Juxtaposition

Bert Brown this week, shedding crocodile tears over blind partisanship in the Senate:

The real problem, Brown told HuffPost, is that the overwhelming majority of senators don’t do the job they were appointed to do.

Senators are supposed to represent their province’s interest “but they don’t,” he said; they just follow what their party’s leadership tells them to do.

“They just vote either for Liberals or for Conservatives,” he said.

“I was there for five years and eight months and we voted everything that was voted to the Conservative government, every one. There was one guy who said who wanted to abstain once,” Brown recounted.

Senators toe the party line out of a sense of loyalty to the person who appointed them, the retired senator said.

Bert Brown less than two years ago, offering his view as to the duties of an appointed Senator:

"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.

[Edit: fixed title.]

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.

All according to plan

Oh, that poor, unfortunate Stephen Harper.

If he could have counted on his party's Senate majority to allow its own institution to be reformed, he might have faced some pressure to make the composition of the Senate somewhat less out of touch with the country.

But now that his party's majority is balking at any plans for Senate reform, what choice does he have but to keep right on handing out patronage appointments - to insiders who will of course help run his party's campaigns and support him on every other issue - until he can override the current turncoat quota?

Harper's Separatist in the Senate

Buckets points out a 2001 Andrew Coyne column on the links between the Canadian Alliance and the Alberta Independence Party. And there's one connection which seems particularly striking based on Harper's poor excuses for...well, pretty much everything he's done over the past two weeks:

Question 4: Who said, to which gathering of which separatist party, "I wish you every success." Was it a) Lucien Bouchard, then a minister in the federal government, in a telegram to the Parti Quebecois in 1990, or b) Bert Brown, member of the Canadian Alliance and "Senator-elect" for the province of Alberta, addressing the same Alberta Independence Party meeting that Mr. Thompson attended?

The answer to each, in case you were in any doubt, is b). Which raises a further query: What on earth were Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, as well as Darrel Stinson, MP, and Ted Morton, Alberta's other "Senator-elect," doing at a meeting of a party dedicated to the dismantling of Canada?

So while Harper is trying to make excuses for an orgy of patronage based on what seems to be an entirely Con-fabricated rumour about Bloc members being appointed to the Senate, one of his only two appointments so far has already been the Alberta equivalent.