Ottawa -
She's the former provincial auditor general who first uncovered wrongdoing in MHA constituency allowance spending in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Now she sits on one of the secretive committees of politicians that is barring the federal auditor general from examining parliamentary spending in Ottawa.
The irony is not lost on Senator Elizabeth Marshall.
But while Marshall won't say just what she is telling her colleagues on the Senate's internal economy committee, she confirms she is making her opinions known.
"Well, the best way for me to respond to that is to say the issue has come up at our meetings, and you know, I speak to it," Marshall said in a recent interview at her office in Parliament's Centre Block.
Marshall said there is a subcommittee that looks after audit issues, and steered inquiries to that body.
But how does she personally feel?
"I don't think my personal opinion, at this point in time, is something that I'd want to get into," Marshall said.
She declined to say publicly "at this stage" what she is telling her colleagues.
Auditor General Sheila Fraser has asked to audit the more than $500 million a year spent at Parliament. There are two groups of politicians blocking that access.
One is the board of internal economy for the House of Commons. The other is the internal economy committee of the Senate. Marshall sits on the Senate's committee.
Politicians have not been keen on Fraser's request. Senator Lowell Murray suggested to a Senate committee last week that politicians are not comfortable with potential problems being unearthed on Parliament Hill.
"The concern that senators have - I can only speak for myself - my sense of their concern is that you have such a high media profile, and there have been these other examples in other jurisdictions that if you were to do any kind of examination and find anything amiss - I am sure you would find something that needed to be corrected or improved - that there would immediately be a scandal," Murray said.
Murray later noted that "we are individuals, and we must go back to our communities and deal with this kind of thing."
A decade ago, when Marshall was auditor general in Newfoundland and Labrador, she uncovered questionable spending at the legislature.
Provincial politicians moved quickly, ejecting her auditors from the House and ramming through a law change to block them under the guise of a simple modernization of legislation.
Three years later, in 2003, the newly-elected Williams administration reversed the ban.
Marshall's successor as auditor general ultimately uncovered wild abuses of legislative spending. Subsequent police probes led to six people being convicted on corruption charges. Politicians from all three parties served jail time.
After wrapping up her tenure as auditor general, Marshall went on to win a seat in the provincial legislature for the Tories in 2003.
She briefly served in cabinet as health minister before leaving in a dispute over Premier Danny Williams' management style, after Williams settled an issue in her department without her knowledge.
Marshall remained on the backbenches until the prime minister appointed her to the Senate earlier this year.
rantle@thetelegram.com
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