In the wake of the Senate expense scandal, a secretive committee of MPs from all parties has decided that it’s time to get with the 21st Centaury and open up their expenses.

Except, they haven’t.

After the Duffy and Co. fiasco, parliamentarians in both houses started to feel some serious heat about the need to make their expense public. Their attempts to block the auditor general from doing his job and go through their receipts, and to swat aside calls from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) for MPs to post their expenses online finally became too much. They have finally agreed to make their expenses public to taxpayers, or so they claim.

In fact, the all-party committee responsible for this act of transparency met in secret to decide that they will post only the line items of their office budgets. No details of individual expenses. No receipts. They will also not allow Freedom to Information (FOI) requests for anything related to their expenses.

They are hoping that this meager act of openness will make the whole issue go away.

Last fall, Alberta’s government was embroiled in a series of scandals over expenses as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) and media outlets filed FOI requests for the expenses of ministers and bureaucrats. One FOI from the CTF even found that former Tourism Minister Christine Cusanelli had expensed first-class plane tickets for her mother and daughter to attend the London Olympics with her.

The pilling-up of expense scandals convinced Alberta’s government to do the right thing and agree to make all expenses from MLAs, political staffers and senior bureaucrats public on a quarterly basis. Taxpayers can now search a user-friendly database at alberta.ca and see just who is spending how much on what, with receipts.

This is real expense disclosure, and it is not what the Conservatives, New Democrats and Liberals in Ottawa quietly agreed to do.

Despite this, Conservative-turned-independent Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber and Green Party Leader, Elizabeth May, both regularly post their expenses online, linking to receipts.

The federal government also went to extraordinary lengths to spike another major push for accountability last June. The Prime Minister’s Office gutted a private members bill by that annoying example of transparency – Brent Rathgeber – that would have made the salaries of government workers earning more than $188,000 subject to FOI requests. The PMO and Conservative MPs who sat on that committee have still refused public justify their actions.

Rathgeber quit the Conservative caucus in protest.

Here in Alberta, the CTF and various media outlets (including Global TV’s Vassy Kapelos) filed FOI requests for the severance payouts given to Premier Redford’s former chief of staff, Stephen Carter. Even though this salary information had been released under FOI for Ralph Klein’s old chiefs of staff, Executive Council decided that this practice should now be discontinued. Carter’s public payout was now private information.

The government continued to block the release of this information even after it was ordered to make it public by the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

When the story went public, Albertans were not buying the government’s line. Premier Redford recognized that the government had stepped in a bit of a pile, and took action.

Although she wouldn’t commit to disclosing Carter’s severance payout until late December, she promised to introduce a ‘sunshine list,’ detailing the salaries and severance payments to senior employees. There are still details to be worked out, but her commitment in principle is a massive step forward on accountability.

And like disclosing the expenses of politicians, it’s a step that all parties in Ottawa have refused to take. All parties seem happy to find quiet agreement when it comes to these things.

It’s fair to point out that Alberta’s government took these measures after public beatings, but the public beat the correct lesson into them. The MPs that we send to Ottawa could use a similar earful until they get the message: “make your expenses public.”