July 11th, 2011
Stephen Harper is again pushing all his old proposals to “reform” the Senate.
It’s all a bit rich, since he has violated every promise he ever made about this much-maligned institution.
He said he would never appoint anyone to the Senate who hadn’t first been “elected” to that role in some fashion. But instead, he packed the place with more partisan cronies than any other Prime Minister in Canadian history.
He said he would never allow an appointed Senator into his Cabinet. But instead, in his very first Cabinet in 2006, he appointed a floor-crossing Liberal (David Emerson) to sit in the upper chamber, and before Emerson could even find his seat, he was elevated to Cabinet.
Knowing they were under investigation by Elections Canada for alleged wrong-doing in Conservative election financing, Mr. Harper appointed two of his closest Party confidants to the Senate, risking further embarrassment for the institution.
And then most recently, he rescued three Conservative candidates, just defeated by their voters on May 2nd, and installed them days later in the Senate. Two of them were former Conservative Senators who had only just resigned to run for the House of Commons. Their voters rejected them, and now they’re better off than if they’d won.
So pious pronouncements about Senate reform don’t ring true from Stephen Harper.
And it’s not just me who’s skeptical. At least two provinces have threatened to take Mr. Harper to court. And even former Alberta Premier, Don Getty, says the Harper scheme is wrong.
The big problem for me is simple. If you concoct some half-baked way to “elect” Senators indirectly – without actually rectifying the numbers from each region, to even-up the severe imbalance against western Canada – then you’re just entrenching the Senate’s current anti-western bias.
Elected, but unequal, just doesn’t cut it!
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