Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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Duffy’s urgent political messaging included frequent appeals for campaign donations. I began to sense, though, that these were being scripted by someone else, and sent from an office other than the senator’s own. However such early donor appeals may have been orchestrated behind the scenes for the closely run Conservative money-vacuuming operation, soon enough the powers-that-be decided that personal contact with Senator Duffy would work better than continuing his avalanche of emails.
He began appearing across Canada, a magnet drawing people to public events and party gatherings, a Maritime Midas turning local fund-raising opportunities into lucrative events helping Conservatives amass a bulging campaign war chest. Yes, Senator Duffy was great!
In the meantime, the prime minister, his government having survived, developed the same fondness for using the Senate all his predecessors had. Among other appointees that year was Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley. One might have imagined a person running the party’s disciplined election-ready machinery as a full-time paid job from the Senate would see the necessity of coordinating his Senate colleague’s time and allocating Mike Duffy’s expenses in ways to ensure immunity from partisan counter-attack. Basic adherence to conflict of interest rules would have been a starting point too. Payment of constant campaigner Duffy’s expenses by the Conservative Party rather than the public treasury, another.
It is hard to be a celebrity; even harder, a celebrity senator.
In the House of Commons, members represent people who have chosen them over other candidates because of who they are as individuals and what they stand for politically. They also have an intense connection to a particular electoral district. Their supporters volunteer to work for them because great effort is needed for re-election campaigns. MPs have a public identity. Constituents admire MPs for their authentic qualities, such as their accomplishments as a job-creating entrepreneur, a fine educator, a respected lawyer, an innovative food-producer, a resilient unionist, an ardent civil libertarian, or an advocate for society’s vulnerable members. They do not want their MP to change but to remain true to character. All the while, MPs must engage forces, both partisan and parliamentary, that render them more like each other, buffing off their individuality. They run for election under a common logo and using approved “messages” they are forced to stick with, and in the Commons they vote in unison, while struggling to preserve some vestige of their individual personality that got them into Parliament in the first place.
For senators, most all of this is absent.
The pressures to perform and remain actively connected to a specific community do not exist. Able to hold office to age seventy-five, free from any concern about being fired, with no imperative to get re-elected, senators free-float in time and space, the Chris Hadfields of Canadian politics.
So a senator merely carries on, being who he or she was before, miming their prior life on a new stage. That’s what made it impossibly hard for a good man and a great hockey player like Frank Mahovlich — no ice surface. And very difficult for talented queen of skiing Nancy Greene — no downhill slopes. Patrick Brazeau remained true to himself when he climbed into a boxing ring with Justin Trudeau for a worthy cause. Pamela Wallin continued to play herself, but looked so out of place in the becalmed upper house that she dubbed herself “an activist senator.” Mike Duffy, too, remained just who he always had been, with no incentive to change and no need to, either.
The Senate can swallow whole those not sufficiently well defined by strong character. But those already larger than life can attract in Canada’s political arena all the attention of a gravity-free, camera-performing astronaut in space.
Senator Wallin was not cutting back, but becoming more active than ever, thanks to the freedom of action offered by the Senate. Her 1998 memoir Since You Asked made clear that Wallin never shied away from work, but in fact was addicted to it and defined by it. “Doing it all” summed up her hectic, frenetic, and upwardly mobile pace.
Before long she was active in Conservative Party outreach, lending her name and panache to a variety of party events across the country. She continued to hold her prestigious and remunerative positions on boards of directors, carried on with her wide-ranging charitable work, and remained active as chancellor of the University of Guelph and as senior consultant to the president of the Americas Society in New York. She participated in conferences on the status of women, not only in Canada but internationally. It was a full agenda, fuller than most could handle, and certainly more demanding than senators in Canada normally take on.
In the Senate, however, she was equally engaged. Wallin took up chairing the Committee on National Security and Defence, and served at the same time as a member of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs and International Trade Committee. Both were natural progressions, building on her prior roles with Prime Minister Harper’s Advisory Panel on Afghanistan and as Canadian consul general in New York, and drawing too on the interest in military matters she’d absorbed hearing her adored father talk about his experiences in the RCAF, her experience as honorary colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force as a mentor and role model for military personnel at Ottawa headquarters, and her role as advisor to Breakout Educational Network on projects pertaining to the essential link between the Canadian Forces and citizens. She had more invitations than could be fitted into her crammed itinerary, despite long hours and frequent flights.
From his new Senate platform, Patrick Brazeau continued his outspoken critique of behaviour and attitudes he felt detrimental to First Nations’ progress, arguing Canadian Aboriginals should not expect to be supported by taxpayers, “to sit back, wait for the government to give me handouts. Maybe be on welfare, maybe drink, maybe take up drugs.”
Such direct talk, drawn from his personal observations and experiences, rankled many. So would his later criticism of the “Idle No More” protests and the liquid-only “hunger strike” by Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat Reserve during which, Brazeau suggested, the Cree chief actually gained weight.
Few in the Canadian south or in our country’s cities, remote from the desolate western shore of James Bay in northeast Ontario, had much direct information about the on-going difficulties of Attawapiskat. But anyone following public issues was familiar with impressionistic reports of sickness, moulding homes, sewage contamination, lack of work, and the reasons for a blockade on the reserve’s road to a nearby mine. Many Canadian eyes were thus opened when, a couple of months later, on May 14, 2013, CBC Television’s Terry Milewski presented a mini-documentary about the thriving Cree community Oujé-Bougoumou on James Bay’s eastern shore, in Québec.
“Little noticed by the world outside,” said Milewski, “the Cree of northern Québec are writing a startlingly different story than their cousins on the western shore of James Bay, with self-government, revenue-sharing, decent schools, and new development. Mining companies are welcomed instead of blockaded. And no hunger strikes.” The forty-year struggle by Québec’s Cree is paying off, he observed, noting how the reserve’s neat streets “feel like they’re on a different planet than Attawapiskat. If the stop signs weren’t in Cree, you’d think the rows of warm, solid homes were in a suburb down south. Shiny new courthouses, band offices, recreation centres, and police stations are being completed. There’s no crisis to summon reporters from Toronto or Montreal.”
The veteran CBC reporter contrasted this prospering and healthy self-governing First Nation in Québec with its troubled Ontario twin, so recently publicized through the protest of Chief Spence. This enabled some CBC viewers to connect the dots and realize that Senator Brazeau, despite his undiplomatic critique, might be onto something.
In the main, however, the Algonquin’s hard-edged views neither resonated with non-Aboriginal Canadians weighed down by historic guilt about First Nations, nor sat well with the chiefs whom Brazeau considered part of a government-reserve nexus that, despite good individuals, was corrupt systemically. Those wanting to discredit Patrick Brazeau stepped up their campaign.
AFN leaders pointed to high spending and poor accounting at CAP as belying what Brazeau espoused, to which the PMO and others countered that these had been Congress problems before Patrick Brazeau became national chief, not during his time as leader. In Ottawa, Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn zeroed in