With slavish regard to the late, great Dorothy Parker, the new Canadian senators — 14 of them, thus far, the most recent six announced this week — run the gamut from A to B.
In other words, while they may turn out to be grand appointments and may be brimming with noble intentions, on the surface they are just like all the others who went before them, utterly conventional good Canadians chosen from the most conventional quarters of this curious country.
The process to get them was different, in that they weren’t the usual sort of party bagmen and hacks who brown-nosed their way to Red Chamber glory, or, as I have always considered it, slept their way to the middle, which is as far as that sort of thing is likely to carry you.
No, this lot volunteered for the gig, picked from among 2,700 applicants who inexplicably applied for the most disgraced job in the most disgraced chamber in the land.
Remember, they did so in the wake of Sen. Mike Duffy’s acquittal on criminal charges that he had fiddled and fudged expenses, travel and the like to his own benefit.
The former veteran CBC and CTV broadcaster was found not guilty in ringing terms, but in the course of his trial he cheerfully admitted to dinging taxpayers for the services of a fitness trainer-cum-adviser, trips from coast to coast wherein he performed minimal or suspect Senate business and, most gratingly, filing daily “living expenses” meant for out-of-town senators for his non-existent additional costs of living in the same city where he’d lived for decades.
In any case, from the 2,700 applicants, an “independent advisory board” — composed in the main of university leaders and prominent-ish aboriginals and feminists from each area with a Senate vacancy — produced a short list using a “merit-based process,” the first criterion of which was “gender, indigenous and minority balance.”
The other criteria included non-partisanship (though the government website notes, wryly I assume, “Past political activities would not disqualify an applicant”), a “knowledge requirement,” personal qualities (this seems to have been translated as winning one of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals, which were so freely handed out – 60,000 of them – a few years ago that I appear to have acquired one, so don’t be impressed) and knowledge of the legislative process, blah, blah, blah.
As well, of course, the candidates had to meet the usual rigorous, but delightfully vague Senate eligibility requirements, such as holding Canadian citizenship (as it happens, this is one of the citizenships that Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef holds herself), property in the province of appointment, and residency there at the time of appointment.
(Ah, yes, residency, the sore point for several of the old-type senators, including Duffy, who was and remains a senator from Prince Edward Island, and who, it appears, might have qualified as a new “independent” as well, for exceptions can be made for those individuals who have been absent from their province for the previous two years if they “can provide satisfactory proof” they “intend to return.”)
Consider, for instance, the newest six senators, whose appointments were duly greeted with the usual approving descriptor that they represent “a wide variety of backgrounds.”
Really?
The trusting would say that for most of them, the Senate appointment caps a distinguished career of public service; the cynic might read the appointments as but the latest in a lifetime spent, one way or another, at the public teat.
Former Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Gwen Boniface, for instance, was praised in the release from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office as “bringing justice and equity to a wide range of issues and having a profound impact on women in policing.”
Oddly, nothing was said about her wretched handling of the early days of the native occupation in the small Ontario town of Caledonia – and it was those early days that set the tone for the abandonment of the rule of law which followed – and her sudden resignation and flight to Ireland for a new job.
Indeed, of the new half-dozen, only Sarabjit Marwah and Lucie Moncion actually appear to have had a succession of real jobs, in his case in the banking sector, in hers, in the credit union network. But of course, the government’s own emphasis on making diversity in the Senate priority one (More women! More minority faces!) manages to somehow diminish their genuine achievements.
The others either mostly worked for government (former Ontario government deputy minister and secretary of cabinet Tony Dean) or for organizations supported mostly by government (the ferocious justice advocate Kim Pate, former Federal Court Judge Howard Wetston, and the aforementioned Boniface).
Where are the ordinary Joes? The steelworkers, teachers, the guys on the line at Ford, the out-of-work oilpatch folks, the cashiers at Metro? Where is there anywhere someone who isn’t from the conventionally approved swaths of Canadian society?
As the brilliant Ms. Parker put it, they run the gamut all right, from A to B and back again. The only real answer to the question of what should be done with the Senate also remains the same: Burn it down.
• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki