was required, or even wanted. The three celebrity senators could devote themselves instead and to much better purpose advancing the Conservative Party and Conservative policies in Canada’s wider reaches beyond Parliament Hill.
The prime minister had yet to discover how taking a chance on famous self-starters would be like gambling with the family’s grocery money.
Chapter 3
Senators in Free-Float
No other prime minister has taken bigger risks in Senate appointments than Stephen Harper. Yet as he has demonstrated — forging a new political party by merging two, claiming Canadian Arctic sovereignty all the way to the North Pole, negotiating a full-frontal trade treaty with the European Community — reward awaits leaders bold enough to take big risks. Launching individuals with large public personas on a mission to expand the Conservative Party from the novel staging area of the Senate of Canada might also pay substantial rewards, too.
But getting to this point required the PM to work himself out of a major conundrum.
Before becoming prime minister he’d strongly and frequently asserted his clear view that senators should be elected. Consistent with this position, after forming a Conservative government in 2006 he’d refused to appoint any. Vacancies in the upper house had, as a result, piled up for three years. The shortage of active members had been making it hard for the Senate, especially in its thinly populated committees, to even give the appearance of working. Yet Mr. Harper still refrained from appointing senators, waiting for a new era when Canadians would elect members of Parliament’s upper house instead, although his government’s legislative initiatives for this, launched with enthusiasm in 2006, had met resistance and not yet become law.
Facing defeat by a coalition of opposition parties in the Commons, the prime minister looked at the bigger picture and swiftly filled all vacancies. Eighteen new Conservative senators, including his trio of celebrities, were officially sworn in in January 2009, almost doubling the party’s total to thirty-eight. Partisan critics needed no prodding to claim in public that his appointments contradicted the prime minister’s pledge to make the upper chamber an elected body. In private, every politician understood that thwarting the opposition parties as he was now doing, trying to make the best of an awkward situation, was an instinctive survival move any prime minister would make. But to include high-voltage stars in his roster of senators was a new departure. That is what really raised eyebrows among political savants.
A “celebrity senator” would be a high-risk senator.
As national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Patrick Brazeau stood uniquely apart, and not just because he was the youngest senator in Canada. Tattooed and pony-tailed, holder not only of a black belt in karate but of radical views on Aboriginal governance, the new Conservative senator would gain attention in ways others could not and dared not.
As political broadcasters turned senators, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy faced their own unique hazards. They became targets of focused attention from their former journalist colleagues because of special interest, envy, or old scores to settle. With contemporary news media having developed a narcissistic self-interest, ever primed to report on themselves or examine media relations, it was guaranteed that any awkward or disconcerting story about such prominent journalism personalities as Pamela Wallin or Mike Duffy would get big play. While quite a few reporters are secretly hungry for the power and paycheque that accompanies being a press spokesperson for government, many other journalists feel that colleagues who “go over” to government or political parties betray journalism’s code of detached and balanced observation 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
