However, as I’ve stated in his space before, I’ve an eight-year-old grandson who could understand them. Heck, I myself, with a bad case of Adult Onset Self-Diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, was able to understand them. Further, over the years it seems that many hundreds of other senators were able to understand them, either that or we were not as vigilante before and simply didn’t catch the others at lining their pockets. Allegedly.
In any case, here’s a precis of what I’ve noted in the past about the Senate. It is actually a call to abolish it – that is unless one crucial event is made to happen. But we’ll get to that.
Canada’s Senate has issues
Now to begin, the central issue with the Upper Chamber, which we have had since Confederation in 1867, is that its 105 senators don’t seem to have meaningful work to do. They dress nicely for committees and such, and they are fed well at functions, but imagine an unelected body trying to pass legislation. We Canadians don’t even like it when elected bodies pass legislation!
That leads to the other major issue — senators are appointed and they get the job by doing favors for the party who appointed them. Which is how we wind up with senators, like Duffy and Pamela Wallin, who seem to have no real skills.
After all, they were journalists.
Now despite all that, here’s this: I’d be a senator. Why would I take the gig? Because it pays $132,000 a year, you get to take naps and there is little in the way of expectations. And get this — you would not have to pay me any residency money whatsoever.
Yes, my home is in B.C., but for $132,000 a year I’d be happy to live in Ottawa, or anywhere in Canada, or the world for that matter. Which brings us to this point: if you take a job, you move to where the job is and pay for your visits back home. If you have a home back home, sell it, or rent it out, and get a new home where you new job is. That’s on you. After all, the taxpayer is already paying you SIX FIGURES!
Duffy and Wallin have issues
That brings us to Pamela Wallin’s expense billing, she’s up next in terms of costly trials. She flies everywhere, takes trips like a ’60s Timothy Leary adherent. During a three-month period in 2013, she billed us $24,000 to go to Saskatchewan and $16,000 to go elsewhere. In Canada’s history no one has spent $24,000 to go to Saskatchewan in a three-month period.
Or ever.
Forty thousand dollars on travel in three months? Most of us haven’t spent 40 grand traveling in three decades. Could she stay put now and again? Spend a night in? Keep up with the Kardashians maybe. Or try a Canadian movie. Perhaps take some non-existent work home?
Home, you know, where Mr. Duffy never goes. People who live in Cavendish, P.E.I. by his ‘primary residence’ say they’ve never seen him. He hasn’t lived in the province since Trudeau, Pierre, not Justin, was the leader the Liberal Party. But taxpayers paid him $22,000 extra each year to take a job that he had to move to Ottawa for, where he already lived, from P.E.I., where he didn’t live.
On being a Canadian senator
For a six-figure salary I’ll move to Ottawa, for free — and I don’t even live there yet. I’ll move my family and if we take trips we’ll pay for them. Plus I won’t complain, as Ms. Wallin did, that the “mounds of paperwork” are so onerous I made mistakes billing Canadian taxpayer. If that debilitating self-diagnosed ADD kicks in, I’ll hire a student to figure it out.
What is it that Duffy and Wallin, Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb, the entire Senate, manage to accomplish that warrants such pampering and overpayment? And don’t we already pay elected people, and their legions of mandarins, to do precisely what it is that these senators don’t really do anyhow?
Here’s this: after 148 years, it has finally come time to save the Canadian taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars by abolishing the Senate. I am really very firm on that and in fact there is but one thing, just the one, that could give me pause to reconsider.
If they made me a senator.
