Juxtaposition

Bert Brown today, trying to justify the public footing a nine-figure annual bill for a cesspool of patronage and corruption:

“It’s one of the five major institutions of the Canadian government and if you were to take that away, you’d just be creating a dictatorship,” Brown said in an interview in his office overlooking Parliament Hill. “Anytime you get a prime minister that won’t listen to anything but his own advice, you get some of the crazy things that we’ve seen.”

Bert Brown less than two years ago, explaining his own belief that Senators should avoid questioning any of the Prime Minister's actions lest they be seen as disloyal:

"Every senator in this caucus needs to decide where their loyalty should be and must be. The answer is simple; our loyalty is to the man who brought us here, the man who has wanted Senate reform since he entered politics, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper," Brown wrote.

So Brown's idea of a bulwark against executive-branch dictatorship is...a branch of government whose responsibility is to maintain perpetual loyalty no matter how unreasonable the executive branch becomes. As if we needed another reason to abolish the institution designed to allow Brown and his ilk to interfere with the operations of Canadian democracy.