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Senators in Free-Float

No other prime minister has taken bigger risks in Senate appointments than Stephen Harper. Yet as he has demonstrated — forging a new political party by merging two, claiming Canadian Arctic sovereignty all the way to the North Pole, negotiating a full-frontal trade treaty with the European Community — reward awaits leaders bold enough to take big risks. Launching individuals with large public personas on a mission to expand the Conservative Party from the novel staging area of the Senate of Canada might also pay substantial rewards, too.

But getting to this point required the PM to work himself out of a major conundrum.

Before becoming prime minister he’d strongly and frequently asserted his clear view that senators should be elected. Consistent with this position, after forming a Conservative government in 2006 he’d refused to appoint any. Vacancies in the upper house had, as a result, piled up for three years. The shortage of active members had been making it hard for the Senate, especially in its thinly populated committees, to even give the appearance of working. Yet Mr. Harper still refrained from appointing senators, waiting for a new era when Canadians would elect members of Parliament’s upper house instead, although his government’s legislative initiatives for this, launched with enthusiasm in 2006, had met resistance and not yet become law.

Facing defeat by a coalition of opposition parties in the Commons, the prime minister looked at the bigger picture and swiftly filled all vacancies. Eighteen new Conservative senators, including his trio of celebrities, were officially sworn in in January 2009, almost doubling the party’s total to thirty-eight. Partisan critics needed no prodding to claim in public that his appointments contradicted the prime minister’s pledge to make the upper chamber an elected body. In private, every politician understood that thwarting the opposition parties as he was now doing, trying to make the best of an awkward situation, was an instinctive survival move any prime minister would make. But to include high-voltage stars in his roster of senators was a new departure. That is what really raised eyebrows among political savants.

A “celebrity senator” would be a high-risk senator.

As national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Patrick Brazeau stood uniquely apart, and not just because he was the youngest senator in Canada. Tattooed and pony-tailed, holder not only of a black belt in karate but of radical views on Aboriginal governance, the new Conservative senator would gain attention in ways others could not and dared not.

As political broadcasters turned senators, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy faced their own unique hazards. They became targets of focused attention from their former journalist colleagues because of special interest, envy, or old scores to settle. With contemporary news media having developed a narcissistic self-interest, ever primed to report on themselves or examine media relations, it was guaranteed that any awkward or disconcerting story about such prominent journalism personalities as Pamela Wallin or Mike Duffy would get big play. While quite a few reporters are secretly hungry for the power and paycheque that accompanies being a press spokesperson for government, many other journalists feel that colleagues who “go over” to government or political parties betray journalism’s code of detached and balanced observation and resent how such deserters tend to undermine their own credibility as independent reporters. There could always be payback for those who traded a television studio for a Senate office.

Even when still journalists, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy had each achieved notoriety not only for reporting the news, but, controversially, for being the news, just like Patrick Brazeau. If the best predictor of future performance is past behaviour, the Conservatives had reason to be anxious about their new stars. Special safeguards, from effective time-management supervision to proper financial accountability, would need to be in place as the Conservative Party began to deliberately and continuously thrust these big-name senators into the public eye to benefit its partisan interests.

In the weeks between the December 22, 2008 public announcement that he was going to the Senate and his official swearing-in ceremony on January 26, 2009, Chief Brazeau suggested that remaining as national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples would allow him to serve as a valuable bridge between the Senate and the First Nations’ leadership.

That was sort of the idea the PM had, initially, as well. Such continuity would not be out of step, after all, with the tradition of allowing senators to retain prior affiliations with public policy organizations and special interest groups, continue their connections to private companies, and even acquire lucrative new directorships on corporate boards while serving as members of the Senate. Senators are not precluded from simultaneously holding paid positions outside Parliament. They need only disclose any roles for which they earn more than $2,000 annually, and do not even have to say how much they earn from each position.

But critics of an Aboriginal leader affiliating himself with the Conservatives were quick to decry this prospect of the senator remaining chief. The fact he was Patrick Brazeau, despised ruffler of headdress feathers of many establishment chiefs, ensured a hot new onslaught of criticism to discredit him even before he could give his maiden speech in the Senate. Overlooking any benefit that blending his two roles may have entailed, they complained that, as chief and senator, Brazeau would collect two six-figure publicly funded salaries. That was all it took to stir outrage.

