Let’s use Duffy to get rid of the Senate for good
“Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”
Otherwise known as the Ice-T defence, this sentiment pretty much sums up Mike Duffy’s courtroom rebuttal to the 31 criminal charges for which he is standing trial. His lawyer, Donald Bayne, has made the occasional token effort to argue the integrity of Duffy’s behaviour — a dash of ‘you must be his local eyes and ears’ and a sprinkle of ‘couldn’t everyone use a little foundation’. But for the most part, Bayne has been content to argue that the Senate is a soiled bed of incontinent rules. Don’t blame Mike Duffy for the odour. It comes with the place.
Whatever its legal merit — and ultimately, it’s difficult to believe it has much — this strategy is guaranteed to enrage real people who, as a rule, must pay for their own scrapbooking and Barbara Bush fetishes. People who work all day believe the worst about politics and suspect the Senate is a giant parliamentary appendix that exists solely to flush money to hobbled party workhorses so they can, in turn, flush money wherever in hell they please. It’s a man-on-the-street prejudice that Duffy’s legal counsel is not only contributing to but counting on.
The implicit, actually explicit, appeal from Duffy’s defence team is that if we’re to condemn the good Senator from Maple Ridge Media Inc., then we must condemn the entire upper chamber. Done and done, say Canadians whose patience has finally reached its limit.
Soon, the trial will turn away from the Senate and toward the PMO. Duffy’s defence will shift accordingly. Again, he’ll not really argue that he behaved defensibly. Only that others behaved worse. That others used grotesque techniques to force him into accepting money against his will — “Pardon me while my client composes himself, your Honour, even the memory of receiving that $90,000 cheque remains traumatizing.” After all that we’ve learned about this great servant of the people, it’s terrifying to imagine what those short-panted monsters working for Stephen Harper must have done to convince him to take the tainted cash. It runs so obviously counter to the spin of his moral compass as we’ve come to know it from this trial.
It remains to be seen how much damage will be done to the Conservatives from all of this. It could end as savagely as Bonnie and Clyde or they might still get re-elected. We won’t really know until Nigel Wright swears his oath and says what, to this point, he has left unsaid.
For the Senate however, we can already conclude that the outcome will be devastating. It seemed unlikely that the institution’s image could be debased any further. But it has been. It’s become so bad that most Canadians are already cheering for a turn toward the terminal. Mike Duffy has become the Senate’s Waterloo.
From here, it’s only going to get worse. Compounded, as things soon will be, by Pamela Wallin, Patrick Brazeau, Mac Harb and the release of the Auditor General’s expenses investigation, it is difficult to imagine that Parliament’s second house can survive what is coming. Or that it even deserves to.
Yes, yes. There are plenty of good people in the Senate. And some good work gets done there — apparently in defiance of all probability. But those good people could be doing good work in lots of places. Universities. Think-tanks. Legislative bodies blessed by the legitimacy of actual elections. For every James Cowan, Hugh Segal and Romeo Dallaire there have been so many more Michel Coggers and Raymond Lavignes.
So bows all round, Mike Duffy. You’ve done what two-dozen prime ministers, a handful of first ministers’ conferences, the federal NDP and an entire session of kazoo-blowing absurdity could not. You’ve brought the chamber of sober second thought to the brink of its last breath.
The question is how to complete this act of euthanasia with the constitution standing guard over its death bed. Political realities dictate that securing a constitutional amendment to support senate abolition won’t happen. A referendum has been suggested — but our national experience in that area has been harder to bear than Pam Wallin’s travel claims.
Many prime ministers have considered killing the beast by attrition, allowing the incumbents to retire off and never appointing replacements. A couple decades from now, it’ll be down to Linda Frum and Josée Verner drinking gin, playing cribbage and taking turns in the Speaker’s chair. This idea has been challenged by constitutional scholars who believe the Governor General — and by extension, the prime minister — has an obligation to maintain at least a parliamentary quorum of 15 occupants. But that’s a matter of interpretation. Couldn’t we try at least?
And even if we can’t kill it, let’s starve the damn thing. Retire off those willing to go now, wait out those unwilling and let the future group of 15 be selected from the ranks of the Order of Canada — under condition that they’ll agree to take no pay, meet as infrequently as constitutionally possible and do the bare minimum to fulfill the body’s legislative functions.
It’s a wildly imperfect solution. But anything, literally anything from term limits to turning it into a country and western bar, would be preferable to the status quo.
Justice Vaillancourt will determine, in due course, whether Mike Duffy will go free. But we know enough already to find the Senate guilty. Let’s not wait any longer to mete out the harshest possible sentence. Shut this disgrace down once and for all.