Nest-Egging

"What I didn't do was mind the shop properly. I think anybody understands that when you are dealing with mounds of paper you're going to make some mistakes. I am sorry for doing that. I wish I'd paid better attention."
"I don't think I deliberately set out to use the system or abuse the system. I don't think that I was there for my own personal financial gain or to aggrandize myself in some way."
"These are my mistakes and I will pay the bills. I have always paid my own bills. Period. Full stop."
Senator Pamela Wallin

Mistakes they most certainly are, at the very least. Costly errors for the taxpayer, as it happens. But in claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel claims, these are flagrant errors indeed.  All the more so that Senator Wallin was billing the Senate of Canada for travel she was undertaking where the travel should have been billed to the boards on which she served and whose meetings she was attending.

Senator Wallin had amassed a travel bill of about $350,000. That's an awful lot of travelling over the course of several years. She was obviously a very busy person. Very much in demand, sitting on a number of boards and making her presence at their meetings an obvious priority. Yet unwilling to charge them for her expenses, feeling that the public purse should pay for her private business travel expenses.

Quite the oversight. Not a lapse in judgement, according to Senator Wallin, but "mistakes" for which she is prepared to take corrective action. The mistakes due to all that paperwork, very confusing. The claims process was simply too mentally demanding, but she is prepared to take "full responsibility" for not having "mind(ed) the shop properly".

There's another element involved, another shop not having been properly attended to, evidently. That one relating to primary and secondary residences. A contrarily puzzling situation that has afflicted other Senate members who were equally confused over the issue of what constitutes a legally acceptable primary residence. Senator Wallin too appeared to be claiming for reimbursement of living allowance expenses.

This is a plot that truly sickens. "The audit has to be finished. We've got to wait. She may not owe anything. She has never been asked (to repay) Whatever reimbursements she's made she's made on her own recognizance. She said, 'you know I've made a mistake here, here's a cheque."

Well, oops! The $38,000 Senator Wallin returned to the Senate expenses of her very own volition as an honourable gesture in recognition of how confused she has been over the years in expense claims should logically dispense with all criticisms of the good Senator's intentions.

The public will wait with bated breath to see the results of the audit being undertaken to determine whether the public trust was too dreadfully abused, and if and how much will be returned to the treasury from someone in a position of trust who took that trust seriously and just, most unfortunately, sullied it, through a truly unfortunate misunderstanding.