Media should shine a stronger light on Senate

RE: Your editorial, “Let Canadians see if Senate has improved”:

How long must thinking Canadian taxpayers be lumbered with these ongoing, thinly-veiled paeans to that slumbering body of persons enjoying the benefit of political loyalty that comes in the form of a sinecure called a, “Senate appointment?”

I, for one – and I know from correspondence and personal conversations, that I speak for many – am sick and tired of hearing the manifold excuses offered by senators and a media slavering to earn the support of politicians, telling us how important the Senate is to our political scene while, at the same time, studiously avoiding every demand for a cost/benefit analysis of just what we taxpayers are receiving for our non-deductible contributions to this charity.

Keeping in mind that, as of the fiscal year, 2015-2016, when senators were accorded a 2.7 per-cent wage increase, bringing their individual salaries to $142,400 per year which, when a total (then – with empty seats waiting for the next lucky political lottery winners) amounted to $14,952,000 (fourteen-million, nine-hundred-and-fifty-two-thousand dollars for those who can’t translate the numbers).

Now, factor in the costs of their offices, staff, health and other benefits, PLUS HANDSOME PENSIONS (I understand the disgraced Senator Don Meredith – a minister of Word and Sacrament, more to his shame,) will receive a pension of $25,000 per year for roughly six-and-a-half-years of doing nothing to earn either taxpayer dollars or respect.

If Postmedia Network is true to the intended honesty and integrity readers expect from newspapers, I challenge – nay, beg you, to publish all of the costs associated with keeping the Slumber Party snoozing – with a concomitant listing of the benefits accruing to taxpayers for their money.

Why all the secrecy about the costs of the senate? Are politicians afraid of an armed revolt if taxpayers learned the truth about this waste of their money?

In closing, let me say that, at age 81 and having retired after 46 years as a broadcast reporter, sadly watching the deterioration of the honesty and integrity of the media for whatever reason – I suspect the decay started in sales departments where “keeping the ad buyer happy at all costs is numero uno, I am sore ashamed of what has happened to a profession of which I was once so proud a member.

Bruce Anderson Humber Rd.