Mulcair stood to respond amid the din.
“There we go with the Conservative playbook,” Mulcair shouted. “Plan A is to hide out in South America. Plan B is to blame the opposition. Why do they not try Plan C, which is to start telling the truth?” Here, Mulcair leaned far over his small wooden lectern to drive home his request.
“For the Conservatives, it’s business as usual,” Mulcair went on a breath later. He was referring to the PMO line from Monday morning fed to media when everyone asked whether the prime minister would be in the House for question period. He would not, they said. Instead, he would be following his “business as usual” approach to it, appearing only Tuesday through Thursday. (Except, of course, this week he won’t be there Thursday, either. Otherwise, business as usual.)
“Does the prime minister think it is business as usual for a senator to defraud taxpayers? Is it business as usual to give a $90,000 payout?” Mulcair asked of the alleged payment between former Harper chief of staff Nigel Wright and sitting Senator Mike Duffy.
The problem, according to Moore, isn’t the government. It’s the Opposition.
“What is the NDP business as usual is to yell from the mountaintops about the need for reform but to not actually support reform when it is before the House of Commons,” he told everyone. “We have legislation for Senate elections and legislation for term limits. Even the idea of abolishing the Senate requires a mandate from the Supreme Court to understand the mandate capacity of the House of Commons, which is what we have done.”
Presumably, Moore was referring to bill C-7, the government’s Senate Reform Act that would, in short, outline senatorial selection and set term limits for senators. In February, the government asked the Supreme Court to review whether the legislation was constitutional. It also asked the Court to weigh in on the possibility of abolishing the Senate altogether. But when it was punted over to the Court, C-7 hadn’t been debated in the House for about a year – something that is entirely within the control of a majority government. So, not something over which the opposition would have any control.
A few minutes later, another man with some thoughts on the Senate was up, putting a question to the government. Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, recently told La Presse that, having 24 seats in the Senate versus the six each from Alberta and B.C., Quebec had an “advantage” – something he later told reporters was not an opinion, but rather “a statement of fact.”
Trudeau started his first question in the House with this: “Canadians, especially western Canadians, believe in accountability.”
The Conservative benches, filled as they are with Westerners, duly gave him a long, sustained round of heckling for this. The Speaker called for order. Trudeau repeated the statement on his way to his ultimate question about a recent court ruling on the robocalls affair. Quoting the ruling, he wondered why the government engaged in “’trench warfare’ to prevent the truth from coming out?”
Moore looked pleased to respond.
“Western Canadians do believe in accountability and that is why they threw out the Liberals in the last three elections,” he started. He then selected another Trudeau quote – one about Canada not doing well because Albertans control the agenda. “Don’t worry, western Canadians know accountability and they will hold him accountable for what he has been saying,” Moore assured everyone.
But look at this. We’re talking about something completely different now, aren’t we?
To be a space alien dropping in on the House of Commons Monday, lacking context but knowing the general workings of the system, you’d be inclined to think this entire controversy is about whether we ought to reform our upper chamber. That’s true, to an extent. But that’s also projecting this entire debate forward a bit too far.
More to the point are some other questions still left unanswered – namely: Under what circumstances can the chief of staff from the prime minister’s office can hand a sitting senator $90,000? And if it’s not allowed, then how did it happen this time? And what did he do that for? And who knew he was doing it?
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