Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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As a multi-cultural society, Canada comprises a variety of social values that do not uniformly mesh; not all communities have elevated the alarm clock and day-planner to the same life-controlling status. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation of senators’ behaviour patterns reveals that, although quite a few are hard-working and deeply devoted, many display lax performance — a number work by means other than sitting at committee meetings, and many non-Aboriginal senators are notoriously missing in action. Such caveats did not prevent reporter Ditchburn from combing the Senate’s attendance register, however, to report that Senator Patrick Brazeau had been absent from 25 percent of the Senate’s seventy-two sittings between June 2011 and April 2012, 31 percent of the meetings of the Human Rights Committee, of which he was deputy-chair, and 65 percent of meetings of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, of which he was a member.
Jennifer Ditchburn displays quick intelligence and a good grasp of details in her reporting, and in 2013 she emerged as one of CBC Television’s reliable commentators on the Senate expenses scandal’s unfolding segments. That she earned the enmity of Patrick Brazeau for reporting those statistics about his attendance is hardly surprising, though. She had framed his performance according to narrow tests of parliamentary life and a traditional view that sitting in meetings is a measure of giving value.
Brazeau’s greater realism and quicker insight led him to understanding that whatever transpired in these meetings mattered little because their outcome had already been determined in the Prime Minister’s Office. Repeal of section 67 of the Indian Act had not been sparked by some initiative taken by a parliamentary committee, he understood, but by a prior decision reached in the PMO. Nor did reporter Ditchburn’s tidy time-tally acknowledge that a young and energetic senator, not yet socialized into the routines of long-serving parliamentary veteran senators who dutifully show up and get attendance stars beside their name, would render much greater public service by rebelling, at some level, against those acclimatized to equate attendance with accomplishment.
Indeed, accounting for these more nuanced yet substantive factors, one should be amazed that Brazeau attended three-quarters of the Senate’s sessions, two-thirds of the Human Rights committee meetings, and one-third of the Aboriginal Peoples committee gatherings. This is especially so because news reports about Patrick Brazeau in this period suggest that difficulties in his personal and family life were complicating his performance, at least at the Senate. He told reporters his attendance problems were caused by personal and private problems. Journalists gratuitously added that “he refused to elaborate,” without acknowledging that if he had, his personal problems would no longer be private and his life would become even more complicated.
In any case, the Senate forum is not the only place a member works. In an arena removed from the Senate’s precincts, as noted, the Conservative senator and the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau faced off in a boxing ring on March 31, 2012, for a celebrity match that raised $230,000 for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation — a beneficial accomplishment no other parliamentarians equalled. For losing, Brazeau cut off his pony-tail and hoped for a return bout.
Also outside the Senate during this same period, Senator Brazeau worked in service to the Conservative Party, as he’d been asked by the PMO and party leaders to do, raising election campaign money by speaking at party fund-raising events. People wanted to meet the colourful Aboriginal senator, a man of growing reknown for his barely controlled intensity and plain speaking.
Celebrity senator Patrick Brazeau was someone to be heard because he stood apart from the herd.
Mac Harb, in contrast, was something of a loner and an organization man, certainly not a politician with the large national following of a celebrity.
But his Liberal Party loyalty and his steadfast support for Jean Chrétien through the internecine party warfare waged by Chrétien forces against the partisan troops of leadership rival Paul Martin had caused the grateful prime minister to thank the Ottawa MP with a Senate seat in September 2003. Mr. Harb thus was able to look forward to the prospect of another quarter century of highly remunerative and pleasant work close to home.
Born in Chaat, Lebanon, on November 10, 1953, Mahmoud Harb immigrated to Canada to study at the University of Ottawa. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Northern Telecom and taught at Ottawa’s Algonquin College. In 1985 he launched what would stretch into a twenty-eight-year career in public office, getting himself elected to Ottawa City Council and rising to become the city’s deputy mayor in 1987 and 1988.
Next came election to the House of Commons in 1988. “Mac” Harb was elected the MP for Ottawa Centre riding, and everything else about him was Ottawa-centric, too. Ottawa was where he’d earned his university degree, worked as a professional, taught community college students, got active in municipal government, and lived.
It was when he became an MP that Mac Harb and I first became acquainted. I admired the ability of the Liberal Party to attract Canadians of different national origins and respected Mac himself for his detached perspective on national affairs, which I felt stemmed from both his more objective perspective as a clear-eyed immigrant and his technical pragmatism as an engineer.
The Liberal Party Mac entered was one torn by leadership rivalries, and he sided with Jean Chrétien and supported his bid to replace John Turner in 1990. For the next fifteen years in the Commons, Mac remained a quiet Chrétien loyalist. Then, for a decade in Parliament’s upper house following his 2003 Senate appointment, he dutifully supported Liberal measures and opposed Conservative ones.
A couple of times, though, he took his own initiative on special issues, enjoying the freedom to float and be true to his own values and concerns. In 2006 Senator Harb brought forward a private member’s bill to establish and maintain a national registry of medical devices, noting in his remarks that one in ten Canadians had some form of medical implant. “Perhaps in this chamber, fellow senators,” he added, looking around at his aging colleagues, “the ratio is slightly higher.”
Just how well his humour was received is not revealed in the Senate Hansard report, but Harb’s acknowledgement of the aging and ailing population in Canada’s upper house, with senators’ increasing demands and dependence on Canada’s health care system, would recur as a theme in 2013 when both senators Duffy and Wallin, speaking against their removal from the Senate because of the expenses scandal, stressed their personal need for medical coverage due to heart ailments and cancer problems, respectively. In voting to oust them, the senators, not without a measure of self-interest, would let them retain health care coverage.
Senator Harb’s second legislative effort focused on the East Coast seal hunt. He expressed his anger over an annual slaughter of marine mammals of negative net benefit to Canada given the little amount of food produced, a declining market for sealskins, and hefty government subsidies to support its uneconomic operation. He viewed the slaughter as especially barbaric because it occurs at the height of whelping season, with mothers nursing the young, unlike the deer hunting season, which takes place in autumn when fawns are weaned and neither mother nor offspring so vulnerable. However, the seal hunt is fervently embraced within Canada by certain segments of society.
Against that background, Senator Harb entered the fray with a bill in March 2009 to restrict the hunt to those with Aboriginal treaty rights. A couple of years later he returned with a different bill to ban the commercial seal hunt. Next, in May 2012, he made a third try, with a bill opposing the annual hunt. Such proposals are disdained by a significant majority of parliamentarians, but Senator Harb was prepared to take heat over the issue because of his beliefs, which were bolstered by his research and understanding of marine science. He was recognized for his efforts by the hard-line animal rights organization PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Given political alignments and PETA’s extremism, it was a mixed blessing for Harb to be honoured by the U.S.-based organization as its “Canadian Person of the Year.”
Mike Duffy’s elevation to the upper house sparked criticism from Islanders because of his lack of familiarity with P.E.I. issues and his questionable validity as a senator, both arising from the fact he was not living on the Island.
Although he’d grown up in Charlottetown and started his career in Prince Edward