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Thursday morning, the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, released a 50-page position paper on his vision of the role of the Senate.  Titled "Complimentarity: The Constitutional Role of the Senate," it is presented as a scholarly review of the institution and outlines the justification for Harder's vision of the chamber, but is little more than the culmination of his cavalcade of nonsense.

You could clearly see that he and his staff made an effort, and they mined the history books for evidence and arguments that they could cherry-pick in order to carry on Harder's continued revisionist history to insist that he is simply trying to embody the vision of the chamber that the Founding Fathers articulated.  The problem is that he continues to narrowly interpret history to support his vision, as opposed to looking at a broader view of the circumstances and events of the era.

For example, while tracing the decision to make the Senate an appointed rather than an elected body, Harder ignores the fact that the Legislative Council (that is, the upper chamber) of the Province of Canada was partially elected, and by the time of Confederation, they declared the experiment to have been a failure.  Historian Christopher Moore termed this experience to have been the creation of a "Triple-R Senate" rich, rural, and reactionary, which frustrated the lower chamber of the day.  As well, the costs of campaigning across the entire province for one of these seats was exorbitant and determined to be unwieldy going forward it was not solely about making the new Senate deferential to the Commons.  Later, when Harder does mention the partially-elected Council, it is again in the context of fears that it being elected created a rival to the Commons, rather than the fact that they had practical experience with how it was composed as opposed to it merely being a rival.

Throughout the paper, Harder decries partisanship, and yet expends a great deal of energy to denounce the Conservatives in the current Senate, both in the paper and in the media rounds he did on Thursday in support of the release.  The problem is that the experiences of the previous couple of parliaments in which there was a problem with the way in which the Senate was being utilized as rubber stamp by the Harper-led government was not due to partisanship in and of itself.  After all, the Senate existed as a partisan body for the better part of 150 years with little problem in this regard.  Where problems came in was that there was deliberate bad faith on the part of the prime minister of the day, who abused his powers of appointment to cause problems with the institution.

Indeed, the lesson that Harder did not learn from the Harper years is that by deliberately starving the Chamber of members until he found himself in a crisis situation and made his famous 18 panic appointments, and then continuing to appoint senators until he had a comfortable majority (at which point he again stopped making appointments in a fit of pique), was that the manner in which those appointments happened was the actual damaging part.  By waiting until his own Senate ranks were depleted, and then flooding them with new appointees (who weren't well vetted), appointing twenty percent of the Chamber in one fell swoop without enough established mentors in place, we saw the creation of a new class of backbenchers rather than senators who would be properly acclimatised to the institution and its norms.  This was not simple partisanship it was spite, compounded by the fact that Harper tried to pull the strings of the Senate through those new "backbenchers," but as we learned from Nigel Wright's memos during the Duffy trial, the lack of actual levers in the Senate frequently frustrated those purposes.  Regardless, it is unfair to cast the problems that this created in the Senate as being a product of a partisan atmosphere.

And so how does Harder see the role of the Senate?  Throughout the paper, he continues to insist that the Senate shouldn't be a rubber stamp, and then lays out all of the reasons why it should be.  Senators shouldn't bother with the Charter or constitutional issues because they're not black and white and are better left to the courts.  He's uncomfortable if senators get too into the minutiae of bills rather than just the broad swaths.  He talks about institutional memory, but doesn't understand that it should also apply to the caucus room as well as Parliament writ-large as it also acts as a check on the power of the leader (hence why Trudeau expelling his senators was as much about centralizing his own authority as it was an attempt to overcorrect the problems in the Chamber at the time).

Harder goes into a lengthy condemnation of using the "pocket veto" of delay on private members' bills, but ignores both the procedural problems that can frustrate the passage of those bills when they are in a committee that is bogged down with voluminous government legislation that is automatically prioritized, or the nature of the fact that there are very bad PMBs that get passed by the Commons because of a combination of sentimentality and the fact that they simply aren't given the time for proper scrutiny some never even hearing from outside witnesses that could have provided needed pushback.

Above all, Harder continues to hammer on his notion about the need to formally adopt the Salisbury Convention, despite the inherent problems with doing so.  But this is Harder at his most self-serving.  The entire exercise of the paper is to give all of the reasons why the Senate shouldn't defeat or even seriously amend government bills things that would make his life more difficult as Government Leader, charged with getting Cabinet's priorities through the Chamber.  That's a task that he has been wholly unsuited for, and two-and-a-half years later, he continues to eschew what his actual job entails which is negotiation.  If Harder's vision were to become reality, we would not have a robust chamber of sober second thought we would have a debating society that concerned itself with a diversity of speeches rather than the challenge function that Parliament is supposed to provide.  There needs to be actual danger that legislation won't pass if government is to take the process seriously.  Neutering the Senate because it's inconvenient for Harder won't do our democracy any favours.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


You can't say the media and Liberals haven't been giving it the old college try.  Ever since Doug Ford upset the media and establishment's choice for the PC leadership — Liberal-appointed patient ombudsman Christine Elliott — they've been relentless in "vetting" the man likely to become the province's next premier.

