continuing until just after her 18th birthday. She was a visiting student from overseas and met the senator at a church event in Ottawa. Meredith is a Pentecostal pastor. Dubbed “Ms. M” by the senate investigator, she recently told the Star she is looking forward now to “getting on” with her life.

In 2013, using a video link at first, he would masturbate while looking at the teenager’s partially unclothed body. While she was still 16, Meredith’s conduct progressed to a physical liaison in the girl’s apartment when Meredith partially removed his pants and touched her breasts and buttocks, and she then partially removed her top and touched the senator’s “private parts,” according to an investigative report that was completed two years after it began. They eventually had sexualintercourse, including once prior to her turning 18, the Senate ethics officer concluded.

He promised to help her with her career, get her a committee posting, maybe do some business with her family. Ultimately, he broke off the relationship, saying “God has spoken to me and am (sic) not happy with me … I should be leading you not making you.”

Within an hour of the Star’s story hitting the news in 2015, then prime minister Stephen Harper ejected Meredith — his own appointee in 2010 — from the Conservative caucus. Meredith kept his job as a senator, but no longer had a party affiliation. The Senate ethics officer began an investigation, but it moved slowly. During that time, Meredith’s previously close-to-exemplary attendance record in the Senate chamber lapsed and