OTTAWA—Conservative Sen. David Tkachuk said he never told Sen. Pamela Wallin to do anything wrong when he suggested she leave irrelevant information about travel expenses off her electronic calendar.

“If she did something wrong, no one told her to do that. Certainly not me,” said Tkachuk, who was chair of the Senate internal economy committee, and the three-person steering committee in charge of the audit process, until June.

“I was trying to move the process along and I never, ever, told her to omit anything that was relevant,” Tkachuk told reporters Tuesday morning.

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The defense was in response to a four-page letter, obtained by the Star on Tuesday, that Wallin's lawyers sent to Deloitte, the forensic accounting firm reviewing her travel expenses, on July 26.

The letter said Tkachuk was the one who had advised her in April to restrict information on her electronic calendar after the investigation had begun.

The letter also said Wallin wanted to protect the privacy of those organizations "whom she dealt with in a non-senate capacity".

Wallin's lawyer said she felt the boards of directors and the University of Guelph, where she had been chancellor, "were being hounded by the media" as a result of leaks related to the contents of the Deloitte review.

The letter also said Wallin's lawyers told Deloitte she was not the only senator who filed travel expenses related to party fundraising activities.

The letter is attached to the Deloitte report, which will be released Tuesday afternoon.

Tkachuk denied advising her to change anything Tuesday.

“I didn’t ask her to change the calendar. I said ‘When you submit your calendar ... make sure you put in all relevant material and not irrelevant material,’” Tkachuk said.

“All I told her was to make sure her calendar was clean. The audit was taking a long time. I wanted to move it ahead ... it was a passing comment in an hour-long conversation,” Tkachuk said.

On Monday evening, Wallin said any changes to her calendar were made because she’d been advised to exclude irrelevant information.

“No attempt was done to mislead Deloitte,” Wallin told reporters Monday, adding she supplied Deloitte with her original handwritten diaries after she was asked about a discrepancy in her calendars last month.

Wallin, who called the process “fundamentally flawed and unfair”, also said she would repay whatever the committee tells her to, plus interest, out of her own resources.

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Wallin said she also took issue with the way Deloitte defined “Senate business” and that she had assumed it was proper to bill the Senate for travel related to public speaking about issues such as the mission in Afghanistan.

She said she viewed herself as “an activist senator”.

Conservative Sen. Gerald Comeau, who now chairs the internal economy committee, said there are nonetheless rules to follow when it comes to traveling on the Senate dime.

“All senators are activist senators. Most senators would not be here if they were not very, very deeply committed to their communities, to their provinces and to the nation, so she had no monopoly on being an activist senator,” Comeau said Tuesday morning before the internal economy committee began its meeting.

“Having said that, we do have principles that we do apply when senators travel and those principles have been well laid-out in the Deloitte report,” Comeau said.