Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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putting him in the Senate as one of theirs, they balked after ascertaining that Duffy’s absence from the Island since the mid-1960s meant he was no longer considered much of an Islander in Prince Edward Island itself. Giving him a Senate seat would not be a smart appointment politically, despite how people on Parliament Hill perceived him.
Retired University of Prince Edward Island law professor David Bulger weighed in with his view that, despite reassurances to the contrary from Conservative Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, Duffy’s lack of Island residency invalidated his senatorship because the Constitution requires a senator to be resident in the province he represents.
Again the PMO took a hand in dampening critics. To address this residency challenge, Prime Minister Harper’s office announced in January 2009 that Duffy would move back to Charlottetown “where he owned a home with his brother, but would likely also keep his Ottawa home.” Significantly, it was not Senator Duffy who sought to assuage concerns about his qualifications. Instead, the PMO spoke for him. At least this suggested someone in the PMO had been detailed to watch over and protect the PM’s new celebrity senators, a smart move given the specific and hostile attention they would get from everybody dissatisfied with Conservatives being in power— a sizable, talented, and influential contingent.
So strongly did Duffy now identify with the Conservatives, and so deeply did he want to push back against entrenched anti-Conservative attitudes of many Canadian journalists, that he began to carry the battle to his former Parliamentary Press Gallery colleagues and slam journalism schools for churning out leftist graduates.
In March 2010, speaking to Nova Scotia Conservative party members at Amherst, Senator Duffy attacked the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, and other schools of journalism, for exposing students to Noam Chomsky and critical thinking. “When I went to the school of hard knocks, we were told to be fair and balanced,” Duffy was quoted in the Amherst Daily News. “That school doesn’t exist anymore. Kids who go to King’s, or the other schools across the country, are taught from two main texts.” According to Duffy, they are Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky’s book on mainstream media, and books on the theory of critical thinking.
“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky, what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty that what we stand for — private enterprise, a system that has generated more wealth for more people because people take risks and build businesses — is bad,” Senator Duffy was reported saying. He then told Conservatives they had nothing to apologize for because most Canadians are not “on the fringe where these other people are.”
A similar message had been delivered in 2002 by seasoned reporter Anthony Westell in his book A Life in Journalism, in which he examined “News Versus Truth” and said the role of journalists is to report the news not make the news. But Westell wrote reflectively, and without Duffy’s newfound combativeness. The senator was casting seeds of resentment over the fertile terrain of Canada’s newsrooms where they would sprout, once the seasons changed.
Pamela Wallin, sworn in as a Canadian senator representing Saskatchewan, owned property in Wadena, the hometown she returned to at Christmas, the place her parents and sister still lived. A Wadena perspective was a counterpoint lens through which she tried to view national issues to determine their relevance to Canadians outside her immediate political and media circles in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York. Being in Saskatchewan helped her remain grounded in who she truly was.
Yet coming home also reminded the Conservative senator of where she’d first entered politics as a radical New Democrat.
Movement across the political spectrum is not uncommon. Brazeau had wanted to enter into “mainstream” federal politics, and while his statements supported initiatives by Conservative prime minister Harper, he’d also left the door open to the Liberal’s, noting how Stéphane Dion had “an open mind” on Aboriginal questions.
Duffy’s movement on the spectrum was more like that of a slalom skier adept at veering left or right to the Liberals or Conservatives, reflecting perhaps his more traditional and pragmatic Maritime political philosophy.
Pamela Wallin’s case was quite different and, because fewer women have prominent public careers, her transition through political philosophy stood out more starkly.
Her shift was as dramatic as that of, say, Barbara Amiel, who transitioned from Communism as a young woman to being a forcefully articulate exponent of right-wing philosophy several decades later, moving from her initial opening with CBC Radio to her platform as newspaper and magazine columnist in Canada and Britain in tandem with husband Conrad Black. In a similar vein, Wallin started political involvement in the anti-American socialist Waffle, opening her media career in a small role with CBC Radio in Regina, and ended up a pro-American Conservative senator. Both women became public figures and chronicled their progress in mid-life memoirs —Confessions in the case of Amiel, Since You Asked from the pen of Wallin.
For each, early years of hard work in low-paying jobs gave way eventually to high living and mass media roles in which they influenced public thinking. Many Canadians learned the background details of both —Amiel’s multi-thousand-dollar shopping sprees for handbags and shoes, Wallin’s condominiums in New York and Toronto — and shook their heads in a response located somewhere between shock and envy.
But it was Pamela Wallin, not Barbara Amiel, whom Prime Minister Harper appointed to the Senate, and because of her position in public office, it was she whose spending came under greater scrutiny. That was the peril of being a celebrity senator: there was no option but to carry on the way you’ve been performing, to float free and stay true to what made you the star you are.
Celebrities who become politicians may either be “parachuted” candidates who are landed by the party that recruited them into safe ridings where they can easily win election to the House of Commons, or appointees dropped into the Senate with even less hassle.
Whichever route is chosen to turn these star public personalities into parliamentarians, they share a common denominator of being accustomed to media attention. They know what it’s like to have their personal life scrutinized. The best have acquired almost instinctive techniques for self-preservation, and learned ways to preserve a buffer zone of privacy. What they have much less familiarity with is the way government works, especially on the inside, and particularly in the continual byplay between journalists and politicians.
“Politics and the media play the same symbiotic game and each needs — and uses — the other,” wrote Pamela Wallin in 1998. “But,” she added, “there are rules.”
It is one thing to acknowledge rules, another to comprehend their application — or to think that because you know what the rules are from the media side of the ramparts, you understand how they work on the political side. The real problem for a great many senators, something that is magnified in the case of those who are celebrities, is that they are simply not politicians.
Although some Canadians envisage a utopia of non-partisan senators, including Liberal leader Justin Trudeau who unveiled a plan in January 2014 to appoint members to the upper house free from party affiliation, we want hockey players who know how to skate and legislators adept in the fundamentals of politics, skills developed by being active in the game. A problem for many of Canada’s senators is their lack of well-honed skills needed to work as legislators and to survive the political arena’s unique demands. In the same way, the apparent understanding journalists and public commentators exude about government and politics lacks an essential foundation of experience inside parties, campaigns, and governments.
One might think a journalist would know better than anyone how reporters sniff out stories and, therefore, why extra care is needed to not misstep or deliver a juicy morsel of news to those waiting around with notebooks and cameras. But such logic does not fit reality. The fact that the two most media-savvy senators in Canadian history, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy, did so many things to encourage, and even provoke, members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery by their actions and practices suggests that perhaps a different law governs: the more familiar one is with the news media, the less one heeds