Senate Issues

Justin Trudeau Suffers From Premature Ejection

Mulder

Today Justin Trudeau tossed the Liberal Senators out of the party caucus.

Ask yourself why?  Do you think a party that had control of the Senate for 65 of the last 70 years  would be concerned?  Well there are two reasons.

1)  The Conservatives have been in power long enough to put a lot of Senators in the house and it may be decades before the Liberals have a majority in the Upper House again.  So in other words, it was fine when they ran the show, but now that they don’t Trudeau wants to change things.  Sort of like taking your ball and going home.

and

2)  After Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin had their names dragged around the mud pit for the last year, the audit on all the Senators will be coming out soon.  And it’s not going to look good for Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Senators.  I am predicting that the Liberal Senators are the worst culprits of abuse in the upper house and that some may make Duffy and Wallin look like angels.

So what does Justin do?  He fires his Liberal Senate Caucus BEFORE we find out that they were naughty in an effort to distance them from the party brand.  But what Justin doesn’t realize is no one is going to consider them anything but Liberal and now he has gone and blown his load early.  If he had waited for the audit and then tossed this lot out on their ear after it is revealed that they were terrible spenders he would have looked like a true leader.

Ah well.  He still has his hair.

On Senate Appointments

Mulder

For all those lefty AND righty whiners complaining about Harper appointing Smith, Verner and Manning to the Senate….Tough freaking noogies.

The Liberals had control of the Senate for 65 of the last 70 years. And now that Harper has chosen to stuff it full of cronies all I hear is Wahhhhh Wahhhh Wahhhh. Grow up people. This is not TiddlyWinks or Go Fish. It’s Big Boy Monopoly and Harper is playing by the rules. He tried to change things and the other parties told him to go pound sand. So now everyone else can go pound sand.

He also told the provinces to nominate their own Senators and the PM would appoint them but only Alberta has chosen to do so. Again, shame on the provinces for not taking advantage of this.

I hope another 20 Senate appointments come up and that Harper shoves another 20 forty year old conservatives in the upper house. Maybe when the other parties see that they will not regain control of the Senate until 2050 they may change their minds about Senate reform.

Keep on rolling Mr. Prime Minister.

Sun Tzu Approves Of Harper's Decision To Proroguing Parliament

Mulder

Sun Tzu, author of Art of War, (the world reknowned book often referred to as the bible on military strategy) would have been in favour of the Prime Minister proroguing parliament. Here is a bullet version of how I came to this conclusion.

1) The Conservative objective is to move conservative legislation through parliament (both the House and the Senate)

2) The Liberals are decimated and fractured in the House so their strategy has been to parry the conservative legislation in the Senate where they have had the majority.

3) Sun Tzu wrote “What is of supreme importance in war is to upset the enemy’s strategic plans.” Hence, the Conservatives need to upset the parrying in the Senate.

4) The only way to do this is to gain control of the Senate (and thus the Senate committees)

5) Proroguing at this time buys the Conservatives enough time to do this.

Chessmaster Harper scores another point.

Liberal Senators Not Getting Job Done Either

Mulder

Bill S4 has been in front of the Senate for 261 days. The Bill is 66 words long. That’s 4 days for every word. (thanks Pierre Poilievre for this info).

The Bill simply changes the term of all new Senators from ending at age 75 to being limited to a 8 years for each time appointed.

With 94 sitting Senators (63 of which are Liberal), and an annual Salary of over $122,000 per Senator this means we have paid approximately $8.25 Million dollars to Senators since this Bill was brought forward and the meter is still running.

Talk about getting Officially Screwed!!