Dear Pamela Wallin, Can I call you Pamela? I know you're a senator now, former diplomat, Order of Canada and all that, but I'm a reporter, you used to be a reporter. You remember what it was like, right? Okay, maybe I better stick to Ms. Wallin.
Because amnesia appears to have overtaken you, and your senate colleague Mike Duffy, as well.
First, no one likes the senate. There are people who defend it as a necessary institution, who see it as a necessary evil, or those who just see it as too difficult to eliminate given the constitutional challenges.
But no one gets the warm fuzzies when they think of the red chamber. We think of senators who spent most of their year in Mexico.
We think of political appointees who are accountable to no one. We roll our eyes and shrug and wish we didn't have to pay for it all when it accomplishes so little.
Ms. Wallin, you worked for CBC and CTV for years, including working as an Ottawa bureau chief.
One of the bread and butter stories for all reporters is finding out how politicians have spent our money.
We write a lot of stories about budgets, but we also really, really like to write stories about politicians who spend public money on themselves. Expensive hotels, big restaurant bills for lobster and champagne, trips abroad.
So when the senate is held in such low regard, and free-spending politicians are the pinatas of the press and public, why are you getting your back up about the investigation into your travel expenses? Ms. Wallin, you spent more than half a million dollars on travel and billed it to the senate in four years.
That's more money than most Canadians will see in 10 years, to cover all their expenses. The vast majority of Canadians do not have plane tickets paid for by someone else so we can commute from Sask. to Ottawa, much less to and from Toronto.
And that seems to be a big part of the problem there. It seems that about $121,000 of your expenses were improper in some way.
You say you'll pay it all back. But you also lashed out and said the investigation into your expenses was "fundamentally flawed and unfair." That position doesn't make much sense.
You're a powerful and well-connected person. You have the resources to fight back if you feel you've been wrongly accused. You could drag this whole thing into the courts.
Instead, you're acting exactly like a politician - throwing around blame, saying you're not at fault, but backing down rather than have to actually defend yourself in an official way.
Of course, that may yet happen, as the details of the investigation have now been handed over to the RCMP. This story could still find its last chapters written by a judge.
The expense issues with the senate, particularly with Ms. Wallin, and Mac Harb and Mike Duffy and Patrick Brazeau, have been an embarrassment for the Conservatives, as well as a reminder of past Liberal misdeeds, thanks to Harb's inclusion.
But if you still had a journalistic bone left in your body, you could have avoided this entirely, Ms. Wallin.
Did you really even need a job as a senator? Did you need the money, after your many high-flying jobs? Did you think you'd have influence, in the part of government that does virtually nothing? Did you think you deserved a new title, somehow? You went from being someone whose job was to hold the powerful accountable, to being powerful and largely unaccountable.
You then went on a spending spree with public cash.
Really, what were you expecting? A hug? Matthew Claxton is a reporter for Langley Advance.