So it was. Taking his cue from the PMO, which was busy damping down criticisms about several of the new senators in the prime minister’s surprising about-face gang appointment, Patrick Brazeau dutifully resigned as chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples the day after becoming a senator.

Two days before his swearing-in, and to complete his constitutional requirements for office, Patrick Brazeau also bought land worth $10,800 at Chertsey in his Québec Senate district of Repentigny.

Pamela Wallin’s place of residence became an issue shortly after Prime Minister Harper named her a Saskatchewan senator on December 22, 2008. Wallin responded by saying her visits to Wadena and the property she owns in the municipality satisfied the residency requirement.

When questions about this persisted, following her swearing in on January 26, 2009, an effort was made, in concert with the PMO, to close down further discussion about the residency requirement. Her executive assistant, Shelley Clark, informed news media that Senator Wallin “would be making no further comment on this issue,” adding that “the Senate Speaker and Prime Minister’s Office are satisfied that all requirements have been met.”

Political scientist Howard Leeson in Regina expressed skepticism, saying Pamela Wallin lived in New York and Toronto and had not lived in Saskatchewan for decades. “Senators are full members of Parliament, whose salaries are paid for by taxpayers, so it’s not unreasonable to ask about their basic qualifications,” he told reporters. A former head of the University of Regina’s political science department who’d joined the Canadian Plains Research Centre, Leeson added that although “residency” is not spelled out in the Constitution, it typically could be evidenced by being able to vote, qualifying for a health card, and filing tax returns in the province. “Simply owning property and visiting Wadena once a month wouldn’t seem to fit the bill,” he suggested, though confirming it was “up to the Senate itself to make that determination.” He told reporters he’d written to the Senate but had been unable to get clarification.

The reason nobody connected with Parliament’s upper house was forthcoming in answering Professor Leeson was quite simply that there was no clear policy in place to tell him about, as Senator David Tkachuk, chair of the Senate’s Internal Economy Committee, would later confirm. A second good reason was that the PMO had unequivocally asserted that the prime minister’s new Senate appointees satisfied all requirements of office. Nobody running the Senate wanted to publicly contradict the all-powerful PMO.

On her appointment to the upper house, Senator Wallin pledged that as soon as the provincial government set up a voting system for Saskatchewanians to elect senators, she’d resign and seek election to her seat. Not only was that stance consistent with the private commitment the prime minister had extracted from his new Senate appointees to support Senate reform, but it was the kind of forthright public statement people had come to expect from Wallin. So it came as no surprise.

What did surprise many, however, was her acceptance of a senatorship as a Conservative. During her long career as a broadcast journalist, Wallin had covered all parties and maintained the necessary political neutrality. Like the CBC’s Don Newman and the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson, Wallin did not vote in federal elections when working in Ottawa, knowing that to mark a ballot required making a choice and that doing so would make it harder to regain the objectivity true journalism demands.

Moreover, before starting into journalism with CBC Radio in the 1970s, Wallin had been a member of the NDP. And when she departed journalism years later in the 1990s, it was to accept a diplomatic appointment from Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Reinforcing the sense that the former New Democrat now had an affinity for the Grits was the fact she’d worked closely with Liberal foreign affairs minister John Manley to host the “Canada Loves New York” post-9/11 rally in Manhattan, and that she and Liberal senator Jerry Grafstein had been jointly honoured in 2003 by the Canadian Society of New York for their ongoing devotion to strengthening ties between Canada and the United States. Although Consul General Wallin’s work in New York as a partisan-neutral diplomat kept her away from party affiliations, her personal history suggested that if she had any at all, they’d likely be with the NDP or Liberals.

Yet Wallin had reached a station in life where the direction of the Conservatives and the opportunities for public service as a senator enabled her to step vigorously into her new role. She would be effective for Stephen Harper’s party, not in the folksy but persistent manner of Mike Duffy, but as a suave and seductive spokesperson, especially with urbanites in places like Toronto, where she’d lived for years.

Between the pair, Wallin and Duffy could cover both sides of the street on their upbeat march to sell political conservatism.

