OTTAWA—International Aid Minister Bev Oda is quitting politics later this month after a series of scandals over her expenses and funding decisions that have hampered her cabinet credibility.

The Conservative MP for the Ontario riding of Durham made the announcement on her website Tuesday, revealing that she informed Prime Minister Stephen Harper two weeks ago that she would be resigning both her post and her seat on July 31, several days after she turns 68.

One source close to the minister said the decision had to do with her readiness for retirement after being the longest-serving minister in the portfolio that she has held since 2007. If it had anything to do with recent political controversies, it would have happened earlier, that person said.

Oda’s resignation bolsters speculation that Harper will shake up his cabinet later this summer. It also puts an end to a reign of terror in the Canadian International Development Agency, according to former officials.

While she is credited with bringing more muscular oversight and focus to the department that doles out foreign aid money to help the world’s most vulnerable populations, she also ran roughshod over young Conservative aides and bureaucrats, one former government official said.

She berated civil servants in meetings in full view of their peers, pressured political staff to delay or obscure the mandatory publication of her ministerial expenses and regularly smoked cigarettes in her office, in violation of provincial laws, the former official added.

“She just ignored all the rules. Ignored everything. Fire hazards. Nothing. Just smoking away. Her staff would go off the deep end.”

Her fondness for cigarettes was no secret. Oda could always be located before and after daily Question Period outside the House of Commons getting her tobacco fix. But the nicotine addiction may have also precipitated her downfall.

It was June 2011 on a business trip to London that Oda ditched reservations at a five-star hotel where the conference she was attending was being held to stay instead at the posh and more expensive Savoy Hotel, which continues to offer smoking rooms.

A Canadian Press reporter revealed earlier this year that taxpayers picked up the tab for Oda’s cancellation fee at the first hotel as well as the $287 difference in the price of lodgings and the cost of an infamous $16 glass of orange juice. The minister was forced to pay back some of the expenses hours after the story emerged.

Conservative insiders say now that the Prime Minister’s Office was well aware of Oda’s penchant for lavish spending, identifying it as an issue in need of careful monitoring.

NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus said Harper should have made her leave sooner.

“I’m not surprised that she’s stepping down, because she’s under such a massive ethical cloud I don’t think she could carry on her duties in any capacity, but I find it disturbing that she had to decide to resign and at no point was there ever an indication the prime minister was going to hold her to account for her outrageous spending and misrepresentation of spending to the Canadian public,” Angus said Tuesday.

Gregory Thomas, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, noted on Tuesday that Oda would immediately start collecting an annual parliamentary pension of $52,183, which would add up to $701,464 if she reaches the age of 80 years old.

Thomas noted that added up to 43,841 glasses of orange juice from the Savoy hotel in London.

“There is broad dismay at ministers who spend lavishly, especially now when federal government employees are going home and telling their families they may not have a job. It’s tough for Canadians to support the government when they’re trying to control spending when they don’t control their own personal spending and they spend lavishly,” Thomas said Tuesday.

“I think it’s unfortunate that her spending habits will be what she’s remembered for rather than the substance of her career and ministry,” said Thomas.

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But despite causing repeated political headaches for the government and having to evade uncomfortable questions from reporters for months at a time, Oda endured in Harper’s cabinet and oversaw sweeping changes within her department.

Those included whittling down the list of countries that would receive more generous and intensive Canadian development dollars and pushing out aid groups whose programs were deemed to be at odds with Conservative priorities or whose ideologies skewed to the left wing.

Oda’s cabinet colleagues stuck by her until the very end when she doctored a document drafted and signed by bureaucrats that recommended a $7-million funding agreement with the interfaith aid group Kairos in 2009. The group’s positions on the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians was at odds with that of the Harper government, as one Tory minister pointed out.

Weeks of parliamentary outrage followed revelations that her political staff had added — in handwriting and at her direction — that the Tories would “not” fund the group.

She denied her involvement for weeks in both the House of Commons and at parliamentary committees before coming clean and apologizing.

Harper praised Oda Tuesday in a statement for leading Canada’s initiative to improve the health of mothers and children in the developing world, for bringing accountability to Canadian aid programs and for planning Canada’s response to humanitarian disasters in Haiti, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa.

“Through Bev’s leadership, Canada has also met, ahead of schedule, its commitment to double aid to Africa. This is a record of which to be proud.”

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