OTTAWA — By global corruption standards, the amounts are relatively tiny: only about 840,000 Canadian dollars in questionable claims, spread over two years and 30 senators.
But Canada is a country where expense-account fiddling can be political poison: It causes far more of the scandals here than sexual misbehavior or other missteps do. And deep down, the outcry over improprieties in the Canadian Senate may be about more than just money.
In a report published on Tuesday, the office of the auditor general of Canada said it had gone over the expense accounts of nearly all sitting and recently retired senators, 116 in all, and found irregularities in more than one-quarter of them.
Nine cases were so serious that the auditors recommended that the Senate forward them to the police for possible criminal investigation, the auditors said. The rest will be referred to an internal Senate body.
The findings threatened to erode what little regard Canadians still have for the country’s unelected and unloved Senate, which was already under a cloud from a highly publicized fraud and corruption trial of one member that started in early April.
Though the body has little practical influence, the audit of its spending practices, prompted by that case, promised to make significant political trouble for the Conservative government of Prime MinisterStephen Harper, not least because several of the most prominent senators involved are his appointees, with close ties to his party.
And some senators did the chamber few favors with their complaints during the audit process. One Conservative member, Nancy Ruth, became indignant that auditors challenged a claim she made for the cost of breakfast after traveling, complaining that they expected her to be satisfied with the “cold Camembert with broken crackers” she was offered on her flight. She got no sympathy.
The auditors said on Tuesday that the issues they had found were systemic, and not just isolated slip-ups. “The weaknesses and problems uncovered in the course of this comprehensive audit of senators’ expenses call for a transformational change in the way expenses are claimed, managed, controlled and reviewed,” the audit report said. “Simply changing or adding to existing rules will not be enough.”
The Senate was set up in the 19th century in part to protect the interests of landowners, but it has come to be widely seen as an ineffectual institution whose chief purpose is providing patronage posts. Canada was not even 10 years old when the first calls were made to overhaul it. But successive governments have proved unwilling or unable either to tackle the job or to put the Senate out of its misery, with Mr. Harper the most recent.
The audit report and the corruption trial that prompted it are both focused on senators Mr. Harper appointed, though, making an institution he does not seem to like very much a major political headache for him in an election year.
“The core problem of the Senate’s legitimacy is fundamental to how there’s sometimes overreaction to spending and other problems,” said Hugh Segal, a Conservative who stepped down last year from the Senate to become the master at Massey College at the University of Toronto. “It’s really not as large as the public outcry and angst would indicate, and that’s because there’s nothing that Canadians can do at the ballot box about it.” Mr. Segal was not named in the report.
Judging by the trial, of a senator named Mike Duffy, and the auditor general’s report, Canadian senators lack the imagination shown by members of the British Parliament whose expense-account abuses were exposed in 2010.
Instead of submitting dubious claims for dog food or the clearing of moats, the Canadians seem to have tripped up mainly on the question of whether trips they took were bona fide business travel. Claims were submitted for fishing and golfing trips, for staff members to attend wedding anniversaries, and, in one senator’s case, trips to promote Canadian wine and food. (Prosecutors’ assertions at the trial that Mr. Duffy claimed reimbursement for a trip taken mainly to buy a puppy appear to be eroding, though.)
Claims for meals that senators did not actually pay for were another problem area; so was inconsistent or inadequate supporting documentation. And like their British counterparts, some Canadian senators were taken to task over abusing rules on expenses related to maintaining homes in both the capital and the regions they represented.
Both the report and Mr. Duffy’s trial have indicated that the Senate’s rules about expenses can be vague and contradictory, and are enforced loosely and erratically.
Only two of the cases sent to the police involve sitting senators; three have resigned since the period covered by the audit, April 2011 to March 2013, and the other four have retired. (Senators formerly served for life, but these days retirement is mandatory at age 75.)
The 840,000 Canadian dollars (or about $683,000) in questioned expenses are only a small slice of the Senate’s annual budget of about $103 million. By contrast, the auditors spent about $24 million conducting their investigation.
Polls consistently show that fewer than 10 percent of Canadians support the Senate in its current form. But they are about equally split on whether to overhaul the “red chamber,” as it is known because of its décor, or to shut it down.
Mr. Segal speculated that if Canadians were asked now whether senators should be allowed to claim any expenses at all, eight out of 10 would say no, and a majority would vote to cut off their salaries, too.
Canadians, he said, tend to be much more unforgiving than Americans when it comes to politicians’ finances. “Americans, who can be as small-minded about politicians as anybody, seem to understand that politics costs money,” he said.
Mr. Harper came to power in 2006 promising to convert the Senate into an elected body, an idea that was once highly popular in his adopted home province of Alberta. But the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Senate cannot be abolished or substantially changed without amending the Constitution, and that can be done only with the unanimous consent of all 10 provinces. Attempts in the 1990s to amend the Constitution turned into political trading bazaars that ultimately failed.
“There’s almost a weird pathology about constitutional amendment in Canada,” said Emmett Macfarlane, a political scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “We have a very decentralized, very diverse country that seems to be held together by baling wire at times.”
Mr. Segal said he would like to see a national referendum on the Senate’s fate that would force the issue. But Professor Macfarlane wondered how to word the question put to voters, and what would happen if the voters split evenly between overhaul and abolition, as they do in polls.
At least one federal politician, however, is pressing to make the current scandal an issue in the national general election in October. Tom Mulcair, the leader of the New Democrats, heads a labor-backed left-of-center party that has never allowed its members to be appointed to the Senate, and that has favored abolishing the body for years. Many of Canada’s provinces once had similar appointed upper chambers, but scrapped them long ago to no apparent ill effect.
Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party, ejected all Liberal senators from his caucus because of the current scandal, but he is calling for an overhaul of the Senate. If, as seems likely, the scandal continues to tarnish the Conservatives, Mr. Segal said that Mr. Harper may decide to back abolition.
Mr. Segal still gamely defends the chamber where he once sat, particularly for its detailed committee work on legislation. But he acknowledged that its disappearance would not be a great loss for the country.
“If that’s what the people want,” he said, “it won’t be a mistake.”
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