Prince Edward Island’s newest senator charged heavily out of the starting gate.

Just days after he’d been sworn in, I began receiving Tory-partisan emails from ebullient “Mike Duffy, Conservative Senator.” As a former PC member of Parliament, the Conservative’s candidate against Michael Ignatieff in the 2008 general election, and an intermittent financial contributor to Conservatives over the decades, my name and address were evidently in the party’s database.

Had the Grits named Duffy to the upper house, I smiled, my Liberal friends would have been receiving these exhortations instead. At first it seemed that a procession of prime ministers — Trudeau, Clark, Trudeau again, Turner, Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, and Martin — had missed real opportunity by not getting Duffy onside. Sure, there was the adage “Be wary of one who wants something too greatly.” But if you were a Tory, Senator Duffy was great!

Duffy’s pent-up lust for being in the Senate of Canada — never a joke, in his mind — was now re-channelling him from being Canada’s most ardent supplicant for a senatorship into Canada’s most assertive partisan in the Red Chamber. His skills were those of a communicator. His talent in politics was to “get the message out.” The prime minister had found his personal paladin. The two were seen on countless stages together in an unending flash of photo-ops, and provincial Progressive Conservative leaders were soon just as pleased as the national party leader to bask in the celebrity glow radiating from “the Senator,” whose presence nobody could miss or mistake.

Duffy’s urgent political messaging included frequent appeals for campaign donations. I began to sense, though, that these were being scripted by someone else, and sent from an office other than the senator’s own. However such early donor appeals may have been orchestrated behind the scenes for the closely run Conservative money-vacuuming operation, soon enough the powers-that-be decided that personal contact with Senator Duffy would work better than continuing his avalanche of emails.

He began appearing across Canada, a magnet drawing people to public events and party gatherings, a Maritime Midas turning local fund-raising opportunities into lucrative events helping Conservatives amass a bulging campaign war chest. Yes, Senator Duffy was great!

In the meantime, the prime minister, his government having survived, developed the same fondness for using the Senate all his predecessors had. Among other appointees that year was Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley. One might have imagined a person running the party’s disciplined election-ready machinery as a full-time paid job from the Senate would see the necessity of coordinating his Senate colleague’s time and allocating Mike Duffy’s expenses in ways to ensure immunity from partisan counter-attack. Basic adherence to conflict of interest rules would have been a starting point too. Payment of constant campaigner Duffy’s expenses by the Conservative Party rather than the public treasury, another.

It is hard to be a celebrity; even harder, a celebrity senator.

In the House of Commons, members represent people who have chosen them over other candidates because of who they are as individuals and what they stand for politically. They also have an intense connection to a particular electoral district. Their supporters volunteer to work for them because great effort is needed for re-election campaigns. MPs have a public identity. Constituents admire MPs for their authentic qualities, such as their accomplishments as a job-creating entrepreneur, a fine educator, a respected lawyer, an innovative food-producer, a resilient unionist, an ardent civil libertarian, or an advocate for society’s vulnerable members. They do not want their MP to change but to remain true to character. All the while, MPs must engage forces, both partisan and parliamentary, that render them more like each other, buffing off their individuality. They run for election under a common logo and using approved “messages” they are forced to stick with, and in the Commons they vote in unison, while struggling to preserve some vestige of their individual personality that got them into Parliament in the first place.

For senators, most all of this is absent.

The pressures to perform and remain actively connected to a specific community do not exist. Able to hold office to age seventy-five, free from any concern about being fired, with no imperative to get re-elected, senators free-float in time and space, the Chris Hadfields of Canadian politics.

So a senator merely carries on, being who he or she was before, miming their prior life on a new stage. That’s what made it impossibly hard for a good man and a great hockey player like Frank Mahovlich — no ice surface. And very difficult for talented queen of skiing Nancy Greene — no downhill slopes. Patrick Brazeau remained true to himself when he climbed into a boxing ring with Justin Trudeau for a worthy cause. Pamela Wallin continued to play herself, but looked so out of place in the becalmed upper house that she dubbed herself “an activist senator.” Mike Duffy, too, remained just who he always had been, with no incentive to change and no need to, either.

