Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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star players?
Frank Mahovlich, for instance, left Timmins to become famous as “The Big M” in a blue Toronto Maple Leaf’s jersey many years ago, but in 1998, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien persuaded Mahovlich to trade up and don the red maple leaf as a Liberal senator. During his ensuing fourteen-year season in Parliament’s second legislature, Mahovlich’s low-profile performance failed to match his efforts on ice, which had put him into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He fit quietly into the senators’ club, where rules were seldom more onerous than “sip your Scotch slowly and keep out of trouble.” He made few headlines, and certainly no bad ones.
When he skated into the sunset in January 2013, fellow senators bid seventy-five-year old Frank farewell. Needful of some noteworthy references for their tributes, they spoke about his accomplishments at the hockey rink winning six Stanley Cups, rather than any goals he’d scored in the political arena. Nobody even remembered Frank getting an assist on any of the plays in parliamentary match-ups. Only the Liberals’ leader in the Senate, the astute Nova Scotia lawyer James Cowan, realized it would benefit his party to recall one or two of Senator Mahovlich’s upper chamber breakaways.
“While he was never the first to intervene in committee hearings,” remarked Cowan kindly, “his thoughtful, probing questions always cut to the heart of issues and concerns of witnesses who appeared before us.” Cowan was drawing on his recollection of meetings of the Fisheries Committee, on which at one time he’d sat with Mahovlich. Fisheries was a natural fit for Maritimer Cowan, less so for the son of a northern Ontario gold mining town, although the Liberals’ celebrity senator did ask about more than just what the testifying fishermen used for bait. “For me, Frank Mahovlich represents, by his quiet dignity, by his thoughtful remarks, and by his faithful attendance to his duties in committee and in the chamber, a fine example of a first-class senator.” Indeed, what more could be expected?
For his own last play, departing Senator Mahovlich took an unaccustomed brief turn around the upper house ice. He thanked Jean Chrétien for appointing him, his assistants and research staff, his wife, Marie, and “everyone in the Senate and, indeed, in Parliament. I would like to bid adieu to the Senate and leave with these final words: I have had a wonderful time. Thank you.”
No requirement obliges senators to make public statements, or to remain in the spotlight. Most make negligible public impact, regardless of what they may believe about their newfound importance, once they’ve taken a seat inside Parliament’s upper house. It’s just that for celebrity senators, switching from big star attention to lacklustre performance, the contrast seems more noticeable.
Like Prime Minister Chrétien, Mr. Harper has plucked stars from the world of sports. His new senators in 2009 included Canada’s female athlete of the twentieth century, as voted by the Canadian Press and Broadcast News, and a highly respected hockey figure who spent more than two decades behind NHL benches coaching the Québec Nordiques, Detroit Red Wings, St. Louis Blues, and Montreal Canadiens, often deep into the playoffs.
Nancy Greene of British Columbia became famous as Canada’s snowflake darling in the 1968 Olympic Winter Games in Grenoble. Claiming gold and silver medals for her downhill triumphs, she showed the world that a Canadian had the right stuff to break the Europeans’ lock on alpine skiing. Internationally, Nancy won overall World Cup titles in 1967 and 1968, and her total of fourteen World Cup victories and Olympic medals is still a Canadian record. Here at home, during her nine-year skiing career, Nancy won seventeen Canadian championship titles. Then she promoted amateur sport and ski tourism, helped develop Whistler-Blackcomb and Sun Peaks, and in 1994 became Sun Peaks Resort’s skiing director. Her star status also continued to sparkle as Chancellor Emeritus of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of both the British Columbia and Canada Sports Halls of Fame, and of Canada’s Walk of Fame.
Jacques Demers led the Canadiens to a Stanley Cup championship in 1993, was twice awarded the Jack Adams trophy for coach-of-the-year, and in 1999 began his popular broadcasts analyzing Canadiens games as a commentator on RDS Television, a position that drew richly on his insider’s knowledge of the sport. Soon after being inducted into the Senate of Canada, Demers made known that he had achieved his career successes despite being effectively illiterate, highlighting not only the challenges of literacy but how a determined individual can fashion a worthwhile career by inventing ways to overcome hurdles, including unseen ones. Neither Demers nor Nancy Greene had political backgrounds, yet both seemed as adept as Frank Mahovlich in learning the rulebook for this new sport of senatorship. Whenever they did make news, which was infrequently, the story was not controversial.
The risk with a celebrity senator, though, is that instead of fading blandly away, he or she will continue to earn controversial headlines. After all, stars achieve notoriety precisely for not being like everybody else. In 2012, Parliamentary Press Gallery interest in problems over at the Senate was only tweaked because some disputed expense claims had been submitted by senators whom Prime Minister Harper had personally selected for their value as national celebrities.
Born in Charlottetown on May 27, 1946, Michael Dennis Duffy was driven to reach out to others.
Even before becoming a teen, he’d told his chums he wanted to become a radio reporter on Parliament Hill. At age sixteen, he was an active ham radio operator, and in his teens, he worked as a disc jockey on CFCY, playing many records from his own collection on air. After completing high school, he opened a fall season at St. Dunstan’s College, but burning to become a news reporter, Duffy quickly lost patience dallying around college classrooms studying humanities, so quit and simply crossed town to start reporting for the Charlottetown Guardian. In 1964, he traversed the Northumberland Straight to work for a mainland radio station in Amherst, Nova Scotia.
Burning for politics in the excitement of Centennial Year, Duffy used his 1967 vacation time and all his savings to get to the Progressive Conservative national leadership convention at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto with press accreditation, a sampler of his unabated determination to report major developing political stories. His next career move was further in the Ottawa direction, getting him from Amherst as far as Montreal’s CFCF as an assignment editor. By 1971, he finally landed where he’d said since a youth he would be — in Ottawa — working as a political reporter. Duffy had a job with CFRA radio.
Three years later, Duffy joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Joyfully working out of CBC’s Parliament Hill bureau, he covered politics for radio listeners between 1974 and 1977 before engineering a switch to The National newscast, becoming the CBC’s lead television reporter on Parliament Hill. He covered most major stories of the Trudeau, Clark, and Mulroney years, becoming well known and recognized across Canada as a national political journalist. But Mike Duffy also worked as a foreign correspondent, covering the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 for the CBC, one of the last journalists to leave Saigon before North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong insurgents swarmed into the city.
Back home, he settled into a rewarding life as a reporter. His personal life was in flux, however; he divorced his first wife in the early 1980s but remarried a few years later. The change was matched by a professional change of partners, too. Shifting networks in 1988, Duffy crossed over to private television’s CJOH-TV in Ottawa as host of a new Sunday Edition public affairs program, which aired until 1999. Leaving the CBC for a more prominent role at CTV was not unmitigated joy. He rankled at being kept further down the pecking order than the network’s well-respected Ottawa political reporter Craig Oliver, and he’d also upset his former close friends and colleagues at CBC Television, men like Peter Mansbridge and Brian Stewart, who felt Duffy had deserted the ship that first sailed him into prominence.
At CTV, Duffy progressed to become host and interviewer with CTV Newsnet, forerunner of the CTV News Channel. An avid interest in political doings and his cherubic ways when meeting others soon made him a parliamentary insider, easily able to entice prominent cabinet ministers onto his name-bearing shows, first Countdown with Mike Duffy and later, Mike Duffy Live. Duffy was a gregarious egalitarian, as readily on a first-name basis with all the security guards and secretaries on The Hill as with senior ministers of the Crown. His personal routes into and around the parliamentary precincts exceeded those of anybody else I know. On his travels, he picked up a great deal of info from improbable