The Senate feeding frenzy continues, complete with torqued headlines and inordinate amounts of time being given to the concern trolls in the NDP (who refuse to answer questions on whether they plan to campaign on opening the constitution if they truly believe in abolition). And why not? The Senate is an easy punching bag. More details continue to leak out, despite the fact that the full audit won’t be made public until Tuesday afternoon, which really makes one question who is doing the leaking and what their endgame is. The AG has hinted that it’s not his office doing the leaking, but if I were him, I’d be steaming mad about these leaks which are casting a pall over the report itself, and fuelling this breathless and hysterical coverage that remains to date largely devoid of a great many facts. The concern trolling over the two leaders and the Speaker has been particularly odious, and it’s hard to take these cries of apparent conflict of interest seriously when you look at the facts regarding their actual involvement and what they knew about their spending claims – just because they got requests for additional information, it didn’t mean that they knew they would be in the final report, and none of the three are being accused of any particular criminality. It was also made known that the Prime Minister wouldn’t have known that there were a couple of questioned expenses for Senator Housakos when he was appointed Speaker, but hey, PMO-conspiracy theorists won’t believe it regardless. While Senator Boisvenu stepped down from the Conservative caucus for the investigation, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny put out a release saying his response in the audit will speak for itself. Former Senator Gerry St. Germain disputes that he’s done anything wrong, as did Former Senator Don Oliver, and well, pretty much every one of the nine that were flagged for being egregious. It also bears mentioning that the audit itself cost over $21 million, and found less than a million in questionable spending, and that number is likely to drop dramatically once the arbitration process gets underway and a number of these cases are found to have been value judgements on the part of auditors (and yes, this is an actual problem with the way this was conducted). Some MPs and Senators think that MPs should have their own books looked over, and wouldn’t you know it, there are a whole lot of MPs who resist that notion – particularly the ones who have been so vocal about the Senate allegations. Meanwhile, the lawyers for suspended senators Wallin, Brazeau and Duffy are whinging that it’s not fair that their clients didn’t have access to this arbitration process, but there was a process at the time that they could have availed themselves to. There have been a lot of problems with procedural fairness with the way their cases were handled, and political expediency was the order of the day coming from the government’s side, but that doesn’t actually excuse any of the potential wrongdoing that they are alleged to have done, most of which far exceeds what most of the senators apparently named in the report did.

Good reads:

• In the Duffy trial, we learn that Duffy did not attend a BC event he billed the Senate for, while he visited his family in Vancouver.
• Aboriginal Affairs is a department that is increasingly lapsing its funding, which the government blames on “complex negotiations.”
• You may not be aware, but your biometric data is probably already being collected, much like these new visa proposals.
• Andrew MacDougall explains why Stephen Harper doesn’t often show his human side.
• Susan Delacourt likens the permanent campaign to Mad Max and other action films. No, seriously.

Odds and ends:

Here is the Ottawa Citizen Gargoyle’s roundup of smaller stories from the past week.

Stéphane Dion says that the Reform Act is a terrible bill, but then makes a nonsense argument about why the Senate should still pass it.

He then says the Senate should pass it anyway because of the #SCC reference decision, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. 2/n

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) June 5, 2015

Stopping a bill that is bad, for all the reasons he listed, doesn't make the Senate a "perennial rival" (from the section Dion quotes). 4/n

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) June 5, 2015

There has been a proliferation of PMBs, lots of them terrible. The Senate shouldn't be obligated to pass them because they're feel-good. 6/n

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) June 5, 2015

All of this to say that Dion's "it's a bad bill but the Senate should still pass it" position is nonsensical. It's a bad bill, period. 7/7

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) June 5, 2015