Article content continued

As it has grown (anonymously) louder, the complaint has evolved into a suggestion that maybe the auditor general and his staff simply do not understand the kind of work that a senator does — or worse, were trying to impose their own job description upon the members of the Upper House. “(The auditors) didn’t have the first clue about parliamentary business and public life in general,” an unnamed Liberal senator told CP. “They are bean counters, and they work in a very narrow environment.”

Whereas a senator’s work, why, it is the stuff of life itself — if that’s not too confining a description. Struggling to put it into words, one senator, this time an unnamed Conservative, essayed to CP that “a senator’s job description is public service.” Another, this time identified as Sen. David Tkachuk (he pretty much had to be: he was being interviewed by the RCMP), put the matter in more tautological terms. When may we say, for the purposes of filing expenses, that a senator is attending an event on Senate business? “If a senator was invited to an event as a senator, then that becomes Senate business.” I cannot imagine how this could ever have become a problem.

It’s gotten so bad that the speaker of the Senate was moved to write a letter to the auditor general in which he discussed, according to a report in the Ottawa Citizen, “the parameters of parliamentary privileges … the role of senators and … the Senate’s constitutionality.” You will have already grasped the issue. You start monkeying around with a senator’s inalienable right to claim expenses for whatever enters his head, you’re practically amending the Constitution. I mean, what else does a senator do but claim expenses?