Manitoba senator gets support for anti-harassment endeavour

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This article was published 28/02/2018 (2493 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Manitoba Sen. Marilou McPhedran narrowly scored a victory Thursday in her quest to weed out harassment on Parliament Hill, securing funds to help a lawyer with the process.

However, she lost a bid to probe how reporters were informed of a private letter questioning that funding request.

In January, McPhedran set up a confidential email address for self-identified victims of harassment by senators and their staff and commissioned a lawyer to give them guidance on pursuing justice and whether to speak publicly.

On Feb. 9, the Senate’s internal budget committee wrote to McPhedran, asking for clarification on how she intended to use the $7,000 because legal advice can only be expensed when used for legislative and work-related tasks.

She responded the lawyer would help her study a bill that would implement harassment rules for parliamentarians and advise her on an ongoing working study of the Senate’s harassment rules. The lawyer would not be compensated for time advising alleged victims, as she has offered to do that work pro bono.

On Thursday morning, the budget committee approved McPhedran’s updated expense claim for $11,000 in a 6-5 vote, with two abstaining. Some of her colleagues questioned her motives, with Leo Housakos suggesting she was trying “to basically go around” her initial request and challenge “a pretty damn good code of ethics” that exists.

“It’s been well-documented the reasons why you wanted to hire a lawyer. And that is to pursue your attempt to create a parallel system of a harassment complaint process,” he said.

Another suggested McPhedran, as a lawyer and former bar member, didn’t require a lawyer’s help.

Others said McPhedran’s project could strengthen the new policy.

“It is a perfect example of a senator undertaking her duty as a senator in a most thoughtful way, using the resources to inform herself and ultimately the rest of us,” Sen. Elaine McCoy said.

Fellow Manitoba Sen. Mary Jane McCallum, who joined the Senate in December, said she was particularly dismayed by how McPhedran was treated.

“I came here looking at the Senate as a chamber of sober second thought — that’s what people practise here — and as a place of fairness,” McCallum said. “That is: people listen and deliberate and then they decide fairly for everyone. Consistently, that is not what I have seen.”

Later that day, Senate Speaker George Furey dismissed a question of privilege McPhedran had raised over a Senate spokeswoman summarizing the details of last month’s letter, marked “confidential,” to a reporter.

The Speaker empathized with McPhedran’s concerns and said the Senate is grappling with how to become more transparent. But he said releasing the information did not impede her ability to do her job and thus there wasn’t a case for it to be investigated. Had the Speaker ruled in her favour, it would have prompted a committee investigation.

McPhedran is waiting for an answer on a third demand that is likely to be more contentious: the budget committee will reveal whether it has paid off sexual-harassment complainants since 2006.

The senator, who has led three inquiries into sexualized power imbalances, said a key goal of reaching out to victims of sexual assault is those people who have signed non-disclosure agreements don’t often understand such “gag orders” provide them with some liberty to reveal what happened.

The Neepawa-raised senator has previously ruffled feathers among some of her colleagues by pushing for more transparency in how the Senate decides on expenses. Paid trips and office supplies are a fraught topic for the Red Chamber after a 2012 scandal that saw a handful of senators forced to pay back travel costs.

Also Thursday, Housakos told his colleagues he was concerned with a high number of expense claims for international travel, which was outright forbidden until a few years ago.

“We are at the point, right now, where it is about to become a runaway train,” Housakos said. “Maybe we should thoroughly consider going back to the practice of applying the rule as it was: the rule was no international travel.”

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca