contrast, was something of a loner and an organization man, certainly not a politician with the large national following of a celebrity.
But his Liberal Party loyalty and his steadfast support for Jean Chrétien through the internecine party warfare waged by Chrétien forces against the partisan troops of leadership rival Paul Martin had caused the grateful prime minister to thank the Ottawa MP with a Senate seat in September 2003. Mr. Harb thus was able to look forward to the prospect of another quarter century of highly remunerative and pleasant work close to home.
Born in Chaat, Lebanon, on November 10, 1953, Mahmoud Harb immigrated to Canada to study at the University of Ottawa. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Northern Telecom and taught at Ottawa’s Algonquin College. In 1985 he launched what would stretch into a twenty-eight-year career in public office, getting himself elected to Ottawa City Council and rising to become the city’s deputy mayor in 1987 and 1988.
Next came election to the House of Commons in 1988. “Mac” Harb was elected the MP for Ottawa Centre riding, and everything else about him was Ottawa-centric, too. Ottawa was where he’d earned his university degree, worked as a professional, taught community college students, got active in municipal government, and lived.
It was when he became an MP that Mac Harb and I first became acquainted. I admired the ability of the Liberal Party to attract Canadians of different national origins and respected Mac himself for his detached perspective on national affairs, which I felt stemmed from both his more objective perspective as a clear-eyed immigrant and his technical pragmatism as an engineer.
The Liberal Party Mac entered was one torn by leadership rivalries, and he sided with Jean Chrétien and supported his bid to replace John Turner in 1990. For the next fifteen years in the Commons, Mac remained a quiet Chrétien loyalist. Then, for a decade in Parliament’s upper house following his 2003 Senate appointment, he dutifully supported Liberal measures and opposed Conservative ones.
A couple of times, though, he took his own initiative on special issues, enjoying the freedom to float and be true to his own values and concerns. In 2006 Senator Harb brought forward a private member’s bill to establish and maintain a national registry of medical devices, noting in his remarks that one in ten Canadians had some form of medical implant. “Perhaps in this chamber, fellow senators,” he added, looking around at his aging colleagues, “the ratio is slightly higher.”
Just how well his humour was received is not revealed in the Senate Hansard report, but Harb’s acknowledgement of the aging and ailing population in Canada’s upper house, with senators’ increasing demands and dependence on Canada’s health care system, would recur as a theme in 2013 when both senators Duffy and Wallin, speaking against their removal from the Senate because of the expenses scandal, stressed their personal need for medical coverage due to heart ailments and cancer problems, respectively. In voting to oust them, the senators, not without a measure of self-interest, would let them retain health care coverage.
Senator Harb’s second legislative effort focused on the East Coast seal hunt. He expressed his anger over an annual slaughter of marine mammals of negative net benefit to Canada given the little amount of food produced, a declining market for sealskins, and hefty government subsidies to support its uneconomic operation. He viewed the slaughter as especially barbaric because it occurs at the height of whelping season, with mothers nursing the young, unlike the deer hunting season, which takes place in autumn when fawns are weaned and neither mother nor offspring so vulnerable. However, the seal hunt is fervently embraced within Canada by certain segments of society.
Against that background, Senator Harb entered the fray with a bill in March 2009 to restrict the hunt to those with Aboriginal treaty rights. A couple of years later he returned with a different bill to ban the commercial seal hunt. Next, in May 2012, he made a third try, with a bill opposing the annual hunt. Such proposals are disdained by a significant majority of parliamentarians, but Senator Harb was prepared to take heat over the issue because of his beliefs, which were bolstered by his research and understanding of marine science. He was recognized for his efforts by the hard-line animal rights organization PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Given political alignments and PETA’s extremism, it was a mixed blessing for Harb to be honoured by the U.S.-based organization as its “Canadian Person of the Year.”
Mike Duffy’s elevation to the upper house sparked criticism from Islanders because of his lack of familiarity with P.E.I. issues and his questionable validity as a senator, both arising from the fact he was not living on the Island.
Although he’d grown up in Charlottetown and started his career in Prince Edward Island, Duffy had left the island in his youth and had lived many years in Ontario. When the Liberals contemplated putting him in the Senate as one of theirs, they balked after ascertaining that Duffy’s absence from the Island since the mid-1960s meant he was no longer considered much of an Islander in Prince Edward Island itself. Giving him a Senate seat would not be a smart appointment politically, despite how people on Parliament Hill perceived him.
Retired University of Prince Edward Island law professor David Bulger weighed in with his view that, despite reassurances to the contrary from Conservative Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, Duffy’s lack of Island residency invalidated his senatorship because the Constitution requires a senator to be resident in the province he represents.
Again the PMO took a hand in dampening critics. To address this residency challenge, Prime Minister Harper’s office announced in January 2009 that Duffy would move back to Charlottetown “where he owned a home with his brother, but would likely also keep his Ottawa home.” Significantly, it was not Senator Duffy who sought to assuage concerns about his qualifications. Instead, the PMO spoke for him. At least this suggested someone in the PMO had been detailed to watch over and protect the PM’s new celebrity senators, a smart move given the specific and hostile attention they would get from everybody dissatisfied with Conservatives being in power— a sizable, talented, and influential contingent.
So strongly did Duffy now identify with the Conservatives, and so deeply did he want to push back against entrenched anti-Conservative attitudes of many Canadian journalists, that he began to carry the battle to his former Parliamentary Press Gallery colleagues and slam journalism schools for churning out leftist graduates.
In March 2010, speaking to Nova Scotia Conservative party members at Amherst, Senator Duffy attacked the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, and other schools of journalism, for exposing students to Noam Chomsky and critical thinking. “When I went to the school of hard knocks, we were told to be fair and balanced,” Duffy was quoted in the Amherst Daily News. “That school doesn’t exist anymore. Kids who go to King’s, or the other schools across the country, are taught from two main texts.” According to Duffy, they are Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky’s book on mainstream media, and books on the theory of critical thinking.
“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky, what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty that what we stand for — private enterprise, a system that has generated more wealth for more people because people take risks and build businesses — is bad,” Senator Duffy was reported saying. He then told Conservatives they had nothing to apologize for because most Canadians are not “on the fringe where these other people are.”
A similar message had been delivered in 2002 by seasoned reporter Anthony Westell in his book A Life in Journalism, in which he examined “News Versus Truth” and said the role of journalists is to report the news not make the news. But Westell wrote reflectively, and without Duffy’s newfound combativeness. The senator was casting seeds of resentment over the fertile terrain of Canada’s newsrooms where they would sprout, once the seasons changed.
Pamela Wallin,