The Senate can swallow whole those not sufficiently well defined by strong character. But those already larger than life can attract in Canada’s political arena all the attention of a gravity-free, camera-performing astronaut in space.

Senator Wallin was not cutting back, but becoming more active than ever, thanks to the freedom of action offered by the Senate. Her 1998 memoir Since You Asked made clear that Wallin never shied away from work, but in fact was addicted to it and defined by it. “Doing it all” summed up her hectic, frenetic, and upwardly mobile pace.

Before long she was active in Conservative Party outreach, lending her name and panache to a variety of party events across the country. She continued to hold her prestigious and remunerative positions on boards of directors, carried on with her wide-ranging charitable work, and remained active as chancellor of the University of Guelph and as senior consultant to the president of the Americas Society in New York. She participated in conferences on the status of women, not only in Canada but internationally. It was a full agenda, fuller than most could handle, and certainly more demanding than senators in Canada normally take on.

In the Senate, however, she was equally engaged. Wallin took up chairing the Committee on National Security and Defence, and served at the same time as a member of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs and International Trade Committee. Both were natural progressions, building on her prior roles with Prime Minister Harper’s Advisory Panel on Afghanistan and as Canadian consul general in New York, and drawing too on the interest in military matters she’d absorbed hearing her adored father talk about his experiences in the RCAF, her experience as honorary colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force as a mentor and role model for military personnel at Ottawa headquarters, and her role as advisor to Breakout Educational Network on projects pertaining to the essential link between the Canadian Forces and citizens. She had more invitations than could be fitted into her crammed itinerary, despite long hours and frequent flights.

From his new Senate platform, Patrick Brazeau continued his outspoken critique of behaviour and attitudes he felt detrimental to First Nations’ progress, arguing Canadian Aboriginals should not expect to be supported by taxpayers, “to sit back, wait for the government to give me handouts. Maybe be on welfare, maybe drink, maybe take up drugs.”

Such direct talk, drawn from his personal observations and experiences, rankled many. So would his later criticism of the “Idle No More” protests and the liquid-only “hunger strike” by Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat Reserve during which, Brazeau suggested, the Cree chief actually gained weight.

Few in the Canadian south or in our country’s cities, remote from the desolate western shore of James Bay in northeast Ontario, had much direct information about the on-going difficulties of Attawapiskat. But anyone following public issues was familiar with impressionistic reports of sickness, moulding homes, sewage contamination, lack of work, and the reasons for a blockade on the reserve’s road to a nearby mine. Many Canadian eyes were thus opened when, a couple of months later, on May 14, 2013, CBC Television’s Terry Milewski presented a mini-documentary about the thriving Cree community Oujé-Bougoumou on James Bay’s eastern shore, in Québec.

“Little noticed by the world outside,” said Milewski, “the Cree of northern Québec are writing a startlingly different story than their cousins on the western shore of James Bay, with self-government, revenue-sharing, decent schools, and new development. Mining companies are welcomed instead of blockaded. And no hunger strikes.” The forty-year struggle by Québec’s Cree is paying off, he observed, noting how the reserve’s neat streets “feel like they’re on a different planet than Attawapiskat. If the stop signs weren’t in Cree, you’d think the rows of warm, solid homes were in a suburb down south. Shiny new courthouses, band offices, recreation centres, and police stations are being completed. There’s no crisis to summon reporters from Toronto or Montreal.”

The veteran CBC reporter contrasted this prospering and healthy self-governing First Nation in Québec with its troubled Ontario twin, so recently publicized through the protest of Chief Spence. This enabled some CBC viewers to connect the dots and realize that Senator Brazeau, despite his undiplomatic critique, might be onto something.

In the main, however, the Algonquin’s hard-edged views neither resonated with non-Aboriginal Canadians weighed down by historic guilt about First Nations, nor sat well with the chiefs whom Brazeau considered part of a government-reserve nexus that, despite good individuals, was corrupt systemically. Those wanting to discredit Patrick Brazeau stepped up their campaign.

AFN leaders pointed to high spending and poor accounting at CAP as belying what Brazeau espoused, to which the PMO and others countered that these had been Congress problems before Patrick Brazeau became national chief, not during his time as leader. In Ottawa, Canadian Press reporter Jennifer Ditchburn zeroed in on Senator Brazeau’s attention to work, as measured by his attendance at meetings.

