Receipts DND Letter

Colin Kenny, Chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, is applying a time-tested military tactic: A strong offence is a smart defence.

At a Parliament Hill news conference last Friday and on yesterday's National Post comment page, he scolded journalists, editorial writers and Canadians for daring to question why his Senate committee spent tens of thousands of dollars on a recent trip to the Middle East. Indeed, a defiant Sen. Kenny instead characterized the story as "cartoon journalism." He blew the opportunity to explain how taxpayers receive value for their money from this committee's work.

At issue is not whether lawmakers should travel to perform their duties. Clearly, they must. Rather, it is why four senators and three staff members traveled to Dubai last month to wait seven days for permission to travel to Afghanistan on a fact-finding trip. When the story erupted last week, Conservative Senator Michael Meighen told CTV National News that committee members had stayed in Dubai because they were waiting to travel to Central Asia. "We shouldn't have cancelled Dubai as long as there was a chance we'd get into Afghanistan," he said.

It turns out that some senators knew the committee would not be traveling to Afghanistan. We know now Canadian military officials met with Sen. Kenny in his office beforehand to explain "for reasons of personal safety," traveling to Afghanistan was not an option. Operation Medusa, which was then underway, had Canadians soldiers engaged in battle against insurgents. (NATO said hundreds of Taliban members were killed. Sadly five Canadians died as well.)

Rather than modify their travel plans before departure or along the way at stops in England or the Netherlands, the committee pressed on. The senators gambled the military situation in Afghanistan might improve and their trip could proceed as planned. Yet they ended up waiting around in Dubai for a week, attending one three-hour meeting with port officials and spending nearly $30,000 on posh hotels. Sen. Kenny now claims the military's "warning had come late."

Sen. Kenny sees goblins everywhere. One minute, he says this is not about accountability and oversight of tax dollars, but is a campaign to discredit the upper house in the voters' eyes. The next, he claims criticism is about making Senate reform an election issue. He also insists a further motivation is that the Conservative government does not want its handling of security issues questioned.

Senate testimony paints an altogether different picture. Other senators have been critical of this committee's budget and travel costs for some time. The Dubai junket is simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

In March, 2005, the security and defence committee requested a $914,000 budget for the 2005/06 fiscal year. Liberal Senator Serge Joyal expressed concerns about the proposed budget: "When I voted in favour of creating the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, it was not inherent that the committee would spend $1-million per year to travel around the world." Senator Joyal pointed to another senate committee studying anti-terrorism legislation and noted it heard testimony from around the world via teleconference.

In the end, the Senate clipped the committee budget to $657,000, an amount still regarded as high by some. Sen. Lowell Murray, for instance, asked what this $657,000 represented as a proportion of the total of all budgets for all senate committees. Sen. Paul Massicotte, then-chairman of the Senate's board of internal economy, replied, "I believe the answer would be one-third."

The public's demand for greater accountability and transparency includes the Senate. Its Board of Internal Economy now owes it to taxpayers to call Sen. Kenny to account for the spending and changing story. Pressure should be applied for the senators to return the Dubai trip money. Failing this, the committee's budget should be reduced by the amount spent in Dubai.

It simply does not hold that revelations about the junket were an attempt to discredit the Senate as a whole (although it did just that). Not with Conservative, Liberal and independent Senators all raising concerns about this committee's budget. Indeed, Committee Vice-Chair Sen. Meighen is a loyal member of the Conservative caucus. Moreover, the committee's strong bipartisan support for the Canadian Forces makes it an unlikely target for the Conservative government.

Throughout this entire episode, Sen. Kenny has never been shy about trumpeting his committee's work to provide solutions to improve our country's security. What he does not seem to grasp is that good work does not give any parliamentarian - elected or otherwise - license to spend tax dollars recklessly or balk when called to account for such spending.