There was an interesting exchange in October 2006, during a session of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs:
Senator Milne [Lorna Milne]: Mr. Mendes [Errol P. Mendes, professor at the Faculty of Law, the University of Ottawa], I am going back to the third-party provisions set up in the year 2000. Am I to understand that if I resigned from the Liberal Party and formed my own party consisting of myself and my neighbours on either side and called it the Lone Pine Tree Party, or something like that, instead of being limited to $1,000 spending, we would be able to donate $3,000 to each of the ridings in our area and spend the rest of our $150,000 on national advertising to say the government was rotten?
Mr. Mendes: That is pretty much true, but in the electoral district you could not donate it.
Senator Milne: You could use it.
Mr. Mendes: Absolutely, yes. At least from the Harper v. Canada decision, that is right.
Senator Milne: That is peculiar, when I am presently at the limit from having donated to my own caucus expenses here in Ottawa, and then paying convention fees, I am over the $1,000 limit, and I have not given a cent to my party.
Mr. Mendes: If someone were to go to court to say that you are prohibited, let us say, from going to the convention and you claim that that is an unintended violation of your right to engage in the political process, that is a possible constitutional argument right there.
Senator Milne: Many senators I know are choosing not to go to the convention for that exact reason.
Mr. Mendes: That is very interesting.
Senator Milne: They are over the limit.
Senator Stratton [Terry Stratton]: I am curious, Senator Milne. You are saying that your Senate caucus expenses are tax receiptable by your party?
Senator Milne: I do not know. I get some sort of a receipt.
Senator Stratton: Our caucus does not. It is considered our personal expense, as I think it should be.
OK, it's a bit subtle. I had to read this a dozen times to figure out what happened. Liberal Senator Lorna Milne states that she "donates to [Liberal] caucus expenses" and that because of that, she is "at the limit", despite having "not given a cent to [the Liberal] party". Apparently "many senators" are in this bind.
So the caucus fund is not part of the Liberal Party accounts, and that makes sense. But then how is it that she and other Liberal Senators have reached their donation limit by kicking in money to the fund?
The limits are tracked by the parties by way of receipts issued to donors for making donations to the party, so the Liberal Party must have been issuing receipts to Lorna Milne and other Liberal Senators for having made a "donation", even though the money did not go to the Liberal Party, as Milne herself states.
Why would the Liberal Party issue donation receipts if there was no donation? Well, those receipts are used to enjoy a tax credit. So maybe this is one of those entitlements Liberal Senators enjoy -- kick in money for beers and a pizza for you and your Liberal Senator buddies, and you can write it off your taxes thanks to a Liberal-issued donation receipt.
That can't be right. If I'm reading this correctly, it an abuse of the donation rules. Actually, it sounds like a downright breaking of the rules, with the Liberal Party and Liberal Senators engaging in some sort of tax shenanigans.
Am I reading this wrong? Perhaps, but then Conservative Senator Terry Stratton's comments confirmed what seemed to be the obvious conclusion. He gets Milne to confirm that she is issued a receipt as a result of making donations to the Senate caucus expense fund, and then unambiguously rejects this as wrong. When a bunch of Senators put in money to the fund to pay for beers and pizza for the hard-working caucus, that's their business.
It's not a donation to the party, and the party ought not to be handing out donation receipts. And those receipts ought not to be used for getting out of paying their fair share of taxes. Those are the rules that Conservative Senators play by.
If this is what it seems like, we're not talking about millions of dollars being laundered through ad agencies on a grand scale. The words that come to mind are miserly, tawdry, and unseemly. Words that ought not to be associated with such an august body as the Senate, but might well be, if the Liberal Party is indeed issuing these tax receipts to its Senators.
