Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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earlier, the largest study ever conducted into the Aboriginal condition in Canada had reached similar conclusions. The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney had not been content only to restore full legal status to Indian women and their families, but had more boldly laid the groundwork for far-reaching changes by launching a full-scale Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Its final report, which reached Parliament in November 1996, recommended dismantling the reserve system and reconstituting Canada’s traditional Aboriginal nations.
These proposals had been distilled from years of hearings in First Nations communities across Canada, and included active participation by respected elders. Yet strong opposition to such change by those entrenched in and benefiting from the existing system, when combined with the Liberal government’s reluctance to move ahead with recommendations of a review it had not initiated, consigned the ideas to oblivion — at least until Chief Patrick Brazeau gave them fresh wings.
As Ron Corbett noted, “Aboriginal people in Canada are an increasingly young, displaced, populace. Yet when the federal government funds Aboriginal programs and services, it continues to pour eight dollars out of every nine into a reserve system that was devised in the nineteenth century. To people like Patrick Brazeau, that’s like maintaining a fleet of wooden ships when the Bismarck is bearing down on you.”
Clearly, Brazeau knew the stakes were high and that the status quo could easily lead to real instability. This view found further support elsewhere; Canada’s security and intelligence services were warning the Government of Canada about rising threats within the country from militant First Nations groups, and internationally recognized insurgency expert Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Bland, retired from the Canadian Forces, was writing his warning on the same subject, a novel entitled Uprising, which I published in 2010.
For Patrick, it was obvious that the kind of change he sought required political action at the centre. Increasingly, he entertained the idea of pursuing that course of action himself. “I may take a stab at federal politics some day and run for elected office in the mainstream,” he explained to Corbett near the end of their interview. “I’ve thought about that.”
While working for fundamental change, CAP’s national chief also focused on specific measures that supported his vision of Aboriginal people acting in society to achieve their goals, not only on a tribal basis, but as individuals. Brazeau sought to inculcate a vital sense of personal responsibility for one’s own future because he felt strongly about self-sufficiency for Aboriginal peoples as individuals, not only as communities, which is particularly important for the majority of isolated natives living off-reserve. He fought to repeal section 67 of the Canadian Human Rights Act because it stipulated that communal rights under the Indian Act superseded the rights of individuals under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Brazeau argued this impeded the individual human rights of Aboriginals and was particularly detrimental to Aboriginal women. In this stance, CAP’s national chief was supported editorially by the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and other major organs of public opinion.
On June 20, 2008, Chief Brazeau happily applauded passage of the Harper government’s Bill C-21, which repealed section 67.Viewing this as another step toward the larger goal of reforming Aboriginal governance, he suggested this extension of human rights protection by the Harper government “will ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Indian Act itself.”
Before the year was out, Prime Minister Stephen Harper invited the highly visible spokesperson for marginalized Aboriginal Canadians to become a senator. It was one of the PM’s most strategic appointments. CAP’s national chief could continue to press, with whatever additional resources and status the Senate of Canada offered, alternative views that challenged positions held by Liberals and the Assembly of First Nations.
Chief Brazeau, who had contemplated federal politics “one day,” radiated his sunniest smile and agreed.
Prime Minister Harper believed the lustrous presence of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau would enhance the Conservative Party and even, as a side-effect, the Senate itself.
In a tightly controlled Parliament, moreover, he reasoned that senators, like MPs in the House of Commons, no longer needed to possess much legislative prowess. If their attendance in committee was sufficient to provide quorum, and if they supplied the expected votes in committee and in the chamber whenever summoned by the Conservative whip, that would suffice as far as Senate duties mattered.
Lacking prior political experience would not serve as a hindrance to being a member of Canada’s highest legislative chamber because any decisions it made about legislation would continue to be orchestrated from the Prime Minister’s Office. No real thinking or independent action as law-makers was required, or even wanted. The three celebrity senators could devote themselves instead and to much better purpose advancing the Conservative Party and Conservative policies in Canada’s wider reaches beyond Parliament Hill.
The prime minister had yet to discover how taking a chance on famous self-starters would be like gambling with the family’s grocery money.
Chapter 3
Senators in Free-Float
No other prime minister has taken bigger risks in Senate appointments than Stephen Harper. Yet as he has demonstrated — forging a new political party by merging two, claiming Canadian Arctic sovereignty all the way to the North Pole, negotiating a full-frontal trade treaty with the European Community — reward awaits leaders bold enough to take big risks. Launching individuals with large public personas on a mission to expand the Conservative Party from the novel staging area of the Senate of Canada might also pay substantial rewards, too.
But getting to this point required the PM to work himself out of a major conundrum.
Before becoming prime minister he’d strongly and frequently asserted his clear view that senators should be elected. Consistent with this position, after forming a Conservative government in 2006 he’d refused to appoint any. Vacancies in the upper house had, as a result, piled up for three years. The shortage of active members had been making it hard for the Senate, especially in its thinly populated committees, to even give the appearance of working. Yet Mr. Harper still refrained from appointing senators, waiting for a new era when Canadians would elect members of Parliament’s upper house instead, although his government’s legislative initiatives for this, launched with enthusiasm in 2006, had met resistance and not yet become law.
Facing defeat by a coalition of opposition parties in the Commons, the prime minister looked at the bigger picture and swiftly filled all vacancies. Eighteen new Conservative senators, including his trio of celebrities, were officially sworn in in January 2009, almost doubling the party’s total to thirty-eight. Partisan critics needed no prodding to claim in public that his appointments contradicted the prime minister’s pledge to make the upper chamber an elected body. In private, every politician understood that thwarting the opposition parties as he was now doing, trying to make the best of an awkward situation, was an instinctive survival move any prime minister would make. But to include high-voltage stars in his roster of senators was a new departure. That is what really raised eyebrows among political savants.
A “celebrity senator” would be a high-risk senator.
As national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Patrick Brazeau stood uniquely apart, and not just because he was the youngest senator in Canada. Tattooed and pony-tailed, holder not only of a black belt in karate but of radical views on Aboriginal governance, the new Conservative senator would gain attention in ways others could not and dared not.
As political broadcasters turned senators, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy faced their own unique hazards. They became targets of focused attention from their former journalist colleagues because of special interest, envy, or old scores to settle. With contemporary news media having developed a narcissistic self-interest, ever primed to report on themselves or examine media relations, it was guaranteed that any awkward or disconcerting story about such prominent journalism personalities as Pamela Wallin or Mike Duffy would get big play. While quite a few reporters are secretly hungry for the power and paycheque that accompanies being a press spokesperson for government, many other journalists feel that colleagues