Perceptions by Gerry Warner

“Throw the bums out!”

I think that’s how millions of Canadians are feeling about the Senate today, and for that matter, politicians in general, as we sit transfixed watching the tawdry machinations in Ottawa as Senators and MPs heave accusations at each other like a bunch of drunken teenagers at a bush party.

Except the teens would probably behave with more class.

It’s great stuff for political junkies like me. Our own Watergate! But is that what we really want? I hope not because this is serious stuff folks. Like it or not, Parliament and the Senate are the two senior legal and political institutions in this country that give us a civilized society. Without them, it’s a slippery slope to the anarchy of those strife-torn countries that we hear about daily in the news.

So what can we do? Here’s my modest proposal.

There are two key players in this sordid mess and they both have to go – the Canadian Senate and Stephen Harper. Both have sullied the political process in this country and made Canada look like yet another unstable Third World country where you can’t trust elected officials wallowing in the taxpayers’ trough and when they’re not doing that they’ve got their hands in your pocket grabbing for more.

Surely, I don’t have to make a case for abolishing the Senate, that time-worn den of sleaze for political sycophants, hacks and puppets that blindly do the prime minister of the day’s bidding every time he whistles. As disgraced Senator Mike Duffy said he didn’t break the rules because basically there are no rules. Just put your shnozz deep into the trough and suck up as much as you can get. Hardly a “Sober Chamber of Second Thought.”  And consider this. If the Senate is supposed to be another political chamber that acts as a check on Parliament, the Senate we have now doesn’t contain a single member of the Opposition.

Get rid of it! Yes, it will be difficult constitutionally but it has to be done.

This brings us to “He who must be obeyed,” possibly the most imperial prime minister in Canadian history. I think whoever coined the expression “control freak” had Stephen Harper in mind when he did it. The man’s anal retentiveness is legendary. I don’t think Joseph Stalin commanded the kind of blind obedience in the Kremlin that Harper commands – nay demands – in his caucus and especially the PMO. I don’t know if cabinet members and advisers need permission to breathe in his presence, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Remember when our rookie MP went “off message” early in his term? Harper slapped him down so quickly that he’s been warbling the party line like a canary ever since.

Given all this, can you conceive even for a nano-second that Harper didn’t know about the infamous $90,000 cheque his senior aid Nigel Wright wrote for possibly soon to be ex-Senator Michael Duffy? It verily strains the imagination. And consider that in Question Period Thursday under withering cross-examination by Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair all Harper could do was bob and weave and insist it was his “understanding” that Duffy paid back his own expenses and knew nothing about his chief of staff paying them for him. I don’t believe him. I suspect millions of other Canadians don’t believe him. At the very least Harper has obfuscated, dissembled and misled Canadians throughout this entire scandal.

Stephen Harper has got to go. He is light years beyond his best before date.

Impossible you say. Canadians don’t eat their political leaders. Maybe so, but if Harper doesn’t exit quickly the Conservative Party of Canada will experience the same fate its namesake Progressive Conservative Party faced when Brian Mulroney stayed on too long and the “Party of MacDonald” was reduced to two seats.  As surely as Brutus stabbed Caesar when he wanted to become Emperor instead of leader, it’s time for our smart, strong, but fatally flawed leader to go. If I were a Conservative Party member now I’d be asking one question.

Where’s Dalton Camp when you need him?

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own. os olpinions are his own.

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