It was a day Stephen Harper must now rue, a day that, against all odds, will reverberate during the election campaign of 2015.
It was a day the prime minister announced a decision that, like so many ill-advised moves in life, was borne of crisis and vulnerability.
Facing a coalition crisis, the Commons prorogued, his future uncertain, the prime minister set a record that day, appointing 18 senators , including Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy.
It may well be the day historians point to when the Senate is abolished .
Harper appointed a senator from Prince Edward Island, Duffy, even though he knew the former journalist lived in suburban Ottawa.
He appointed a senator from Saskatchewan, Wallin, even though everyone knew her primary residence was in Toronto.
And he appointed a young aboriginal leader, Brazeau, a selection that immediately raised questions about the vetting process in Harper’s office.
We may never know whether Duffy and Wallin, the pseudo-celebrities who dominated the news that frenzied day, were somehow given the impression that they were to be “activist,’’ as Wallin puts it, an unspoken code meaning they had different status and were to use their profile to sell the party, that somehow the regular rules, fuzzy as they were, didn’t really apply to them.
Insiders swear no such message was delivered, and their actions were a product of over-inflated egos.
Today, one can draw a straight line from that pre-Christmas day to the turmoil which now engulfs Harper.
Wallin and Duffy are the subjects of RCMP investigations and there is another probe into the $90,000 payoff from deposed chief of staff Nigel Wright to Duffy.
Wright ally Andrew MacDougall, Harper’s communication director , and issues management director Chris Woodcock, are departing or have left the Prime Minister’s Office.
Wallin and Duffy have been booted from caucus, Brazeau is on forced Senate leave, awaiting trial on assault and sexual assault charges and facing an RCMP breach of trust probe (the fourth senator embroiled in scandal, Mac Harb, was a Liberal appointee inherited by the prime minister.)
Having dug this hole, Harper has only one alternative — get ahead of the scandal.
He cannot control the timing of police investigations and a wider investigation of Senate spending by Auditor-General Michael Ferguson has begun and could well turn up more dubious “activist” spending.
For Harper, Senate eruptions can be expected right into the 2015 campaign. The Senate is an object of scorn and mockery and the Conservative heartland is of the mind to throw the bums out and close the place up.
In the short term, the Harper communications machine will continue to drive the bulldozer — back and forth — over the Duffy and Wallin corpses.
But in the longer term, there is every sign that Harper is prepared to leap past the Senate reform marker and go straight for abolition. The prime minister may well believe that the days of tinkering with elections and term limits have passed and closing the place would be more palatable to Canadians — and easier.
Last month, Pierre Poilievre, minister of state for democratic reform, said the government would prefer reform , not abolition, but if it cannot be reformed, it must be abolished. The government has asked the Supreme Court to advise on how abolition can be accomplished.
There are risks to such a strategy. Any such move carries it with a huge load of constitutional flotsam and jetsam, requires a lot of time-consuming heavy lifting for any government and threatens to obscure any economic management message heading into an election.
Harper will not let a Senate reform or abolition message overtake an economic message in a throne speech expected in October, but weeks later, that message could be the centrepiece at the party convention in Calgary.
It would aim to take the issue away from the NDP and its “roll up the red carpet’’ campaign and could undercut Justin Trudeau’s reform message, allowing the Liberal leader to be painted as the Senate status quo leader.
It would be a stunning political feat if Harper, who largely created this fiasco, could then benefit from the discontent with the Senate he fuelled.
It would be equally stunning if the opposition allowed him to get away with it. We may be on the verge of seeing if the prime minister can pull it off.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Tim Harper
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