Senate seat was a life-long goal

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This article was published 07/06/2016 (3576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rod Zimmer spent most of his adult life trying to get a seat in the Senate. Once he got there, ill health kept him from accomplishing all he wanted to, says those who knew him.

The former Liberal senator died Monday night in Ottawa. He was 73.

Alan Hustak, Zimmer’s cousin, said his death came as a surprise despite his health troubles in the last 13 years, including a battle with esophageal cancer and several bouts of pneumonia that forced him to resign his beloved Senate seat in 2013.

Hustak said Zimmer was like a brother to him, and said the former senator fell in a bathtub in February and was in a rehab facility in Ottawa until Monday, when he was transferred to a special care home. He died within hours of being moved.

“I doubt he ever would have been well enough to live on his own again, but I didn’t anticipate his death,” Hustak said.

Zimmer was born in 1942 in Kuroki, Sask., a hamlet 230 kilometres east of Saskatoon. His father, Joseph Zimmer, was a passionate Liberal who was promised a seat in the Senate by Paul Martin Sr. When Martin didn’t win the Liberal leadership as expected in 1968 (it went to Pierre Trudeau), Joe Zimmer’s Senate seat went out the window and Rod Zimmer set his mind on one goal.

“He said ‘I am going to get my father’s seat in the Senate,’” Hustak remembers Rod saying, during that convention. “We all laughed at the time. But he single-handedly made all the right moves to get it done.”

Zimmer worked as an executive assistant to Liberal cabinet minister James Richardson, eventually moving to take a role with Canwest, which was run by well-known Liberal Izzy Asper. He was on the boards of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, worked on the Pan Am Games and was a fundraiser for Paul Martin Jr.’s leadership campaign.

He became one of the best fundraisers for the Liberal party in Manitoba, well known for hosting huge events at his Roslyn Road home.

In 2005, prime minister Paul Martin Jr. rewarded Zimmer with a Senate seat.

Former Manitoba Liberal senator Sharon Carstairs said it was unfortunate Zimmer’s health kept him from achieving much as a senator.

“He did not make the contribution to the Senate he would have made had he been well,” she said.

She said Zimmer was supportive of young people, generous with both his time and money, and even helped fund trips to party conventions for young people who couldn’t afford to go.

Carstairs also had stinging words for the way Zimmer was treated by the Senate in the final year of his life over the expense scandal.

“The last year of his life has been made much more difficult by the unscrupulous behaviour of the Senate,” Carstairs told the Free Press.

He was one of 30 senators identified by auditor general Michael Ferguson as having made inappropriate expense claims.

He was one of nine accused of committing sins grievous enough to ask the RCMP to investigate. Zimmer was said to owe more than $176,000 in claims made mainly for a secondary residence, travel and hospitality costs, which Ferguson said he wasn’t eligible for because he hadn’t spent enough time in Manitoba to warrant calling his Ottawa home a second residence.

Zimmer rejected the accusations and said the auditor tried to make up residency rules. He accused him of interfering in the Mike Duffy trial. Duffy was facing fraud and breach of trust charges over similar expense claim issues, and Zimmer said Ferguson was passing judgment before the judge. Duffy was acquitted in April.

Zimmer’s final years were difficult because of his marriage to Maygan Sensenberger, an actor 46 years younger than him. The age difference had tongues wagging but the real trouble came after she was arrested for causing a disturbance on a flight to Saskatoon in 2012. She pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence. In 2014 and 2015 she was arrested again for assault and threatening a police officer in two separate events in Ottawa.

Zimmer and Sensenberger had separated before his death but were not divorced. Most Liberals distanced themselves from Zimmer following his resignation from the Senate, and he was estranged from much of his family until recently because of his marriage to Sensenberger.

Zimmer wanted to be buried in Saskatchewan next to his father.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca