"...he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya...."
This is Captain Quint, in the movie Jaws, talking about a shark. But it may as well describe Stephen Harper and his senseless knee-jerk hatred of the Canadian Senate.
As has been widely reported (e.g., John Ivison's piece in the National Post), der Führer Harper intends to simply stop making new appointments to Canada's Senate. Given that we're already short 22 Senators, it shouldn't take long for the Upper House to die of starvation.
Clearly prostituting himself for the sake of reelection this fall, Harper isn't trying to destroy the Senate - not legally at least. Nor is he trying to save it. He's using a cheap political trick to make the Senate so much worse than it is now, that it will die of neglect and abuse rather than a direct attack that can be traced back to him.
This isn't the first time Harper has acted with cowardice. He defunded more than a dozen women's health centres and safe houses years ago, rendering them financially unviable and resulting in their closure. But he didn't close them himself. His own government argued that they could have found other funding, but the defunding came without warning and far too fast for any of them to regroup....
His single-minded hatred of the Senate is more likely based on unresolved mommy issues than it is on any measure of fact. The "spending scandal" he drones on about under the political rubric of "unaccountability" is based on doublespeak and false rhetoric. The audit of Senate expenses found just under $1 million in bad expenses, out of an overall budget of just over $90 million (so, about 1%), yet cost over $23 million to carry out. Even if you include only the direct costs of the audit, it cost about $12 to find $1 of bad expense. That's just throwing good money after bad.
Say you had $100 to spend, and spent $99 of them wisely, and blew only a buck. That'd be pretty good, overall, right? So, how is the situation in the Senate any different? (Spoiler alert: it isn't.)
I'll tell you who's really unaccountable - it's Harper himself, Canada's own tin-plated dictator. When he says the Senate is unaccountable, he means it's unaccountable to him. And just like when he childishly prorogued Parliament (twice!), he will seek to destroy what he can't have. The Senate, as with the government as a whole, works for the citizens, not for the PM. But the Senate won't bend over for Harper, so it has to go.
Are there idiots and fools in the Senate? Sure; idiots and fools are everywhere. Is the Senate broken? Maybe, a bit. But that doesn't mean you excise it from the Canadian government, nor do you kill it with a death by a thousand cuts, as Harper is doing. The Senate is constitutionally mandated. By treating it as he is, Harper is basically pissing on our Constitution.
And in any case, it's not the Senate that's broken, it's the method by which Senators are appointed (riddled with unethical politicization) and the draconian rules under which the Senate must operate that are broken. Both these things are suitable targets for a government to address. Neither of them will be fixed by starving the Senate out of exist.
Once again, Harper proves himself to be a mean-spirited, arrogant, power-mongering megalomaniac.
And, unfortunately, Canadians are probably stupid enough to hand him another majority government this fall, so that he can keep raping Canada to make up for his own petty insecurities.
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| Source: The National Post. |
As has been widely reported (e.g., John Ivison's piece in the National Post), der Führer Harper intends to simply stop making new appointments to Canada's Senate. Given that we're already short 22 Senators, it shouldn't take long for the Upper House to die of starvation.
Clearly prostituting himself for the sake of reelection this fall, Harper isn't trying to destroy the Senate - not legally at least. Nor is he trying to save it. He's using a cheap political trick to make the Senate so much worse than it is now, that it will die of neglect and abuse rather than a direct attack that can be traced back to him.
This isn't the first time Harper has acted with cowardice. He defunded more than a dozen women's health centres and safe houses years ago, rendering them financially unviable and resulting in their closure. But he didn't close them himself. His own government argued that they could have found other funding, but the defunding came without warning and far too fast for any of them to regroup....
His single-minded hatred of the Senate is more likely based on unresolved mommy issues than it is on any measure of fact. The "spending scandal" he drones on about under the political rubric of "unaccountability" is based on doublespeak and false rhetoric. The audit of Senate expenses found just under $1 million in bad expenses, out of an overall budget of just over $90 million (so, about 1%), yet cost over $23 million to carry out. Even if you include only the direct costs of the audit, it cost about $12 to find $1 of bad expense. That's just throwing good money after bad.
Say you had $100 to spend, and spent $99 of them wisely, and blew only a buck. That'd be pretty good, overall, right? So, how is the situation in the Senate any different? (Spoiler alert: it isn't.)
I'll tell you who's really unaccountable - it's Harper himself, Canada's own tin-plated dictator. When he says the Senate is unaccountable, he means it's unaccountable to him. And just like when he childishly prorogued Parliament (twice!), he will seek to destroy what he can't have. The Senate, as with the government as a whole, works for the citizens, not for the PM. But the Senate won't bend over for Harper, so it has to go.
Are there idiots and fools in the Senate? Sure; idiots and fools are everywhere. Is the Senate broken? Maybe, a bit. But that doesn't mean you excise it from the Canadian government, nor do you kill it with a death by a thousand cuts, as Harper is doing. The Senate is constitutionally mandated. By treating it as he is, Harper is basically pissing on our Constitution.
And in any case, it's not the Senate that's broken, it's the method by which Senators are appointed (riddled with unethical politicization) and the draconian rules under which the Senate must operate that are broken. Both these things are suitable targets for a government to address. Neither of them will be fixed by starving the Senate out of exist.
Once again, Harper proves himself to be a mean-spirited, arrogant, power-mongering megalomaniac.
And, unfortunately, Canadians are probably stupid enough to hand him another majority government this fall, so that he can keep raping Canada to make up for his own petty insecurities.
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