Finley proved adept at disciplining and in many cases firing those party candidates who strayed too far off message. As the Globe put it, “The shell-shocked accounts of dumped candidates were one of the few public windows into Finley’s working world, providing some hair-raising reading.” Finley was a man who worked in public life, but behind the scenes of it, pulling, tweaking and shaping the machinery of party and government. Much like sausage-making, it was not a process that most in the public would want to see first-hand.
A few scandals circulated around Finley but they were of the middling kind, not the ones that could threaten a government. One, the so-called “in and out scandal” that broke in 2008, involved allegations by Elections Canada that somewhere between $230,000 and $1.3 million was misspent or misreported by moving the funding “in and out” of local ridings. Harper repeated his mantra that “Our position’s been very clear” over and over again, and the thing just went away. After 24-hour news services tried in vain to explain to the public how federal campaign funding works, the story quickly lost traction in the headlines, so boring it just went away. In 2009, after the scandal had all but faded, Harper appointed Finley to the senate.
Making problems so boring they disappear is the senate’s bread and butter. Moreover, boring work can also be important work. The millions of pages produced each year by the senate – which one can peruse digitally – provide an insight into the work done by the various committees and subcommittees of the upper house.
To take one example (completely at random), in October 2012, the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry heard from a Mr. Kevin Schooley, the Executive Director of the Ontario Berry Growers Association. He updated the committee on advances in berry growing technology: “Growers have utilized research and some innovative techniques, including row covers, high tunnels and I guess the most important one of all in strawberries is day-neutral production or, as we like to refer to it, ever-bearing strawberry production.” (I don’t know if the last bit is a pun or not.) Schooley decried the fact that 84 per cent of berries sold in Canada were imported, an alarming statistic for the berry growers. This is important information for the government to have, and to use in the shaping of policy. Gathering this kind of boring but essential information – information that often plays an important role in policy-development – is typical of senators’ work.
Imagine if the senate were elected. We would be thrusting the sausage-makers onto the street to shake hands, kiss babies, worry about financing, collude with friendly business interests at fundraising dinners, and so on. They would also be given a mandate – from those who elected them – to quash legislation at the federal level. Granted, they do already have that power, but before the current government managed to appoint enough senators to form a majority, that was a power used sparingly (the Conservatives did vote down a climate change bill in 2010, a move derided as “one of the most undemocratic acts we have ever seen” by Jack Layton).
The senate certainly should have the power to review bills, but should also have enough respect for precedent not to vote them down along partisan lines. Nevertheless, an elected senate would, by necessity, remove these mandarin politicians, and replace them with actual politicians, a terrifying thought. The work that the Senate does is drawn out, at times boring, and at other times dirty. It allows appointees access to some of the levers of government, so that the difficult, tedious, and at times skullduggerous work can be done out of the public eye.
That is the strength of the senate. It allows parties to reward its “pit bulls,” men and women like Doug Finley, who exist in the background. Finley was a workaholic in a largely thankless task (but one with a great pension, and excellent job security). In a rare interview on CBC’s The Current Finley explained how he scheduled his chemo treatments for Friday, so that he could be back at work at the Senate on Monday, spending his last days moving the machinery of government, for as long as he was physically able. There is something noble in that story. For all the stories of Mike Duffy’s outlandish misspending, for all the senators who spend their time in Florida on the taxpayer’s dime, for all the backroom dealings, we should recognize that the Senate is a place where important work does get done. Senator Finley was a man who excelled at that work.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Ryan Flavelle
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