As a multi-cultural society, Canada comprises a variety of social values that do not uniformly mesh; not all communities have elevated the alarm clock and day-planner to the same life-controlling status. Moreover, a comprehensive evaluation of senators’ behaviour patterns reveals that, although quite a few are hard-working and deeply devoted, many display lax performance — a number work by means other than sitting at committee meetings, and many non-Aboriginal senators are notoriously missing in action. Such caveats did not prevent reporter Ditchburn from combing the Senate’s attendance register, however, to report that Senator Patrick Brazeau had been absent from 25 percent of the Senate’s seventy-two sittings between June 2011 and April 2012, 31 percent of the meetings of the Human Rights Committee, of which he was deputy-chair, and 65 percent of meetings of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, of which he was a member.

Jennifer Ditchburn displays quick intelligence and a good grasp of details in her reporting, and in 2013 she emerged as one of CBC Television’s reliable commentators on the Senate expenses scandal’s unfolding segments. That she earned the enmity of Patrick Brazeau for reporting those statistics about his attendance is hardly surprising, though. She had framed his performance according to narrow tests of parliamentary life and a traditional view that sitting in meetings is a measure of giving value.

Brazeau’s greater realism and quicker insight led him to understanding that whatever transpired in these meetings mattered little because their outcome had already been determined in the Prime Minister’s Office. Repeal of section 67 of the Indian Act had not been sparked by some initiative taken by a parliamentary committee, he understood, but by a prior decision reached in the PMO. Nor did reporter Ditchburn’s tidy time-tally acknowledge that a young and energetic senator, not yet socialized into the routines of long-serving parliamentary veteran senators who dutifully show up and get attendance stars beside their name, would render much greater public service by rebelling, at some level, against those acclimatized to equate attendance with accomplishment.

Indeed, accounting for these more nuanced yet substantive factors, one should be amazed that Brazeau attended three-quarters of the Senate’s sessions, two-thirds of the Human Rights committee meetings, and one-third of the Aboriginal Peoples committee gatherings. This is especially so because news reports about Patrick Brazeau in this period suggest that difficulties in his personal and family life were complicating his performance, at least at the Senate. He told reporters his attendance problems were caused by personal and private problems. Journalists gratuitously added that “he refused to elaborate,” without acknowledging that if he had, his personal problems would no longer be private and his life would become even more complicated.

In any case, the Senate forum is not the only place a member works. In an arena removed from the Senate’s precincts, as noted, the Conservative senator and the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau faced off in a boxing ring on March 31, 2012, for a celebrity match that raised $230,000 for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation — a beneficial accomplishment no other parliamentarians equalled. For losing, Brazeau cut off his pony-tail and hoped for a return bout.

Also outside the Senate during this same period, Senator Brazeau worked in service to the Conservative Party, as he’d been asked by the PMO and party leaders to do, raising election campaign money by speaking at party fund-raising events. People wanted to meet the colourful Aboriginal senator, a man of growing reknown for his barely controlled intensity and plain speaking.

Celebrity senator Patrick Brazeau was someone to be heard because he stood apart from the herd.

Mac Harb, in contrast, was something of a loner and an organization man, certainly not a politician with the large national following of a celebrity.

But his Liberal Party loyalty and his steadfast support for Jean Chrétien through the internecine party warfare waged by Chrétien forces against the partisan troops of leadership rival Paul Martin had caused the grateful prime minister to thank the Ottawa MP with a Senate seat in September 2003. Mr. Harb thus was able to look forward to the prospect of another quarter century of highly remunerative and pleasant work close to home.

Born in Chaat, Lebanon, on November 10, 1953, Mahmoud Harb immigrated to Canada to study at the University of Ottawa. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Northern Telecom and taught at Ottawa’s Algonquin College. In 1985 he launched what would stretch into a twenty-eight-year career in public office, getting himself elected to Ottawa City Council and rising to become the city’s deputy mayor in 1987 and 1988.

