hectic, frenetic, and upwardly mobile pace.
Before long she was active in Conservative Party outreach, lending her name and panache to a variety of party events across the country. She continued to hold her prestigious and remunerative positions on boards of directors, carried on with her wide-ranging charitable work, and remained active as chancellor of the University of Guelph and as senior consultant to the president of the Americas Society in New York. She participated in conferences on the status of women, not only in Canada but internationally. It was a full agenda, fuller than most could handle, and certainly more demanding than senators in Canada normally take on.
In the Senate, however, she was equally engaged. Wallin took up chairing the Committee on National Security and Defence, and served at the same time as a member of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs and International Trade Committee. Both were natural progressions, building on her prior roles with Prime Minister Harper’s Advisory Panel on Afghanistan and as Canadian consul general in New York, and drawing too on the interest in military matters she’d absorbed hearing her adored father talk about his experiences in the RCAF, her experience as honorary colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force as a mentor and role model for military personnel at Ottawa headquarters, and her role as advisor to Breakout Educational Network on projects pertaining to the essential link between the Canadian Forces and citizens. She had more invitations than could be fitted into her crammed itinerary, despite long hours and frequent flights.
From his new Senate platform, Patrick Brazeau continued his outspoken critique of behaviour and attitudes he felt detrimental to First Nations’ progress, arguing Canadian Aboriginals should not expect to be supported by taxpayers, “to sit back, wait for the government to give me handouts. Maybe be on welfare, maybe drink, maybe take up drugs.”
Such direct talk, drawn from his personal observations and experiences, rankled many. So would his later criticism of the “Idle No More” protests and the liquid-only “hunger strike” by Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat Reserve during which, Brazeau suggested, the Cree chief actually gained weight.
Few in the Canadian south or in our country’s cities, remote from the desolate western shore of James Bay in northeast Ontario, had much direct information about the on-going difficulties of Attawapiskat. But anyone following public issues was familiar with impressionistic reports of sickness, moulding homes, sewage contamination, lack of work, and the reasons for a blockade on the reserve’s road to a nearby mine. Many Canadian eyes were thus opened when, a couple of months later, on May 14, 2013, CBC Television’s Terry Milewski presented a mini-documentary about the thriving Cree community Oujé-Bougoumou on James Bay’s eastern shore, in Québec.
“Little noticed by the world outside,” said Milewski, “the Cree of northern Québec are writing a startlingly different story than their cousins on the western shore of James Bay, with self-government, revenue-sharing, decent schools, and new development. Mining companies are welcomed instead of blockaded. And no hunger strikes.” The forty-year struggle by Québec’s Cree is paying off, he observed, noting how the reserve’s neat streets “feel like they’re on a different planet than Attawapiskat. If the stop signs weren’t in Cree, you’d think the rows of warm, solid homes were in a suburb down south. Shiny new courthouses, band offices, recreation centres, and police stations are being completed. There’s no crisis to summon reporters from Toronto or Montreal.”
The veteran CBC reporter contrasted this prospering and healthy self-governing First Nation in Québec with its troubled Ontario twin, so recently publicized through the protest of Chief Spence. This enabled some CBC viewers to connect the dots and realize that Senator Brazeau, despite his undiplomatic critique, might be onto something.
In the main, however, the Algonquin’s hard-edged views neither resonated with non-Aboriginal Canadians weighed down by historic guilt about First Nations, nor sat well with the chiefs whom Brazeau considered part of a government-reserve nexus that, despite good individuals, was corrupt systemically. Those wanting to discredit Patrick Brazeau stepped up their campaign.
AFN leaders pointed to high spending and poor accounting at CAP as belying what Brazeau espoused, to which the PMO and others countered that these had been Congress problems before Patrick Brazeau became national chief, not during his time as leader. In Ottawa, Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn zeroed in on Senator Brazeau’s attention to work, as measured by his attendance at meetings.
As a multi-cultural society, Canada comprises a variety of social values that do not uniformly mesh; not all communities have elevated the alarm clock and day-planner to the same life-controlling status. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation of senators’ behaviour patterns reveals that, although quite a few are hard-working and deeply devoted, many display lax performance — a number work by means other than sitting at committee meetings, and many non-Aboriginal senators are notoriously missing in action. Such caveats did not prevent reporter Ditchburn from combing the Senate’s attendance register, however, to report that Senator Patrick Brazeau had been absent from 25 percent of the Senate’s seventy-two sittings between June 2011 and April 2012, 31 percent of the meetings of the Human Rights Committee, of which he was deputy-chair, and 65 percent of meetings of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, of which he was a member.
Jennifer Ditchburn displays quick intelligence and a good grasp of details in her reporting, and in 2013 she emerged as one of CBC Television’s reliable commentators on the Senate expenses scandal’s unfolding segments. That she earned the enmity of Patrick Brazeau for reporting those statistics about his attendance is hardly surprising, though. She had framed his performance according to narrow tests of parliamentary life and a traditional view that sitting in meetings is a measure of giving value.
Brazeau’s greater realism and quicker insight led him to understanding that whatever transpired in these meetings mattered little because their outcome had already been determined in the Prime Minister’s Office. Repeal of section 67 of the Indian Act had not been sparked by some initiative taken by a parliamentary committee, he understood, but by a prior decision reached in the PMO. Nor did reporter Ditchburn’s tidy time-tally acknowledge that a young and energetic senator, not yet socialized into the routines of long-serving parliamentary veteran senators who dutifully show up and get attendance stars beside their name, would render much greater public service by rebelling, at some level, against those acclimatized to equate attendance with accomplishment.
Indeed, accounting for these more nuanced yet substantive factors, one should be amazed that Brazeau attended three-quarters of the Senate’s sessions, two-thirds of the Human Rights committee meetings, and one-third of the Aboriginal Peoples committee gatherings. This is especially so because news reports about Patrick Brazeau in this period suggest that difficulties in his personal and family life were complicating his performance, at least at the Senate. He told reporters his attendance problems were caused by personal and private problems. Journalists gratuitously added that “he refused to elaborate,” without acknowledging that if he had, his personal problems would no longer be private and his life would become even more complicated.
In any case, the Senate forum is not the only place a member works. In an arena removed from the Senate’s precincts, as noted, the Conservative senator and the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau faced off in a boxing ring on March 31, 2012, for a celebrity match that raised $230,000 for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation — a beneficial accomplishment no other parliamentarians equalled. For losing, Brazeau cut off his pony-tail and hoped for a return bout.
Also outside the Senate during this same period, Senator Brazeau worked in service to the Conservative Party, as he’d been asked by the PMO and party leaders to do, raising election campaign money by speaking at party fund-raising events. People wanted to meet the colourful Aboriginal senator, a man of growing reknown for his barely controlled intensity and plain speaking.
Celebrity senator Patrick Brazeau was someone to be heard because he stood apart
