OTTAWA — NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair was defiant Tuesday as he faced reporters asking why his party had informed the House of Commons that its Montreal-based employees were working in Ottawa.
Facing the television cameras, Mulcair insisted his party had done nothing wrong when it established satellite offices in Quebec with taxpayer-funded staff working alongside party employees. He suggested bureaucrats on the Hill were fully aware the NDP had hired people living and working in Montreal to help Quebec MPs.
“Let’s be serious, with Blackberries with phone numbers in Montreal, people who receive their pay in Montreal, indications that we are opening an office in Montreal, let’s be serious. Everyone knew that this was in Montreal,” Mulcair said.
The party pointed to select emails between NDP and Commons staff that reflect knowledge the NDP employees were living outside Ottawa.
But a new document prepared by the clerk of the House of Commons on Tuesday and obtained by the Huffington Post Canada suggests administrators were aware staff lived in Montreal but that they thought they worked in Ottawa.
In a September 22, 2011 email, NDP human resources coordinator Marie-Dominique Sicé mentions Quebec NDP MP staff are working in Montreal.
Christian Boileau, the acting senior analyst in the Commons’ Pay and Benefits sections responds on October 7 that the employment forms belonging to those employees indicate they work in Ottawa.
“Can you please confirm their work location?” Boileau writes.
Earlier documents from Commons clerk Audrey O’Brien suggest that is when Commons staff met with interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel’s deputy chief of staff Jess Turk-Browne to discuss the unusual staffing arrangement. When asked on October 13, 2011, whether the employees would be working in Ottawa or in another office and commute between the two, Turk-Browne responds “In Ottawa,” according to the minutes of the meeting.
On November 9, however, the NDP’s Sicé writes to Boileau from Pay and Benefits to complain one employee in Montreal received his cheque in Ottawa. She indicates this is a long-running problem and asks that cheques for staff whose home address is in Montreal be sent to that address.
Boileau responds that the employee works in the Ottawa office, according to their records.
“...it is not common practice to send cheques home when an employee works out of the Ottawa office,” he writes. “To avoid future misunderstanings, I would recommend that all cheques for the NDP Research Group be mailed at home until the direct deposit is activated by the employee.”
Sicé responds “Let’s leave it the way it’s usually done as it’s been working fine, except for these exceptions.”
On November 22, Commons staff arrange for the nine employees who have addresses in Montreal to receive their cheques at home. The email from Boileau refers to them as “Montréal employees.”
A week later, O’Brien writes to then-NDP house leader Joe Comartin asking for more information about the employees who are shared between Quebec NDP MPs.
Comartin responds on December 14 with details of the arrangements. He says employees hired by Quebec NDP Members “perform work exclusively for these members.”
He makes no mention that employees actually work in Montreal, nor does he say they work in Ottawa.
When questioned on Tuesday about the conversation Turmel’s deputy chief of staff had with administrators, Mulcair dismissed the document as “a series of short snippets of some emails.”
“There’s no minutes to a meeting, there are not minutes to a meeting, you’re mistaken, there are no minutes to a meeting.”
Another reporter asked if the NDP staffer was lying, or if the clerk was lying.
“We have always followed the rules,” Mulcair responded.
He suggested that employees who marked “Ottawa” on an employment form for their work location were only representing the fact that their superiors would be located in the capital and not in an MP’s constituency.
O’Brien, however, made it clear she was caught by surprise this March when she found out employees hired to work in Ottawa were located in Montreal.
“At no point was the House Administration informed that the employees would be located in Montreal or that their work would be carried out in co-location with a political party’s offices,” she wrote.
The document, which explains Commons rules and the situation as understood by the House of Commons administration, was prepared in advance of Mulcair’s testimony at a Commons committee hearing Thursday. MPs on the Procedure and House Affairs committee are scheduled to question the NDP leader about his party’s use of taxpayers’ resources for alleged partisan purposes. The party’s use of satellite offices is under scrutiny, as is the NDP’s use of MPs’ “franking” privileges — free and unlimited letter postage — to send close to 2 million pieces of mail in a five-month period last year, including some that were delivered during by-elections.
As HuffPost reported Monday, the NDP is refusing to disclose additional documents to assist an investigation into its alleged partisan activities. Turmel, now the NDP whip, said in a May 12 letter the party wanted assurances the documents would not be used to question Mulcair on Thursday.
“In the absence of such assurances and until the hearing scheduled by PROC [the Procedure and House Affairs Committee] for May 15th, 2014 has happened, you will appreciate that we are unable to comply with your requests,” she wrote.
Mulcair, however, denied this was the case on Tuesday.
“That is completely false, that’s completely false,” he said. “We’ve always given all the documents that have been asked.”
The NDP handed over some documents to the Board of Internal Economy, the committee that administers the Commons, Tuesday. The board is still waiting for copies of the party’s office leases and floor plans showing where Commons staff sit in relation to partisan staff, one source said.
The PROC committee is also waiting for documents about the NDP’s use of alleged partisan mailings. The O’Brien files are only related to satellite offices.
During Question Period Tuesday, Liberal MP Emmanuel Dubourg asked committee chair Joe Preston whether he had received documents about the mailings. Preston said they hadn’t yet arrived but he would do his best to ensure they were in MPs hands before Thursday.
Mulcair pointed to exchange as evidence the Liberals and the Conservatives were ganging up on the NDP and playing “a little game.”
The NDP leader insisted the party’s satellite offices were set up under rules existing at the time and that no rules were broken. When the board changed or clarified the rules, the NDP ceased employing commons staff in a location owned by the party.
Liberal, Bloc Quebecois and Conservative MPs have questions about what, if any, partisan activity the taxpayer-paid parliamentary staff may have done in satellite offices in Quebec City, Toronto and Montreal.
“It certainly appears there’s been a misuse of taxpayer resources, I think that that’s something that we deserve an answer [to],” Conservative MP Blake Richards said.
Everyone knows there needs to be a clear difference between the work political parties do and the work parliamentarians do, he said.
“There has been many indications of this [Montreal] office being used for party purposes, fundraising seminars that they held and being used as the address of some of their riding associations for example, so there clearly has a been a mixture here in my opinion,” Richards added.
Several training sessions have been held at the Montreal office, covering topics such as fundraising and election preparedness. The riding association Pierrefonds—Dollard uses the location as its address.
Bloc Quebecois MP Jean-François Fortin said appeared to him that the NDP was trying to skirt the rules.
“I think it’s hard to split what is done in a partisan way and what is done in a parliamentary way.”
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said he expected Mulcair would respond to questions about the NDP’s spending in a forthright manner Thursday.
“The idea of using taxpayers’ money for partisan ends is completely against the longstanding rules of the House of Commons,” Trudeau said.
Mulcair said staffers who did constituency work and those that did partisan work were unionized and represented by two different bargaining units because of their job descriptions.
“Our parliamentary staff has only ever done parliamentary work. Our political staff does political work and the two never criss-cross,” he said.
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