The Dauphin speaks:
The scandal-plagued Senate has a cheerleader in Justin Trudeau after the Liberal leader said he wouldn't abolish the chamber because it's to Quebec's gain over other provinces to keep the lights on.
"We have 24 senators from Quebec and there are just six from Alberta and British Columbia. It's to our advantage," he told a French newspaper.
"To want to abolish it is demagoguery," he said in a rebuke of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair's campaign to mothball the place. "We'll have to improve it."
That boy does not know how to pander. If only he hadn't used the word "ours" he might have gotten away with it. In Quebec "ours" means something different than in the ROC. A linguistic gap that no amount of translation can overcome.
Saying one thing in French, hoping no one in the ROC will catch on, is nothing new. The Brian tried this stunt during the constitutional fracas of the late 1980s and early 1990s. John A was a master of saying one thing in Montreal and something else in Toronto. To add to the audacity of the feat he was speaking English the whole time, the odd French flourish aside. In those days you could get away with being a senior member of the Orange Lodge and win a majority of seats in Quebec.
The times have changed and the Quebecois voter, always sensitive, now takes umbrage at the smallest of things. Like an aging beauty they must be flattered constantly. Like Norma Desmond they are always ready for their close up, even if the rest of us aren't. This sort of craven pandering to crude triumphalism is par for the course in La Belle Province. Justin being Justin he gets noticed for doing it. Not by the MSM, who still see him as the second coming of his father, but by this country's hardy band of right-leaning hacks.
I must, however, make note of the phrase "French newspaper." Is it an actual French newspaper? Or is it a French language newspaper in Canada? They haven't separated yet. Nor are they ever likely to. Whatever cher Pauline might say or think.
Politicians everywhere in our fair Dominion try to rig the federal transfer game in their favour. Since none of them are traitors, at least in the conventional senses, they clothe their rent seeking in the language of national unity and national development. In Quebec, where the critical mass of the population was at the best of times ambivalent to the Canadian project, such niceties are unnecessary.
What is necessary, especially for a man carrying around the name Trudeau, is to establish your bona fides with the soft nationalists who swing most elections in the province. Just as petty hoodlums must commit some crime to gain admission to a street gang, so federalist politicians such as Justin must prove that nationalism runs through their veins. Since soft nationalism is a remarkably nebulous concept, recall that even Levesque was fond of phrases such as "sovereignty association," you don't have call for independence. You simply make clear that when the choice is between Canada's interests and Quebec's whims, you vote as expected.
Still the middle aged school boy who would be king has a point. If you're a Quebecois voter aiming for maximum rent extraction, the Senate is a nice tool to have. The Red Chamber has never been a hot topic in the province, the decades ahead, however, will see the upper house become quite popular. The demographic winds are blowing hard against the province of a Quebec as a whole, and the ethnic Quebecois as a people. For a century and a half they have usually held the balance of power in the Dominion, being shut out only in those rare moments when the whole of the ROC opposed them (think Conscription in 1917). Now that Stephen Harper has engineered a majority government without their help, a peacetime first in Canadian history, then Quebec no longer matters as it once did.
For decades the West clung to Senate reform as a way of evening the odds against Central Canadian imperialism. It was cathartic to tell the Eastern Bastards to Freeze in the Dark. Yet as three Trudeau majority governments proved, you could quite easily screw the West and win the rest. You can't do that anymore. The West is more economically and political important than Quebec. The importance of Senate reform will wane in the western provinces, almost exactly in tandem with its rise in importance in Quebec. The Senate, surprisingly, continues to serve its basic function, a limited backstop for minorities. At least some minorities.
There's also the whole patronage thing. But that was part of the idea too. Getting superannuated pols out of the way of those with a political future. Cynical though it is to admit it, that's not an entirely irrelevant function. Defeating these decrepit hangers-on would be a more straight forward, though often far more difficult, approach. A timely Senatorial appointment has solved many a Prime Minister's back bench headaches.
Recall also that John A and George Brown had the Senate in mind as a mechanism by which the rich and productive could be protected from the poor and thieving. Then again no one had heard the phrase "welfare state" in 1864. Not all change is improvement.
It exists because it exists. Trying to fix it, or destroy it, is likely going to cost more than it will save, in terms of both political blood and taxpayer's treasure. Our most famous constitutional appendix, it will remain where it is until it becomes acute. Till then we'll have to hope for the best of a bad situation. Except for those of us who can realistically hope for an appointment.
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