Senator Wells, I agree with the key points in your speech. I especially agree that things need to change, and if we want greater independence, we must separate the audit committee from the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration.

With regard to the proposed committee’s mandate to provide oversight, could you give me some concrete examples of the type of oversight that this new committee would have?

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Senator Wells: Thank you, Senator Saint-Germain. It’s a good question. Of course, any specific items that the committee might undertake would be up to the whole committee, and I would accede to their authority.

You will recall that in my speech I spoke about three sections that I would see fall under the greater umbrella. First would be a larger deep dive on a significant issue that relates to the expenditures of the Senate. Something like that could be, for instance, how the pension is established. I know with the way the Treasury Board does the rate of return for pension in the Senate,they use a 1.9 per cent rate of return. For the public service, they use 12.8 per cent. That is a significant difference, a significant cost to the Senate. That’s the kind of thing I would look at.

For the audit and oversight of directorates, which I see as the second program under the larger umbrella, like in the finance and procurement directorate, we would look at procurement. Is it being done efficiently? Are best practices being used? Are we getting three bids? With respect to sole sourcing, where we don’t get three bids, is there a suitable pre-qualification in place? It is that sort of thing. Are we doing things right? It’s not so much an audit of a directorate, although it doesn’t preclude that, but it would be more an oversight and audit of the systems that we use.

Third, which I would consider a regular and ongoing aspect of the work of the committee, would be samples of senators’ expenses, travel, living and office expenses. We would do audits. I would take advice on this from those who know more, but we may take five examples a year and do audits on those so that we could prevent what we ran into three years ago. First of all, are systems in place? Are they being correctly enforced? Are they being complied with? If there are rejections of applications for money or reimbursement, is there a high number of those in a certain category where maybe a senator or all senators need additional training, or their staff need additional training.

I would see that audit being an ongoing rotation audit of senators’ travel, living expenses and office expenses. We will recall that the greatest difficulty we ran into when the Auditor General came in, aside from him not looking at 88 per cent of what we asked him to look at, was that with the 12 per cent that he did look at with the senators’ office expenses, he had no comments, none whatsoever. And that comprised 8 per cent of the total Senate budget. He looked at essentially 4 per cent, which is travel expenses, and 2 per cent of that was living expenses.

We would look at all aspects of the senators’ budgets, but really, senator, only as a portion of the work of the audit and oversight committee, and mostly to prevent things from happening rather than a look at finding out what is wrong and addressing it that way.