she returned to at Christmas, the place her parents and sister still lived. A Wadena perspective was a counterpoint lens through which she tried to view national issues to determine their relevance to Canadians outside her immediate political and media circles in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York. Being in Saskatchewan helped her remain grounded in who she truly was.
Yet coming home also reminded the Conservative senator of where she’d first entered politics as a radical New Democrat.
Movement across the political spectrum is not uncommon. Brazeau had wanted to enter into “mainstream” federal politics, and while his statements supported initiatives by Conservative prime minister Harper, he’d also left the door open to the Liberal’s, noting how Stéphane Dion had “an open mind” on Aboriginal questions.
Duffy’s movement on the spectrum was more like that of a slalom skier adept at veering left or right to the Liberals or Conservatives, reflecting perhaps his more traditional and pragmatic Maritime political philosophy.
Pamela Wallin’s case was quite different and, because fewer women have prominent public careers, her transition through political philosophy stood out more starkly.
Her shift was as dramatic as that of, say, Barbara Amiel, who transitioned from Communism as a young woman to being a forcefully articulate exponent of right-wing philosophy several decades later, moving from her initial opening with CBC Radio to her platform as newspaper and magazine columnist in Canada and Britain in tandem with husband Conrad Black. In a similar vein, Wallin started political involvement in the anti-American socialist Waffle, opening her media career in a small role with CBC Radio in Regina, and ended up a pro-American Conservative senator. Both women became public figures and chronicled their progress in mid-life memoirs —Confessions in the case of Amiel, Since You Asked from the pen of Wallin.
For each, early years of hard work in low-paying jobs gave way eventually to high living and mass media roles in which they influenced public thinking. Many Canadians learned the background details of both —Amiel’s multi-thousand-dollar shopping sprees for handbags and shoes, Wallin’s condominiums in New York and Toronto — and shook their heads in a response located somewhere between shock and envy.
But it was Pamela Wallin, not Barbara Amiel, whom Prime Minister Harper appointed to the Senate, and because of her position in public office, it was she whose spending came under greater scrutiny. That was the peril of being a celebrity senator: there was no option but to carry on the way you’ve been performing, to float free and stay true to what made you the star you are.
Celebrities who become politicians may either be “parachuted” candidates who are landed by the party that recruited them into safe ridings where they can easily win election to the House of Commons, or appointees dropped into the Senate with even less hassle.
Whichever route is chosen to turn these star public personalities into parliamentarians, they share a common denominator of being accustomed to media attention. They know what it’s like to have their personal life scrutinized. The best have acquired almost instinctive techniques for self-preservation, and learned ways to preserve a buffer zone of privacy. What they have much less familiarity with is the way government works, especially on the inside, and particularly in the continual byplay between journalists and politicians.
“Politics and the media play the same symbiotic game and each needs — and uses — the other,” wrote Pamela Wallin in 1998. “But,” she added, “there are rules.”
It is one thing to acknowledge rules, another to comprehend their application — or to think that because you know what the rules are from the media side of the ramparts, you understand how they work on the political side. The real problem for a great many senators, something that is magnified in the case of those who are celebrities, is that they are simply not politicians.
Although some Canadians envisage a utopia of non-partisan senators, including Liberal leader Justin Trudeau who unveiled a plan in January 2014 to appoint members to the upper house free from party affiliation, we want hockey players who know how to skate and legislators adept in the fundamentals of politics, skills developed by being active in the game. A problem for many of Canada’s senators is their lack of well-honed skills needed to work as legislators and to survive the political arena’s unique demands. In the same way, the apparent understanding journalists and public commentators exude about government and politics lacks an essential foundation of experience inside parties, campaigns, and governments.
One might think a journalist would know better than anyone how reporters sniff out stories and, therefore, why extra care is needed to not misstep or deliver a juicy morsel of news to those waiting around with notebooks and cameras. But such logic does not fit reality. The fact that the two most media-savvy senators in Canadian history, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy, did so many things to encourage, and even provoke, members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery by their actions and practices suggests that perhaps a different law governs: the more familiar one is with the news media, the less one heeds a politician’s instinctive wariness of journalists.
Another problem facing free-floating star senators who have a sense of entitlement is their assumption that others will tend to grunt-work and minor details.
Many senators — not just Indian chiefs, highly paid hockey players, and network star broadcasters, but also corporate executives and senior officials — have been accustomed to others handling the “details” of arranging travel, paying service accounts, keeping up with financial administration, filing accurate expense accounts, and collecting appropriate reimbursements. In their prior careers, somebody else looked after a lot of things necessary for them to do their jobs, like arranging limousines, air travel, hotels, working the telephones, reserving restaurant tables, picking up dry cleaning, buying clothing, organizing personal grooming, massages, and shopping for food and liquor. Those coming from Canada’s big television news networks had become accustomed to the pattern that lots of people were always around to look after things.
Even if the star performer or top person in a hierarchy is the one pushing cash at people, gaining the goodwill that such munificence provides, it is some “underling” who has to collect a receipt, jot down a note about the payment, or later be handed a clutch of the star’s receipts to process through the reimbursement regime. In 2013, a former employee of Senator Colin Kenny went public with her complaint that she’d spent a lot of time looking after his expenses, booking personal activities, delivering and fetching his cleaning, and the like. In the corporate world, personal assistants do all this, and more, for senior executives all the time. In the Senate, however, employees are paid from public dollars, with the general understanding they are being engaged in public business. But the Senate’s “honour system,” combined with uncertain rules and long tolerated practices, created a murky realm of tacit compliance and wilful abuse.
The Senate and its code of financial conduct, if problematic in the case of Senator Kenny, were especially ill-equipped to mesh a star senator’s acquired sense of entitlement with public expectations for accountability in spending money. Moreover, the distinction between personal affairs and public activities, being foggy, was hard for senators themselves to adhere to. They were, most all of them, on the public dime and using parliamentary facilities and services while conducting private business, continuing professional roles, and doing partisan political organizing. Life was one glorious blur as a senator free-floated through it.
Whatever problems were brewing behind the scenes, however, for the first couple of years the public verdict on Stephen Harper’s picks of celebrity senators was that, once again, the prime minister really knew what he was doing.
For the Conservative Party’s biennial conference in June 2011, delegates to the event at Ottawa’s impressive new convention centre were delighted, and television viewers across Canada entranced, to see two very familiar broadcasters who for