Next came election to the House of Commons in 1988. “Mac” Harb was elected the MP for Ottawa Centre riding, and everything else about him was Ottawa-centric, too. Ottawa was where he’d earned his university degree, worked as a professional, taught community college students, got active in municipal government, and lived.

It was when he became an MP that Mac Harb and I first became acquainted. I admired the ability of the Liberal Party to attract Canadians of different national origins and respected Mac himself for his detached perspective on national affairs, which I felt stemmed from both his more objective perspective as a clear-eyed immigrant and his technical pragmatism as an engineer.

The Liberal Party Mac entered was one torn by leadership rivalries, and he sided with Jean Chrétien and supported his bid to replace John Turner in 1990. For the next fifteen years in the Commons, Mac remained a quiet Chrétien loyalist. Then, for a decade in Parliament’s upper house following his 2003 Senate appointment, he dutifully supported Liberal measures and opposed Conservative ones.

A couple of times, though, he took his own initiative on special issues, enjoying the freedom to float and be true to his own values and concerns. In 2006 Senator Harb brought forward a private member’s bill to establish and maintain a national registry of medical devices, noting in his remarks that one in ten Canadians had some form of medical implant. “Perhaps in this chamber, fellow senators,” he added, looking around at his aging colleagues, “the ratio is slightly higher.”

Just how well his humour was received is not revealed in the Senate Hansard report, but Harb’s acknowledgement of the aging and ailing population in Canada’s upper house, with senators’ increasing demands and dependence on Canada’s health care system, would recur as a theme in 2013 when both senators Duffy and Wallin, speaking against their removal from the Senate because of the expenses scandal, stressed their personal need for medical coverage due to heart ailments and cancer problems, respectively. In voting to oust them, the senators, not without a measure of self-interest, would let them retain health care coverage.

Senator Harb’s second legislative effort focused on the East Coast seal hunt. He expressed his anger over an annual slaughter of marine mammals of negative net benefit to Canada given the little amount of food produced, a declining market for sealskins, and hefty government subsidies to support its uneconomic operation. He viewed the slaughter as especially barbaric because it occurs at the height of whelping season, with mothers nursing the young, unlike the deer hunting season, which takes place in autumn when fawns are weaned and neither mother nor offspring so vulnerable. However, the seal hunt is fervently embraced within Canada by certain segments of society.

Against that background, Senator Harb entered the fray with a bill in March 2009 to restrict the hunt to those with Aboriginal treaty rights. A couple of years later he returned with a different bill to ban the commercial seal hunt. Next, in May 2012, he made a third try, with a bill opposing the annual hunt. Such proposals are disdained by a significant majority of parliamentarians, but Senator Harb was prepared to take heat over the issue because of his beliefs, which were bolstered by his research and understanding of marine science. He was recognized for his efforts by the hard-line animal rights organization PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Given political alignments and PETA’s extremism, it was a mixed blessing for Harb to be honoured by the U.S.-based organization as its “Canadian Person of the Year.”

Mike Duffy’s elevation to the upper house sparked criticism from Islanders because of his lack of familiarity with P.E.I. issues and his questionable validity as a senator, both arising from the fact he was not living on the Island.

Although he’d grown up in Charlottetown and started his career in Prince Edward Island, Duffy had left the island in his youth and had lived many years in Ontario. When the Liberals contemplated putting him in the Senate as one of theirs, they balked after ascertaining that Duffy’s absence from the Island since the mid-1960s meant he was no longer considered much of an Islander in Prince Edward Island itself. Giving him a Senate seat would not be a smart appointment politically, despite how people on Parliament Hill perceived him.

Retired University of Prince Edward Island law professor David Bulger weighed in with his view that, despite reassurances to the contrary from Conservative Senate Leader Marjory LeBreton and the prime minister’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, Duffy’s lack of Island residency invalidated his senatorship because the Constitution requires a senator to be resident in the province he represents.

Again the PMO took a hand in dampening critics. To address this residency challenge, Prime Minister Harper’s office announced in January 2009 that Duffy would move back to Charlottetown “where he owned a home with his brother, but would likely also keep his Ottawa home.” Significantly, it was not Senator Duffy who sought to assuage concerns about his qualifications. Instead, the PMO spoke for him. At least this suggested someone in the PMO had been detailed to watch over and protect the PM’s new celebrity senators, a smart move given the specific and hostile attention they would get from everybody dissatisfied with Conservatives being in power— a sizable, talented, and influential contingent.

