WHAT AVERAGE JOES THINK OF TRUDEAU SENATE PICKS
• Can “Joe Nobody” be a “somebody” on Parliament Hill?
Maybe now, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s revamped Senate appointment process, thought hotdog vendor Terry Scanlon, whose Hot Diggity Dog stand is just a few blocks away.
After hearing about the 21 recent appointees, the 70-year-old isn’t so sure anymore. “It’s elites and bureaucrats that seem to be getting all the jobs,” he said, rather than people the working class can relate to.
Scanlon was one of the 2,700 people seeking to fill seats left empty by prime minister Stephen Harper.
The successful applicants are a distinguished bunch at the top of their field. Professors, lawyers and progressive thinkers are wellrepresented, but not many conservatives, engineers, tech experts or tradespeople.
Another applicant who describes himself as a “regular” guy, Jesse Britton, from Dublin, Ont., said he thinks Trudeau missed an opportunity to put a “broader reflection of our society” into those red velvet seats.
Where are the paramedics, union leaders, firefighters and high school teachers, he wonders?
“People like me, quote unquote, who just do their job and try to do their best for the community and what’s been given to you — I think those people are as valuable to society as anybody else,” said Britton, 39.
He says the independent advisory board that recommended five people for each vacancy, “definitely didn’t think outside of the box.”
According to criteria posted on its website, it was more interested in gender, indigenous and minority balance; non-partisanship; “solid knowledge of the legislative process;” outstanding personal qualities; and a record of service in government, in the community or in the applicant’s field of expertise.
No information has been released about the applicants’ demographics.
Britton has a day job as a draftsman, getting to the nuts and bolts of designs for communication towers in Canada and the U.S.
He, his wife and their kids, aged 12, 10, six and one, live on a farm that has been in his family for 150 years, where his dad grows wheat, beans and corn.
They home-school their kids, one of whom suffers from medical issues caused by a genetic condition; another has a learning disability. On top of that, they volunteer at their church and the hospital in Stratford, Ont., Britton said.
When the Senate’s new application process came out, he thought the government was “saying that they want to be different” — more representative, and more open.
“If there’s ever a time in history that someone like me could have a shot, it would be now,” he remembered thinking. “From what they picked, it doesn’t seem like it is.”
Scanlon, meanwhile, started his hotdog business after working in shipping and receiving for the National Research Council, bookkeeping at a construction company and managing a fitness centre. He said he volunteers with food banks and works with the Royal Ottawa Hospital.
“There’s a lot of people out here in the working class,” he said. “I’ve been selling hotdogs here for over 33 years. I meet every kind of person. White-collar, blue-collar, no collar at all. … They’re tired of hearing of the VIPs getting all the big jobs.”
The Senate should include people who really think about how decisions affect the working class, the poor, those on the streets and with mental health issues, Scanlon argued.
For his part, Britton wondered whether the new senators know “what that feeling is when you get up in the morning and you go, ‘I worked my butt off yesterday but there’s no guarantee I’ll have a job tomorrow.’ ”
Or, “What it’s like to tell your kid again, ‘No, we don’t have the money for that, we’ve got to save more.’ And knowing that you’re not able to save more.”