Liberals slam PM over Wallin travel claims

VIDEO: Liberals respond to Wallin Senate expense report (August 14)

OTTAWA – The federal Liberals say Prime Minister Stephen Harper exercised poor judgment when he vouched for Sen. Pamela Wallin’s expense claims earlier this year.

And Liberal MP Stephane Dion and Sen. James Cowan, the party’s leader in the Senate, say it’s part of an ongoing pattern of dubious decisions on the prime minister’s part when it comes to the spending scandal in the upper chamber.

Harper told the House of Commons in February he had personally looked at Wallin’s travel costs, saying they were on par with other parliamentarians travelling between Ottawa and Saskatchewan.

READ MORE: Locals lose patience with once loved Senator

“In terms of Sen. Wallin, I have looked at the numbers,” Harper said at the time. “Her travel costs are comparable to any parliamentarian travelling from that particular area of the country over that period of time.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has since said that Harper was only talking about Wallin’s overall travel expenses, not individual claims.

On Tuesday, the Senate called in the RCMP after an audit flagged a host of inappropriate travel claims spanning nearly all of Wallin’s career as a senator, which began late in 2008.

The auditors flagged $121,348 in inappropriate expenses and called for further review of nearly $21,000 in additional claims.

READ MORE: Wallin audit reveals grey area in Senate expense claims

Wallin has already repaid $38,000, and has since promised to reimburse any disallowed expenses – with interest – out of her own pocket.

The Senate says it cost $126,998 to hire accounting firm Deloitte to audit Wallin’s expenses.

Dion, the former Liberal leader who is now the party’s democratic reform critic, also cited Harper’s five-day defence of his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, before finally accepting his resignation. Wright wrote a $90,000 cheque to cover the disallowed housing expense claims of Sen. Mike Duffy.

“At first glance, the prime minister should have seen the red flags. It should have raised alarms. Without indeed knowing all the details at first glance, at broad review, he should have seen the problems,” Dion said.

MORE: Highlights from the Pamela Wallin audit

“The pattern is repeating itself.”

In the latter case, Harper and several ministers insisted that only Wright was aware of the arrangement with Duffy. It has since emerged that three other senior staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office also knew about the payment.

“Now the RCMP has said that three people in the direct entourage of the prime minister and his office were aware, in addition to a Conservative senator,” Dion said.

The New Democrats are scheduled to hold their own news conference later today on the Wallin audit.