So strongly did Duffy now identify with the Conservatives, and so deeply did he want to push back against entrenched anti-Conservative attitudes of many Canadian journalists, that he began to carry the battle to his former Parliamentary Press Gallery colleagues and slam journalism schools for churning out leftist graduates.

In March 2010, speaking to Nova Scotia Conservative party members at Amherst, Senator Duffy attacked the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, and other schools of journalism, for exposing students to Noam Chomsky and critical thinking. “When I went to the school of hard knocks, we were told to be fair and balanced,” Duffy was quoted in the Amherst Daily News. “That school doesn’t exist anymore. Kids who go to King’s, or the other schools across the country, are taught from two main texts.” According to Duffy, they are Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky’s book on mainstream media, and books on the theory of critical thinking.

“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky, what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty that what we stand for — private enterprise, a system that has generated more wealth for more people because people take risks and build businesses — is bad,” Senator Duffy was reported saying. He then told Conservatives they had nothing to apologize for because most Canadians are not “on the fringe where these other people are.”

A similar message had been delivered in 2002 by seasoned reporter Anthony Westell in his book A Life in Journalism, in which he examined “News Versus Truth” and said the role of journalists is to report the news not make the news. But Westell wrote reflectively, and without Duffy’s newfound combativeness. The senator was casting seeds of resentment over the fertile terrain of Canada’s newsrooms where they would sprout, once the seasons changed.

Pamela Wallin, sworn in as a Canadian senator representing Saskatchewan, owned property in Wadena, the hometown she returned to at Christmas, the place her parents and sister still lived. A Wadena perspective was a counterpoint lens through which she tried to view national issues to determine their relevance to Canadians outside her immediate political and media circles in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York. Being in Saskatchewan helped her remain grounded in who she truly was.

Yet coming home also reminded the Conservative senator of where she’d first entered politics as a radical New Democrat.

Movement across the political spectrum is not uncommon. Brazeau had wanted to enter into “mainstream” federal politics, and while his statements supported initiatives by Conservative prime minister Harper, he’d also left the door open to the Liberal’s, noting how Stéphane Dion had “an open mind” on Aboriginal questions.

Duffy’s movement on the spectrum was more like that of a slalom skier adept at veering left or right to the Liberals or Conservatives, reflecting perhaps his more traditional and pragmatic Maritime political philosophy.

Pamela Wallin’s case was quite different and, because fewer women have prominent public careers, her transition through political philosophy stood out more starkly.

Her shift was as dramatic as that of, say, Barbara Amiel, who transitioned from Communism as a young woman to being a forcefully articulate exponent of right-wing philosophy several decades later, moving from her initial opening with CBC Radio to her platform as newspaper and magazine columnist in Canada and Britain in tandem with husband Conrad Black. In a similar vein, Wallin started political involvement in the anti-American socialist Waffle, opening her media career in a small role with CBC Radio in Regina, and ended up a pro-American Conservative senator. Both women became public figures and chronicled their progress in mid-life memoirs —Confessions in the case of Amiel, Since You Asked from the pen of Wallin.

For each, early years of hard work in low-paying jobs gave way eventually to high living and mass media roles in which they influenced public thinking. Many Canadians learned the background details of both —Amiel’s multi-thousand-dollar shopping sprees for handbags and shoes, Wallin’s condominiums in New York and Toronto — and shook their heads in a response located somewhere between shock and envy.

But it was Pamela Wallin, not Barbara Amiel, whom Prime Minister Harper appointed to the Senate, and because of her position in public office, it was she whose spending came under greater scrutiny. That was the peril of being a celebrity senator: there was no option but to carry on the way you’ve been performing, to float free and stay true to what made you the star you are.

Celebrities who become politicians may either be “parachuted” candidates who are landed by the party that recruited them into safe ridings where they can easily win election to the House of Commons, or appointees dropped into the Senate with even less hassle.

