Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
and resent how such deserters tend to undermine their own credibility as independent reporters. There could always be payback for those who traded a television studio for a Senate office.
Even when still journalists, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy had each achieved notoriety not only for reporting the news, but, controversially, for being the news, just like Patrick Brazeau. If the best predictor of future performance is past behaviour, the Conservatives had reason to be anxious about their new stars. Special safeguards, from effective time-management supervision to proper financial accountability, would need to be in place as the Conservative Party began to deliberately and continuously thrust these big-name senators into the public eye to benefit its partisan interests.
In the weeks between the December 22, 2008 public announcement that he was going to the Senate and his official swearing-in ceremony on January 26, 2009, Chief Brazeau suggested that remaining as national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples would allow him to serve as a valuable bridge between the Senate and the First Nations’ leadership.
That was sort of the idea the PM had, initially, as well. Such continuity would not be out of step, after all, with the tradition of allowing senators to retain prior affiliations with public policy organizations and special interest groups, continue their connections to private companies, and even acquire lucrative new directorships on corporate boards while serving as members of the Senate. Senators are not precluded from simultaneously holding paid positions outside Parliament. They need only disclose any roles for which they earn more than $2,000 annually, and do not even have to say how much they earn from each position.
But critics of an Aboriginal leader affiliating himself with the Conservatives were quick to decry this prospect of the senator remaining chief. The fact he was Patrick Brazeau, despised ruffler of headdress feathers of many establishment chiefs, ensured a hot new onslaught of criticism to discredit him even before he could give his maiden speech in the Senate. Overlooking any benefit that blending his two roles may have entailed, they complained that, as chief and senator, Brazeau would collect two six-figure publicly funded salaries. That was all it took to stir outrage.
So it was. Taking his cue from the PMO, which was busy damping down criticisms about several of the new senators in the prime minister’s surprising about-face gang appointment, Patrick Brazeau dutifully resigned as chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples the day after becoming a senator.
Two days before his swearing-in, and to complete his constitutional requirements for office, Patrick Brazeau also bought land worth $10,800 at Chertsey in his Québec Senate district of Repentigny.
Pamela Wallin’s place of residence became an issue shortly after Prime Minister Harper named her a Saskatchewan senator on December 22, 2008. Wallin responded by saying her visits to Wadena and the property she owns in the municipality satisfied the residency requirement.
When questions about this persisted, following her swearing in on January 26, 2009, an effort was made, in concert with the PMO, to close down further discussion about the residency requirement. Her executive assistant, Shelley Clark, informed news media that Senator Wallin “would be making no further comment on this issue,” adding that “the Senate Speaker and Prime Minister’s Office are satisfied that all requirements have been met.”
Political scientist Howard Leeson in Regina expressed skepticism, saying Pamela Wallin lived in New York and Toronto and had not lived in Saskatchewan for decades. “Senators are full members of Parliament, whose salaries are paid for by taxpayers, so it’s not unreasonable to ask about their basic qualifications,” he told reporters. A former head of the University of Regina’s political science department who’d joined the Canadian Plains Research Centre, Leeson added that although “residency” is not spelled out in the Constitution, it typically could be evidenced by being able to vote, qualifying for a health card, and filing tax returns in the province. “Simply owning property and visiting Wadena once a month wouldn’t seem to fit the bill,” he suggested, though confirming it was “up to the Senate itself to make that determination.” He told reporters he’d written to the Senate but had been unable to get clarification.
The reason nobody connected with Parliament’s upper house was forthcoming in answering Professor Leeson was quite simply that there was no clear policy in place to tell him about, as Senator David Tkachuk, chair of the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee, would later confirm. A second good reason was that the PMO had unequivocally asserted that the prime minister’s new Senate appointees satisfied all requirements of office. Nobody running the Senate wanted to publicly contradict the all-powerful PMO.
On her appointment to the upper house, Senator Wallin pledged that as soon as the provincial government set up a voting system for Saskatchewanians to elect senators, she’d resign and seek election to her seat. Not only was that stance consistent with the private commitment the prime minister had extracted from his new Senate appointees to support Senate reform, but it was the kind of forthright public statement people had come to expect from Wallin. So it came as no surprise.
What did surprise many, however, was her acceptance of a senatorship as a Conservative. During her long career as a broadcast journalist, Wallin had covered all parties and maintained the necessary political neutrality. Like the CBC’s Don Newman and the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson, Wallin did not vote in federal elections when working in Ottawa, knowing that to mark a ballot required making a choice and that doing so would make it harder to regain the objectivity true journalism demands.
Moreover, before starting into journalism with CBC Radio in the 1970s, Wallin had been a member of the NDP. And when she departed journalism years later in the 1990s, it was to accept a diplomatic appointment from Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Reinforcing the sense that the former New Democrat now had an affinity for the Grits was the fact she’d worked closely with Liberal foreign affairs minister John Manley to host the “Canada Loves New York” post-9/11 rally in Manhattan, and that she and Liberal senator Jerry Grafstein had been jointly honoured in 2003 by the Canadian Society of New York for their ongoing devotion to strengthening ties between Canada and the United States. Although Consul General Wallin’s work in New York as a partisan-neutral diplomat kept her away from party affiliations, her personal history suggested that if she had any at all, they’d likely be with the NDP or Liberals.
Yet Wallin had reached a station in life where the direction of the Conservatives and the opportunities for public service as a senator enabled her to step vigorously into her new role. She would be effective for Stephen Harper’s party, not in the folksy but persistent manner of Mike Duffy, but as a suave and seductive spokesperson, especially with urbanites in places like Toronto, where she’d lived for years.
Between the pair, Wallin and Duffy could cover both sides of the street on their upbeat march to sell political conservatism.
Prince Edward Island’s newest senator charged heavily out of the starting gate.
Just days after he’d been sworn in, I began receiving Tory-partisan emails from ebullient “Mike Duffy, Conservative Senator.” As a former PC member of Parliament, the Conservative’s candidate against Michael Ignatieff in the 2008 general election, and an intermittent financial contributor to Conservatives over the decades, my name and address were evidently in the party’s database.
Had the Grits named Duffy to the upper house, I smiled, my Liberal friends would have been receiving these exhortations instead. At first it seemed that a procession of prime ministers — Trudeau, Clark, Trudeau again, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, and Martin — had missed real opportunity by not getting Duffy onside. Sure, there was the adage “Be wary of one who wants something too greatly.” But if you were a Tory, Senator Duffy was great!
Duffy’s pent-up lust for being in the Senate of Canada — never a joke, in his mind — was now re-channelling him from being Canada’s most ardent supplicant for a senatorship into Canada’s most assertive partisan in the Red Chamber. His skills were those of a communicator. His talent in politics was to “get the message out.” The prime minister had found his personal paladin. The two were seen on countless stages together in an unending flash of photo-ops, and provincial Progressive Conservative leaders were soon just as pleased as the national party