages of the past are just that past and the lessons have been learned and taken to heart.

To recap, the supposed "loosening" of the rules was the decision by the Senate's Internal Economy Committee to allow Senators to use part of their uncommitted hospitality budgets to bolster their housing allowance because some of the senators were finding it hard to find accommodations in Ottawa within the limit.  The additional funds aren't much a senator's entire hospitality budget is $3000, and it's not new money it's money that's part of their existing allocation that they're simply shifting temporarily within the current fiscal year while they decide whether or not to enhance the housing allowances to better match the current realities of Hill-adjacent accommodations.

Incomprehensibly, the story suggests that 1) this was done "quietly"; 2) that this is somehow "loosening" the rules, particularly because they don't have to file monthly claims when they can submit an annual lease documentation; and 3) that this somehow is a return to the old "honour system" (which really wasn't an honour system like it was described), that will return the Senate to the days of the Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin outrages.  None of this is true, however, which becomes frustrating because it's a blatant attempt to cast the Senate in an inauspicious light for the sake of driving clicks.

First of all, none of this was done "quietly."  All decisions were made in public, televised committee hearings, that were debated and voted on (as the Senate's communications officer replied to the Globe publicly).  Unfortunately, this has become an endemic problem in political journalism in that things are described as being done "quietly" when reporters didn't catch it in the first place and a press release wasn't sent out to announce it loudly.  And I get that in this age of constrained resources that reporters can't monitor all things at all times.  Fair enough.  But just because they didn't flag it to your attention, it doesn't mean that it was done "quietly."  The Globe has become particularly egregious about using this term, as though anything that happens on the Hill without their express notification means that it was done "quietly."  Witness the renewal of the equalization formula it was only in the budget, the budget implementation bill, came up in committee, and was the subject of consultation with provincial finance ministers for the months leading up to the budget but because the Globe didn't notice it, it became characterized as "quietly" passed, and the official opposition and certain provincial opposition leaders who didn't pay attention but who instead use the Globe as their opposition research bureau, were suddenly outraged at the government pulling a fast one on them.  It's utterly ridiculous, and we're at the point where news bureaux need to ban the term because it's become a cop-out.

Secondly, no rules were loosened, nor has any been any return to an "honour system."  Senators still need to provide receipts and documentation as before, and all of those are posted to the website in the interests of transparency (which they were doing before MPs were, it should be noted).  Conveniently ignoring these facts in the Globe's story in order to magnify the outrage is simply irresponsible.

But wait it gets better.  In order to drum up even more outrage, the only actual quotes in the story are from reliable outrage quote generator Charlie Angus, the NDP's ethics critic who not only didn't ensure that he had the facts correct before he commented, Angus seems to think that if Senators only spend a third of the year in Ottawa (not necessarily true the canard that the Senate only sits three days a week ignores that committees also sit on Mondays, and the fact that there are a significant proportion of MPs who also aren't in Ottawa on Mondays and Fridays), he seems to think that housing costs are somehow reduced by how much time one spends there as though a rental or a mortgage would somehow be reduced by the fact that one only spends "a third of the year" there.  And yet this is somehow proof that senators are playing a "shell game" with taxpayers' money.

The lazy journalism of this aside, we should remember that much of the reporting on the whole ClusterDuff affair and the supposed "expenses scandal" in the Senate was fairly shoddy and torqued to the extreme, which in turn made it difficult for there to be some actual critical journalism on the Auditor General's report on the Senate.  That too was later panned by both former Supreme Court of Canada justice Ian Binnie in his review of expenses, and by outside legal counsel Brenda Hollingsworth when she reviewed the report to offer a legal opinion on the collection of outstanding claims that the Auditor General listed.  For reporters to ignore these facts in order to build the case that this is latest issue is a case of Senators returning to their "old" ways is again irresponsible.

The Senate has made numerous changes to their processes, and in fact had begun the process years before the Auditor General got called in to do the audit.  The demise of the "honour system" predated that audit, and for reporters to keep bringing it up in order to contrive some controversies about the Senate is bad-faith reporting.  Trying to amp up controversy where none exists is bad-faith reporting.  Which isn't to say that everything is perfect in the Senate right now I have huge concerns with the direction that the "independent" chamber is going and the changes being proposed to it, and we should be talking about this more.  But to try and beat the dead horse of expenses drama means that we can't actually have the conversations we should be having about the Upper Chamber, which makes this Globe hit piece even more outrageous.

Photo Credit: CBC News