Pamela Wallin has resigned from the Senate. A statement from the Clerk of the Senate on Monday said Wallin, 73, resigned her seat effective October 18, two years before the mandatory retirement age of 75. No reason for the resignation was given.
Wallin represented Saskatchewan from 2009, when she was appointed on the advice of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Before politics she was one of Canada’s best-known broadcasters — the first woman to serve as CTV’s Ottawa bureau chief, in 1985, a longtime Canada AM host, and later Canada’s Consul General in New York, a post she took up in 2002.
Her Senate career was defined in part by the expenses scandal that engulfed the chamber in 2013: Wallin repaid roughly $150,000, was suspended without pay, and left the Conservative caucus, though the RCMP announced in 2016 that no charges would be laid. She most recently sat with the Canadian Senators Group.
Her departure opens a Saskatchewan vacancy in the upper chamber and closes a public career that spanned journalism, diplomacy and politics over five decades.
