Politics nixes Meilleur, and the Senate loses out
Madeleine Meilleur should have been a senator, instead of watching her nomination to be Canada’s official-languages commissioner smash on the rocks.
The former Ottawa-Vanier MPP and doyenne of eastern Ontario francophones is a casualty of Justin Trudeau’s aversion to partisanship in a legislative body that has historically needed it to function.
A place in the Senate is what Meilleur wanted, after a year of semi-retirement from politics. But she’s too much a Liberal to make it through the appointment process for the Red Chamber and now she’s withdrawn as the government’s nominee for the official-languages gig. Which is the right thing for her to do: it was never going to work. Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced Meilleur’s recusal Wednesday afternoon.
In olden days, like before 2015, Meilleur would have seemed like a fine addition to the Senate.
She’s from a big family in backwoods Quebec, moved to the city, trained as a nurse and worked with babies and new moms at the Montfort Hospital for a decade. While working, she got a law degree and changed careers. She specialized in labour and eventually worked for Canada Post. She went into politics, climbing the ladder from Vanier council to regional council to provincial office.
Where she was named to increasingly important jobs, rising from minister of culture to attorney-general by way of social services and corrections — deeply unsexy jobs in which the primary excitement is other people’s mistakes blowing up in your face. Which didn’t happen while Meilleur was on watch. She ran her ministries quietly and competently.
The worst things you can say about her are that she failed to fix Ontario’s jails, and she’s a Liberal through and through.
Meilleur resigned as Ontario’s attorney general and as the MPP for Ottawa-Vanier a year ago, saying she wanted to be closer to home and family. She’s 68 and found love later in life, marrying for the first time just a few years ago. Most people assumed she was simply retiring.
As it turns out she still wanted to work in public affairs and applied to be a senator, under the federal Liberals’ new process for picking people. It’s an odd system, requiring people to throw themselves at the Red Chamber as if they were applying to be accountants, but it is more obviously based on merit than simply having the prime minister name whomever he happened to like.
Trudeau’s system has selected people like an ex-head of the OPP, the former head of the Ontario Securities Commission, the former head of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society. Broadly, they’re people with a small-l liberal bent, comfortable with the workings of the government. There are no right-wing economists, no professors who won’t use unusual pronouns for trans people, no pastors of evangelical churches. But they’re people of expertise, accomplishment and independence.
Jean Chrétien named his chief of staff and his director of communications to the Senate on his way out of the prime minister’s office; Stephen Harper put his chief bagman, his campaign director and a whack of failed Tory candidates there. None of Trudeau’s appointments is likely to prep for the Liberal reelection campaign out of his or her Senate office or devote a lot of energy to party fundraisers. Whether the Senate can function as a body of free-thinkers who don’t yield to the whip we don’t know yet, but making it less of a storage locker for party goons seems like a positive development.
Ruling out someone like Madeleine Meilleur, less so. If only she weren’t a Liberal, she’d be supremely qualified, but if she weren’t a Liberal, she wouldn’t qualify. It’s a Catch-22.
No, she was told, you’re too much a partisan figure. But perhaps you’d like to be commissioner of official languages? Why not give that a shot?
She was qualified for that job, too, having been Ontario’s minister of francophone affairs, but the opposition parties aren’t crazy about a longtime Liberal’s being charged with monitoring a Liberal government’s efforts to promote bilingualism. And they’re right: being an independent agent of Parliament makes even less sense for a partisan than being a senator does.