Canadian senators investigated for questionable expenses

Canada's Auditor General Michael Ferguson has found that 30 current and former senators submitted improper expenses and referred nine of the more serious cases to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In a much anticipated 116-page report on senators' expenses released here Tuesday that examined nearly 80,000 spending claims over two years, Ferguson said the 30 senators racked up almost 1 million Canadian dollars (812,700 U.S. dollars) of inappropriate expenses. The highest claim, from former Liberal senator Rod Zimmer, totalled 176,104 Canadian dollars (143,154 U.S. dollars) and is among the nine forwarded to the country's national police force.

Five of the nine cases involved ineligible living expenses made by past and present senators, who declared a primary residence outside Ottawa when in fact they spent most of their time in the national capital, according to the auditor general's report that cost taxpayers about 23.5 million Canadian dollars to produce.

One of the five cases involves a sitting senator who last week resigned from the Conservative Senate caucus after being notified he was under police investigation.

Senate government leader Claude Carignan; Conservative Leo Housakos, who was appointed speaker last month by Prime Minister Stephen Harper; and Liberal James Cowan, the opposition leader in the Senate, were among the 21 current and former senators whose expenses violated Senate rules, according to Ferguson's report.

On Monday, Housakos and Cowan said that although they dispute the auditor general's findings, which they had access to prior to Tuesday' s public release, they would repay the thousands of Canadian dollars in claims Ferguson's office had red-flagged. Carignan had already repaid 3,516 Canadian dollars for a staff member's travel expenses found to be unrelated to parliamentary business.

In late May, those three senior senators recruited former Canadian Supreme Court justice Ian Binnie to arbitrate disputes over repayment of funds arising from the auditor general's report.

As public sentiment increases in ridding Parliament of unelected, and by the auditor general's assessment, unaccountable senators, Ferguson's report called for "transformational change" in the way senators' expenses are claimed, managed, controlled and reviewed, ideally by an oversight body whose members are independent of the Senate. Endi