Whichever route is chosen to turn these star public personalities into parliamentarians, they share a common denominator of being accustomed to media attention. They know what it’s like to have their personal life scrutinized. The best have acquired almost instinctive techniques for self-preservation, and learned ways to preserve a buffer zone of privacy. What they have much less familiarity with is the way government works, especially on the inside, and particularly in the continual byplay between journalists and politicians.

“Politics and the media play the same symbiotic game and each needs — and uses — the other,” wrote Pamela Wallin in 1998. “But,” she added, “there are rules.”

It is one thing to acknowledge rules, another to comprehend their application — or to think that because you know what the rules are from the media side of the ramparts, you understand how they work on the political side. The real problem for a great many senators, something that is magnified in the case of those who are celebrities, is that they are simply not politicians.

Although some Canadians envisage a utopia of non-partisan senators, including Liberal leader Justin Trudeau who unveiled a plan in January 2014 to appoint members to the upper house free from party affiliation, we want hockey players who know how to skate and legislators adept in the fundamentals of politics, skills developed by being active in the game. A problem for many of Canada’s senators is their lack of well-honed skills needed to work as legislators and to survive the political arena’s unique demands. In the same way, the apparent understanding journalists and public commentators exude about government and politics lacks an essential foundation of experience inside parties, campaigns, and governments.

One might think a journalist would know better than anyone how reporters sniff out stories and, therefore, why extra care is needed to not misstep or deliver a juicy morsel of news to those waiting around with notebooks and cameras. But such logic does not fit reality. The fact that the two most media-savvy senators in Canadian history, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy, did so many things to encourage, and even provoke, members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery by their actions and practices suggests that perhaps a different law governs: the more familiar one is with the news media, the less one heeds a politician’s instinctive wariness of journalists.

Another problem facing free-floating star senators who have a sense of entitlement is their assumption that others will tend to grunt-work and minor details.

Many senators — not just Indian chiefs, highly paid hockey players, and network star broadcasters, but also corporate executives and senior officials — have been accustomed to others handling the “details” of arranging travel, paying service accounts, keeping up with financial administration, filing accurate expense accounts, and collecting appropriate reimbursements. In their prior careers, somebody else looked after a lot of things necessary for them to do their jobs, like arranging limousines, air travel, hotels, working the telephones, reserving restaurant tables, picking up dry cleaning, buying clothing, organizing personal grooming, massages, and shopping for food and liquor. Those coming from Canada’s big television news networks had become accustomed to the pattern that lots of people were always around to look after things.

Even if the star performer or top person in a hierarchy is the one pushing cash at people, gaining the goodwill that such munificence provides, it is some “underling” who has to collect a receipt, jot down a note about the payment, or later be handed a clutch of the star’s receipts to process through the reimbursement regime. In 2013, a former employee of Senator Colin Kenny went public with her complaint that she’d spent a lot of time looking after his expenses, booking personal activities, delivering and fetching his cleaning, and the like. In the corporate world, personal assistants do all this, and more, for senior executives all the time. In the Senate, however, employees are paid from public dollars, with the general understanding they are being engaged in public business. But the Senate’s “honour system,” combined with uncertain rules and long tolerated practices, created a murky realm of tacit compliance and wilful abuse.

The Senate and its code of financial conduct, if problematic in the case of Senator Kenny, were especially ill-equipped to mesh a star senator’s acquired sense of entitlement with public expectations for accountability in spending money. Moreover, the distinction between personal affairs and public activities, being foggy, was hard for senators themselves to adhere to. They were, most all of them, on the public dime and using parliamentary facilities and services while conducting private business, continuing professional roles, and doing partisan political organizing. Life was one glorious blur as a senator free-floated through it.

Whatever problems were brewing behind the scenes, however, for the first couple of years the public verdict on Stephen Harper’s picks of celebrity senators was that, once again, the prime minister really knew what he was doing.

For the Conservative Party’s biennial conference in June 2011, delegates to the event at Ottawa’s impressive new convention centre were delighted, and television viewers across Canada entranced, to see two very familiar broadcasters who for years had sent them parliamentary news and reports of political developments from the nation’s capital over CBC and CTV airwaves. Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy basked in enthusiastic partisan approbation at centre stage, co-hosting the national Conservative convention in Ottawa.