Ongoing Outrage

The host of letters appearing in today's Star attests to the ongoing public outrage over the Senate porkbarrellers. Although in many ways a mere sideshow to the endemic and systemic problems that face our governance, it nonetheless illustrates that Canadian anger, when it can be aroused, can be formidable.

I am taking the liberty of reproducing a few of the shorter missives below, and I also highly recommend Thomas Walkom's column, in which he lambastes the almost jesuitical reasoning being propounded by defenders of this Senate malfeascence:

They preach austerity but secretly practice gluttony, stealing from the poorest of the poor to pad their many mattresses. For those Senators their day is nigh.

Richard Kadziewicz, Scarborough

Always the outspoken critic of everyone else, I think it’s time that Mike Duffy and his Cheshire Cat smile disappear and head back to Blunderland.

Dave Lower, Brampton

If you have lost your job and are collecting EI, the government might send someone to your home to check if you are cheating the taxpayers.

If you are a senator, the prime minister and government House leader will defend your expenses in the House of Commons.

Why the difference? Because they know where you live, but they do not know where the senators live.

Keith Parkinson, Cambridge

Surely smart people like Ms Wallin and Mr Duffy had some question in their minds as to the validity of their expenses and residency status as they completed their expense forms and filed their residence confirmation documents. These actions from our appointed leaders are disgusting and Canadians do not deserve this treatemnt.. Let’s boot them out of the Senate now.

Doug Gameroff, Toronto

If Mike Duffy was unable to read the rules and understand them when most of the senators did, then it follows he is too dumb to be in the Senate. Shame! Resign!

Stella Watson, Toronto

Does Mike Duffy Have 'Pump Head'? - UPDATED

Well, in the tried and true tradition of governments announcing embarrassing news on Fridays, 'P.E.I. Senator' Mike Duffy kinda sorta admitted to maybe an error, thanks to 'confusing senate forms' asking for his primary residence. Not that he did anything wrong, of course, but after 80 days of what Tim Harper calls a sideshow, the rotund representative of the island province told CBC that the issue has become a "major distraction" from the work he's trying to do for Prince Edward Island, the province he represents in the Senate.

"We are going to pay it back, and until the rules are clear — and they're not clear now, the forms are not clear, and I hope the Senate will redo the forms to make them clear — I will not claim the housing allowance."

The following video offers some analysis from Terry Milewski:

How complex or confusing is the form? For a person of normal intellect, not very, as The Rabble points out:

The form Duffy found so confusing asks first of all if a Senator's primary residence is within 100 kilometres or more than 100 kilometres from Parliament Hill. You don't need an advanced degree in geography to figure that out.

For instance, if you live, as Senator Duffy now admits he does, in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata you are about 20 kilometres from Parliament Hill, maybe less.

The form then asks for the address of the Senator's primary residence in the province or territory he or she represents.

Given the good senator's confusion, I also can't help but wonder if there is a story here that the media are missing out on. Mr. Duffy has made much of the fact that he had open-heart surgery in 2006, hence the need for an OHIP card, granted only to those who spend at least 153 days a year physically present in Ontario. As he told CBC,

"I had open heart surgery, ... I'm being intensively followed. The other day I counted up, I have six different doctors … so I have a lot of health problems, and the advice of my doctors was not to make a switch, to stay with them at the Heart Institute in Ottawa. And that's what I've done."

Open-heart surgery, with which I have some familiarity within my own family, entails the heart being stopped and the patient placed on a heart-lung bypass machine for varying lengths of time. An unfortunate byproduct of the procedure can be cognitive imnpairment, known colloquially as 'pump head', with a wide range of cognitive impairments and deficits that can persist and worsen for years. And while I realize that such dysfunction may go largely unnoticed for a long time in our senate as attested to by recent events, it does seem to be a legitimate question to raise in Mr. Duffy's case.

Of course, another legitimate and related question to raise is that if he indeed found the senate forms too confusing to correctly and honestly complete, can he really be competent to discharge his senatorial duties, given that one of them is exposure to excruciating legislative minutia that demands a clear mind to read, understand, and make informed decisions on?

Just wondering, is all.

UPDATE: Here is more analysis by the CBC's Terry Milewski on the issue.

Because

... I just couldn't resist reposting this morning's Star editorial cartoon.

The Scourge of the Undead

While there was much talk in the House of Commons yesterday about how to prevent a 'zombie apocalypse,' in Canada, Bob Hepburn has his own solution on how to deal with the scourge of the undead: hold a referendum on abolishing the Senate.

Noting that it costs well over $100 million a year to operate the Senate, including the $132,000 annual salary for the 105 senators, their staffs and expenses and the fact that senators need to show up for work barely 70 days a year, Hepburn suggests that Ontario Premiere Kathleen Wynne include a sentence in her throne speech calling for the referendum.

Given the unholy and voracious appetites of Senators Duffy, Brazeau, Harb and Wallin, dealing with the living dead in a decisive manner would unquestionably make Canada a safer place for that much-threatened ideal known as democracy and finally bury the careers of the party hacks who currently inhabit the upper chamber.

Why Is This Man Smiling?

Could it have anything to do with the fact that he has made a successful career out of masquerades?

First, of course, Mike Duffy donned the mask of a political reporter, pretending to be an objective seeker of the truth, initially for CBC and then later for CTV, all the while moving closer and closer to the people he was supposed to be investigating and reporting on until even the thin veneer of impartiality vanished whenever he was in the vicinity of Conservative politicians.

Next, he masqueraded as a Senator who brought value to the 'chamber of sober second thought' while at the same time indulging in the kind of rabid Conservative partisanship that made a mockery of any such notion.

Compounding his clever disguise was the claim that he represents P.E.I., which he asserts is his principal residence, despite the fact that he has lived in Ottawa for many years, holds an Ontario Health Insurance Plan card (which requires that one be a permanent resident of Ontario), thereby rendering the over $30,000 in living expense claims he has claimed since 2010 an instance of egregious and probably criminal fraud.

Maybe the picture of the affable Duffy was shot when he had an amusing exchange with one of his 'constituents' visiting from P.E.I.; most islanders have never seen the rotund politico on their shores.

Or perhaps his good cheer has nothing to do with the above; perhaps he is just richly amused by this video:

Even though I care deeply for the environment and all that thrives within it, I can only hope The Eastern Bald Senator is now on the endangered list and quickly headed for extinction.

The Conservatives: Farther Gone Than I Had Realized

The Harperites are more out of touch with reality than I realized if they think this Tory bought-and-paid-for hack is going to do them any good in their voter-suppression crimes.