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Clair de Lune and Café Henry Burger closed in the mid-2000s partly due to an expense-account scandal that ignited closer examination of how some senior federal public servants spent tax dollars.

Also hurt by our demands for more responsible spending of public money is the Ottawa Senators.

Or so says Melnyk, who this week told Toronto radio station Sportsnet 590 that “selling tickets is particularly difficult in Ottawa because the city’s two biggest employers — the federal and municipal government — are not permitted to purchase tickets … or give tickets.”

Nor, he should have added, can the employees of the city’s two largest employers accept tickets from the few corporations who do buy tickets.

Indeed, the City of Ottawa’s auditor general launched an investigation in 2007 after it was reported that a waste-management company looking to make controversial changes to a landfill gave Stanley Cup playoff tickets to senior bureaucrats.

To be fair to Melnyk, he wasn’t arguing that governments should start buying tickets. But he’s right.

Consider that in 2011, Mayor Jim Watson was “very unhappy” with the revelation that Hydro Ottawa — which is wholly owned by the city — had purchased $28,450 worth of Senators tickets in 2010-11 even while it was trying to hike hydro rates to cover what it said were increasing business costs. Watson ordered the practice stopped immediately.

It’s not that a city such as Ottawa can’t carry professional sports. Glen Hodgson, the chief economist for the Conference Board of Canada and co-author of the sports-economy book Power Play, believes the capital is large enough to support the Sens and the Redblacks, but only if you factor in the 1.3 million people in the entire Ottawa-Gatineau region.