What is it Harper has achieved?
PM’s silence on Senate reform is deafening
Brian Mulroney has an idea for Senate reform. And maybe it won’t work. Maybe it doesn’t go far enough. Maybe, given the hurricane of opprobrium about to befall Ottawa with the release Tuesday of auditor general Michael Ferguson’s examination of Senate spending, it’s too late to salvage the Red Chamber at all.
But at least Mulroney has an idea: Appoint two eminent persons, a former auditor general and a former Supreme Court justice, and have them craft a new plan for Senate spending and residency, the former Tory prime minister told The Canadian Bar Association in Montreal last week. Then have the PM of the day appoint candidates from lists provided by the provinces.
Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, has an idea for Senate reform, too. He proposes to craft an arm’s-length process that would offer up potential nominees based on benchmarks of social merit. So eminent authors, artists, scientists, athletes and entrepreneurs might find their way into the Senate. To what extent this is feasible under the current Constitution, which requires that senators be appointed by the PM, is a subject of debate. But heck, it’s an idea.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair also has one of those, it so happens. His is to get medieval on the Senate’s carcass; blast it, pave it, make it a bowling alley, whatever: Just get rid of it. This is practically impossible, since the Supreme Court has judged abolition requires unanimous provincial consent, as well as agreement of the House and Senate. Even so, it’s something. Fodder for thought, argument, comment and revision.
Now to the question: Where is Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s idea for Senate reform?
Term limits, elections, the whole triple-E packet offered up by the Harper Conservatives dating back to their dewy-eyed Reform Party years, have been off his to-do list since the Supreme Court ruled in April of 2014. His response has been to stop appointing new senators. There are 20 vacancies now. There will be dozens more in the next few years. The laws of Canada are not, in fact, legal, unless passed by a functioning Senate. Therefore, we actually need some senators, breathing, speaking, voting. Or we need a Plan B. The PMO has had a year to develop Plan B. Where is it?
Back to Mulroney who, at the time he stepped aside in 1993, was considered the most popularly disliked Canadian leader ever. “He bugs us still,” wrote Peter C. Newman years later. Controversy followed Mulroney everywhere. His cabinet was a revolving door of ministers moving in and out due to various infractions and peccadillos. There was Meech, the rise of the Bloc, Charlottetown. Later, there was, of course, the Schreiber affair.
But Mulroney got some ver y important, diffic ult things done; free trade with the United States and Mexico; an acid-rain treaty and Arctic sovereignty agreement with the United States; the GST, which made it possible for Paul Martin in the mid1990s to balance the books; and leadership among the western democracies in the fight against South African apartheid.
Mulroney managed all this, and the headwaters of his constitutional failures, too, by focusing on the very big files; and by making it his business to forge personal bonds with every member of his caucus, including the backbenchers dismissed by his predecessor, Pierre Trudeau, as “nobodies.” Mulroney was, like him or loathe him, a terrifically skilled politician, and ambitious for the country to boot.
Second question: What has Stephen Harper accomplished that is difficult and important, beyond of course of having held power for nearly a decade?
On aboriginal affairs, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, there is the sound of crickets. On assisted suicide, despite a Supreme Court ruling months ago requiring a new law, crickets. On pipeline development, supposedly the very core of the nation’s economic future, there is a witless Twitter campaign by Conservative MPs against Tim Hortons, sparked by the doughnut chain’s spurning of ads for pipeline builder Enbridge — itself an idiotic cave-in to the now fashionable distaste for “Big Oil.”
Lost on the Tory Timbit warriors, seemingly, is that neither they nor their leader have expended the least energy, consumed the least political capital, in oh, two years, trying to persuade Canadians pipelines are environmentally safe and economically necessary.
Harper, his former director of communications wrote Friday in the Ottawa Citizen, “doesn’t see it as his job to be the comedian-in-chief, empathizer-in-chief, or bawler-in-chief.” That’s actually understating it a fair stretch: Based on the record, Harper doesn’t consider it his job to persuade anyone of anything, make an argument for anything other than the unsuitability of his opponents, or take a political risk ever, lest the ensuing spirited conversation awaken voters from their torpor.
In year 10, Stephen Harper leads a government without any apparent purpose, other than its own survival. It’s a vulnerable place to be, less than five months from judgment day.