Graham Steele on expense scandals and the politicians who cause them

Another political expense scandal has broken. 

It's déjà vu all over again. This week's audit of Senate expenses transports me back to February 2010, when Nova Scotia's own expense scandal broke.

Our senators should have learned from Nova Scotia's experience — not to mention earlier expense scandals in Newfoundland and Labrador and the United Kingdom — that the Auditor General would soon be rapping at their door.

Legislative expenses became a tempting target.

But the senators didn't hear the approaching footsteps. They believed they were above it all. Now they're neck-deep in the same soup as we were in 2010.

Three ingredients for an expense scandal

There are three essential ingredients for a political expense scandal.

First, there has to be a fuzzy boundary between public business and private business.

The core of a politician's job is to propose, debate, and vote on laws and budgets.

Beyond that, though, what's the politician's job? We know when a police officer's off duty, and we know when a nurse is off duty. But when's a politician off the clock? There's no job description, so every trip, every meeting, even every hello in the street, is arguably all in a day's work. 

Of course politicians like it this way. Who wouldn't? Loose rules means loose accountability. Loose accountability makes for carefree days. The job is what the politician says it is—until the auditors show up with a measuring tape and some ideas of their own about where the boundaries are.

The second essential ingredient is secrecy.

If a politician knows their expenses will be publicized, they will take greater care. "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants," said American jurist Louis Brandeis, and he was right.

Until the Auditor General came along, our senators believed their expenses were for their eyes only. All that mattered was whether the claim could get past the Senate administration. There were no consequences for putting in a bad or dubious claim.

The third essential ingredient is the wrong attitude.

There's no way to put this gently. The longer you're in politics, the greater the likelihood you'll become detached from reality. 

You start to believe that rules are for other people. 

Your sense of self-importance grows to the point where you believe your very presence at an event, like a golf tournament or a board meeting, is in the public interest. And if it's in the public interest, you can expense it.

That's how we end up with politicians who forget how to reach into their own pocket for an airfare, a cab, or a meal. 

Good apples and bad apples

Not every senator is implicated, just as not every Nova Scotia MLA was implicated in the 2010 expense scandal.

In fact, many Nova Scotia MLAs believe they were unfairly smeared by the Auditor General's report. Apart from the four who were convicted of criminal offences, at least one former MLA believes his reputation and job prospects were ruined forever. Plenty of others believe the Auditor General made mistakes, but they were afforded no opportunity to correct the record.

But as the senators are about to find out, the public will not draw neat distinctions between the good apples and the bad, or whether the audit report was fair.

Behind the scenes

If the Senate is anything like Nova Scotia's House of Assembly in 2010, the senators' first reaction will be to attempt damage control and snipe at the Auditor General.

"This will all blow over," they'll whisper to each other.

"The Auditor General doesn't understand us," they'll whine.

"We'll clean up the mess and get credit for the repairs," they'll hope.

Nova Scotia MLAs said all of those things, and it didn't do us one bit of good.

Our senators are about to discover that the public loves a good expense story.

Maybe not everybody knows what our trade policy should be, and maybe not everybody understands how to build a destroyer or how much a fighter jet goes for, but they know a reasonable price for a glass of orange juice.

At least the senators have one thing going for them that Nova Scotia MLAs did not: they'll never have to face a voter. And that is the ultimate accountability.