| Oct 30, 2013


Although I do not share the view that the Senate expense affair will have a long-term impact on anyone but those who actually touched the money, it is still all bad for the Conservative government and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Whether you agree with the planned suspension of the three big-spending senators or consider that they are being sentenced before having the benefit of a trial, the whole mess, from start to finish, can only be attributed to the Conservative Party, and ultimately to Mr. Harper himself.

He is the one who appointed the three senators. And at least in the case of Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy, they were then extensively employed by the Conservative Party for fund-raising purposes. Someone in the Conservative Party hierarchy knew, or should have known, where these people lived and whether they should be able to claim expenses for places where they did not live.

And now that they have become a liability, Stephen Harper has suddenly taken on the mantle of righteous indignation. While you or I might say we are angry that these people have ripped us all off, for the man who set the whole scheme up, who put them in that position in the first place, to now say he is just as angry as the rest of us, is hard to swallow.

When you add the fact that Mr. Harper's own chief of staff covered $90,000 of Mike Duffy's expenses and Harper's own Conservative Party paid over $13,000 in Duffy's legal fees, Stephen Harper's current stance as the angry victim is even harder to take.

Still, the whole thing is about to blow over and with 730 days until the next election it could be a distant memory by then, no more relevant than any of a hundred other events.

However, the real danger in all of this will come from the Conservatives' desire to change the narrative, which is something that politicians in trouble always do. They have indicated they may attempt to transform the whole issue into a renewed call for Senate reform.

While it is certainly worthwhile to discuss Senate reform, this is entirely the wrong context. The Conservatives will only be trying to weaken the Senate in order to do damage control for a tawdry expense scandal that was of their own doing.

This is not the kind of sober second thought that the Senate, a body that is devoted to providing just that to legislation that comes out of what is often an overheated, partisan parliament, deserves.

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