Wishing away the Senate

The Senate is a body that everybody — well, a whole lot of people — wishes would go away, but — due to the fact that it is a creature of the Constitution and we have a profound aversion to attempting any revisions to its sacred content — it cannot simply be wished away.

There is no question that for politicians and commentators, hurling anathemas at the red chamber is kind of a field sport, an opportunity to stir applause and prove you’re on side with every right-thinking person. And for journalists, it has been eons since there has been an episode as juicy as the Duffy affair, as his trial wove its tentacles around the first six weeks of the federal election campaign, to the point when there were days that innocent spectators could easily flip from one to the other wondering whether there was a dime’s worth of difference between the two. Campaign and trial took on the air of an experimental drama, where the actors from one play merge at various key moments with the cast of the other.

For the Conservatives particularly, it has been the political equivalent of a war on two fronts. They have stumbled vainly about trying to keep the one from washing over the other, but press releases and campaign appearances rarely have the flair of outtakes from a hard day on the witness stand, and certainly not the sheer political magnetism of the prime minister’s former chief of staff showing up in the courtroom to unravel the obscure, crafty and otherwise esoteric manoeuvres of the PMO.

Opposition politicians obviously try to merge the public’s distaste for the Senate and the clamour over some of its members’ excesses with their well-exercised distaste for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper himself, seeing, or wishing to see, the Duffy trial as a surrogate for the election campaign itself.

And, to a point, this is fair. Harper, however disdainfully he has spoken of the Senate, has been fruitless in his quests to either repair, reduce its presence or bypass it. He picked and appointed some of his own to that turbulent college, and he’s paying a price for the calls to bring Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin into its gilded precincts.

Not that he alone should bear the intolerable weight of the opprobrium the Senate scandals have excited. There was a Senate before Harper and there will be one long after he leaves. And there were senators before Harper who tested the high-grade elasticity of its “rules.” Some who found conducting its business from a Mexican beach more alluring than showing up in the chamber itself, or who borrowed its dubious prestige and siphoned its generous emoluments to swell their personal comfort while heartily neglecting what might reasonably be understood as their official duties. Thoughts, sober or second, they contributed but few.

Indeed no one was more obliging to the ancient rituals of that august body than the Liberals. It’s useful to recall that the much-fatigued finger of scorn has been pointed at the Senate almost as long as there has been a Senate. And while we cannot deny Harper’s perhaps unwitting share in its reputational decline, it would be churlish, if not downright niggardly, not to celebrate the efforts of prime ministers before him to that same dismal effect.

Now in mid-campaign, the person with the clearest position on the Senate, reiterated this week in his interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge, is NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. He’s going to abolish it, a determination all the more winsome for being unattended with any real understanding of how he will accomplish the task. It is not his to wish away. And vague hand swirls toward talks with the premiers and the popular will are very much a magician’s hat from which no bunny will ever emerge. Tom Mulcair is not David Copperfield and saying “abracadabra” will not eliminate the Senate.

But despite how serious Mulcair seems on this point, we may nonetheless ask: How serious is he really? He knows he cannot just snap his fingers and make the Senate go away. He knows he will need to get the premiers on side in order to change the Consti- tution. And he knows that would bring a trucker’s convoy of other issues they will want on the agenda. And we will be back to that awful twilight time when people woke up to the latest constitutional conference and called, to give them some respite, for brandy and Tylenol just to fight off ennui.

The immediate question is whether Mulcair’s approach to this issue will hurt him. Clearly he’s promising what — at least for the time being — cannot be done. My guess it that it will not ever be done. I see this particular claim of his more as a performative gesture than a realistic policy proposal. He wishes to harmonize with the popular mood on the Senate. Which is outrageous. So the most vigorous statements on the Senate are a signal that he is on key with this, that he shares the voters’ perspective. The voters, in turn — should Mulcair become prime minister and find that he cannot immediately abolish the Senate — will forgive his failure to deliver, in admiration for his zeal in declaring his wish to do so.

In sum, whatever obstacles Mulcair has on his march to 24 Sussex, his stand on the Senate, for all its contradictions, will not be a major one.

Tom Mulcair is not David Copperfield

and saying ‘abracadabra’ will not eliminate the upper chamber