They tried to dredge up some old stories.  First there was the old Globe and Mail very retro retrospective where anonymous sources alleged Ford was a hash dealer over 30 years ago.  Then they tried to trump up his comments as a city councillor speaking on behalf of his constituents upset about an autistic centre being placed in their neighbourhood as him implying he disliked autistic children.  Then they brought up the time he lost his cool in defending his addicted brother who the media was clamouring to dethrone as mayor of Toronto at the time.

Of course none of these lines of attack did so much as scratch Ford.

So then the media started to demand he give details on how he intends to find billions in savings after scrapping their beloved carbon tax, which it just so happens the average Ontarian now rejects as just another smoke screen for a tax grab, ineffectual at actually combating climate change.  The chattering class is now trying to suggest Ford is obtuse.  "He can't scrap the carbon tax because the Trudeau government has made it mandatory!  How does he not know" they say.  What they fail to mention is that Trudeau will soon be facing reelection and that he'll have to defend his flip-flopping record.  This included telling voters last time that his government would not implement a carbon tax from Ottawa.  So this will undoubtedly be an issue front and centre during the next federal election, and if Trudeau gets the boot then there goes Ford's obstacle.

As for the media claiming Ford doesn't have a plan: he's only been leader for a month, and although the election is less than two months away there is still plenty of time to roll out a platform, so why show his hand so early in the game, before the writ has even been dropped?  He's already dominating in the polls.  Poll after poll show the Ontario PCs at least several points ahead, meanwhile the Liberals have sunk down to third in the latest.  There's no reason for Doug to rush out a platform, especially to a largely hostile media looking to misrepresent and skewer his plan, when he's already riding a wave of popularity and momentum.  Populists don't need to get into specifics, they thrive in ambiguity which allows them to be many things to different voters.  It also leaves them much more leeway when they get in power, since they didn't make too many detailed promises.

Ford deciding to scrap the campaign bus so the press hyenas cannot nip at his heels the entire election was panned by the press as him restricting journalists' ability to do their jobs.  But will the public really care?

(In the digital age the whole concept of a group of journalists having to be cooped up in a stage-managed environment to see a politician repeat the same lines over and over to different crowds is antiquated.  Local press and some news outlets following Ford using their own resources will suffice in informing the public.  The rest of the journalists can get important developments from the others' footage and reports.  Having so many reporters at these events is a waste of resources.)

As Sun columnist Lorrie Goldstein has pointed out, most media commentators will not be taken seriously for saying "Ford needs to be closely watched" because the same media largely neglected their duties when it came to doing the same for Kathleen Wynne and Dalton McGuinty.  Voters are not just angry at politicians for the state of affairs in Ontario, but also the watch dogs for giving the Liberals an easy ride and not barking to the public sooner on how the Liberal government's policies would adversely affect them (e.g. hydro).  To be fair, most of the electorate have no one to blame but themselves — for being ignorantly complacent about provincial politics — for the mess we're in.  Nevertheless, a vehemently adversarial attitude towards the newcomer while going easy on the historically unpopular Premier will look jarringly off to the average voter.

The media scrummed Ford last week, badgering him about not being able to attend the Black community debate, which took place this past Wednesday, due to a scheduling conflict.  The implication was he was snubbing the Black community and feared facing Premier Wynne and NDP leader Andrea Horwath.  Both of these charges fell apart pretty quickly.

The first charge unravelled immediately.  All one would have to do is see pictures of a Ford rally to realize he draws many people from all minority communities in Toronto.  But on top of that, Ford has been bussing (sorry, not for journalists) underprivileged children (many of them Black) up to Muskoka every year in the summer to enjoy cottage life.  On top of that, last weekend Ford attended a Black community event to speak and engage with them.  Ford's good relations with many in the Black community deflates the charge he's a racist like Trump (the evidence against Trump is also wanting), something the Toronto Star and Liberals have been pathetically peddling.

On Wednesday, Wynne released an open letter accusing Ford of avoiding facing her and the press challenging him, citing his absence at the debate.  Ford, shortly after the open letter was released to the press and spread across social media, countered immediately, hammering the Liberals and Wynne by tweeting out a zinger: "I accept Kathleen Wynne's challenge to three televised debates.  Let's do the first one outside the jail where the senior Liberal operative will be spending 4-months."

And just like that, the tables were turned.

Even if some new skeleton is discovered in Ford's closet, which is doubtful when the best the Globe could do in the past was tell a story about alleged hash dealing from three decades ago, or him saying something spectacularly stupid like Tim Hudak, it's likely to roll off his back.

The one way in which Trump and Ford really are similar is that the more the media and their political opponents try to smear them, despite them both clearly being flawed, the more indestructible they become.  The media undermine their own credibility and ability to successfully attack because of their blind zeal to torpedo the viability of a candidate they revile.

Photo Credit: The Beaverton

Written by Graeme C. Gordon

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.