Harper-Critical

What on earth – beyond, say, his past five years of governing – could have presaged Stephen Harper's Senate appointments?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's appointment of three defeated Tory candidates to the Senate yesterday rankled nearly everyone in the country save card-carrying Conservative party members. The plucky Saskatoon StarPhoneix blasts Harper's picks as an affront to his western Canadian base and a reversal of what was once one of his causes célèbres. “Unless Mr. Harper's intention is to make Canadians so cynical about the Senate appointment process that they'd be willing to accept almost any change he wants to make short of reopening the Constitution, this is the very kind of prime ministerial abuse of power he used to decry as a Reformer,” write the editorialists. A reformed Senate was to have given less-populated provinces a stronger voice in Ottawa, but moves like this make the supposed Western champion Harper “come across as cynical or perhaps even hypocritical.”

One of the Hill's top reporters, The Halifax Chronicle Herald's Stephen Maher, figures “Harper is plainly using the Senate as a holding ground for would-be MPs, and it makes you wonder about what kind of conversations he has with them when they decide to step down.” (See Fortier, Michael.) It would be illegal to promise the senators that they'd be reappointed if they ran and lost, but Maher doesn't think the Tories are dumb enough to do that. At least Fabian Manning, Josée Verner, and Larry Smith will probably be “better than some of the bagmen and party organizers that all prime ministers give Senate seats as rewards.” Damning with faint praise, that.

Voters and commentators hoping that Harper would change his governing style for the better after winning his majority are probably realizing they're “suckers,” realizes Scott Stinson in the National Post. “It was believable, once, that it was unfair to judge Mr. Harper on his minority-government record,” writes Stinson. “But if this is the way the prime minister chooses to begin his majority rule, in one hypocritical, undemocratic, and unaccountable swoop, then there’s another conclusion to reach: maybe these are his principles.” Well, at least we can rest easy knowing roughly 60 per cent of the voting public felt that way before May 2, too.