Tom Mulcair ‘lives for free in a lovely house’: Senate Speaker lashes out over secondary housing expense claims
In a rare move, the Conservative Speaker of the Senate publicly lashed out at NDP Leader Tom Mulcair Wednesday, deriding questions the Opposition leader made about the appropriateness of the senator’s housing expense claims as an “unfounded personal attack”.
In an extraordinary statement released to the media, Conservative Sen. Noël Kinsella noted Muclair “lives for free in a lovely house” in upscale Rockcliffe Park at Stornoway.
Stornoway is the official residence of the leader of the Opposition in the nation’s capital.
There is nothing in the Senate’s housing rules that forbids a senator from owning a house in Ottawa before joining the upper chamber. Nor do those rules require senators to spend a certain amount of time at their declared primary residence (in Kinsella’s case, New Brunswick) in order to qualify for a secondary housing allowance of $22,000 a year for their Ottawa home.