SENATOR DUFFY'S SENATE QUALIFICATIONS: A CONSERVATIVE SHILL WITH NO CLASS

Senator Duffy: A Conservative Shill

With No Class

At Christmas time Mike Duffy, the famously corpulent and cherubic, but aging, former television newsman was rewarded for his many years as a Conservative shill. He was one of eighteen Conservative faithful to receive courtesy of their pal the Prime Minister, the crown jewel of Canadian political patronage – an appointment to the Senate of Canada. Among the party hacks, flaks and hangers-on like Duffy, a Senate appointment is a dream come true - the big enchilada of politics - the mother of all cushy political appointments.

And no wonder. Senators make a base salary of $130,400 a year and get extra for serving as committee chairs. The pension is 75% of the Senator’s five best years of salary and is payable after the tender age of 55 and only six years in the Senate. And of course, it is indexed to the cost of living.

And there is more. A Senator gets 64 free return trips a year anywhere in Canada by plane or train and can give away his ticket to someone else to use. If he lives 100 km or more from Ottawa, he can pick up an extra twenty grand a year in expenses. He also has a hundred fifty thou to fix up his new offices, and can hire staff, etc., all courtesy of you and I the loyal and faithful Canadian taxpayer.

Ah, but was Duffy qualified to receive such munificence? Of course he was, and in two very important respects. First of all, his reporting on CTV in recent years so clearly supported his patrons, that alone would have made him a natural selection.

But he is qualified to be a Conservative Senator in another very important way, as evidenced by his rich oratory in his maiden speech delivered in the Red Chamber on Tuesday. After buttering up his patron and offering an assortment of banalities, his blackberry buzzed - a big no, no in the Chamber.

After that gaucherie, Senator Duffy had this to say to his distinguished colleagues of the gravy train: “Honourable Senators, I was disappointed to see that our dynamic young premier in Prince Edward Island, Robert Ghiz, has climbed into bed with the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and honourable Senators know what a grotesque scene that is. Do honourable Senators know what happens when two politicians climb into bed together? One of them comes out on top and I am afraid that when one is in bed with Danny Williams he will come out on top and I would hate to see where that will leave P.E.I in the end.”

His comments in the Senate were a little tamer than what he said at the P.E.I. Progressive Conservative annual meeting a few days before. At that meeting Duffy, in referring to Ghiz and Williams said, "when two men get into bed together one is going to get the shaft, and I assure you it won't be Danny Williams."

When pressed for an apology the classy Senator only had this to say: "Honourable senators, if the metaphor I used in my speech on Feb. 3 was offensive to some members of this chamber, I withdraw the metaphor."

All of this reminded me of another instance that Duffy revealed something of himself. More than ten years ago he launched a defamation lawsuit against the now-defunct but wonderful publication known as Frank Magazine. During the proceedings he gave testimony that he had been deprived of an Order of Canada appointment because of the things that Frank had written about him. Duffy alleged that his source was Prime Minister Chretien no less. Of course, he was unable to prove his allegation.

And so if shilling for the Conservatives was Duffy’s first qualification to be a Conservative Senator, what was the second qualification? It is the same characteristic possessed by present day Conservatives too numerous too mention. It is what has set people like Gerry Ritz, Myron Thompson, Art Hangar, Stephen Harper, Stockwell Day, John Baird, a host of other Conservatives and now Duffy, apart from distinguished and respectable parliamentarians.

They all – Duffy among them - have no class.

And so, being a Conservative shill and having no class, of course Senator Duffy is qualified to be a Conservative Senator.

PARLIAMENT HILL: THE DAWNING OF A NEW LIBERAL ERA

Bush's pal Steve Harper is not doing well these days.

So long as Steve had a simplistic 5-point program and stuck to it, he did well. But when it came to multi-tasking he had trouble passing gas and blowing his nose at the same time. When it came to putting out fires he was all thumbs with both the hose and the extinguisher.

Harper's problems really began with his flip-flop on income trusts. During the election campaign, unlike the Grits who seemed to be lurking around the next corner to do them in, Stevie had promised to maintain them as an investment vehicle. Once in power however, he fell under the spell of the gurus at Finance, the Bank of Canada, and Bay Street. They convinced him to break the promise. And so, the sly and stealthful pal of Bush's, shamelessly changed his mind. Income Trusts, he announced, would be phased out. The handsome returns they delivered to their investors would be no more. Thusly, he broke his word to a key group of the traditional coalition of Conservative voters - retired people with savings, not to mention, the brokers and financial advisors who feed off of them, together with other business groups. They were all loyal, fair and foul weather Conservatives. Overnight, many became former loyal, fair and foul weather Conservatives.

The front end man picked by Stevie to do the verbalizing dirty work was an arrogant Ontario former ambulance chaser, Finance Minister James Flaherty. Flaherty's hauty demeanor while presiding as the chief executioner of the much beloved investment vehicle, did little but exacerbate Stevie's Government's first major PR disaster.

The next stop along Steve's road to perdition was his Budget. It took about 24 hours for the Canadian people to grasp the essence of it all - an obvious and giant bribe to the Province of Quebec.

The billions transferred over to Steve's pal Jean Charest never had a snowball's chance of passing the stink test. Charest was informed of Harper's largesse of several billion to La Belle Province to correct a mythical fiscal imbalance in Equalization payments near the end of a brutal provincial election campaign which was not going well. And so, in one of the most unsavoury and odious moves in Canadian political history, with the proceeds of his bribe, Charest offered a huge tax cut to Quebecers. He squeaked through with a narrow minority victory.

The Budget also earned the undying enmity of Tory Premier Danny Williams of Newfoundland, who came out swinging about what he saw as another broken Harper promise - the promise of not including resource revenues to calculate Equalization payments. Williams remains on the warpath, taking his rip-roaring attack on Steve's character and policies, on speechifying road trips elsewhere in Canada. Premier Calvert of Saskatchewan, notwithstanding that he is a mild gentleman as befits a man of the cloth, has also told anybody within earshot of what he thinks of the conniving Prime Minister. Canadians from across the country cursed the Prime Minister as another Quebec appeaser. Even Quebecers seemed embarassed by the Conservative generosity of other Canadians' money. His support there has dropped like a rock since.

Then comes Afghanistan. The hapless and feckless warrior, retired General and Minister of National Defence Gordon O'Connor, under constant fire in the House, changed his story about the treatment and monitoring of Canadian captured detainees in Afghanistan repeatedly. He was ably assisted in the confusion by Steve himself, together with the grey-matter challenged Liberal gift from the Conservatives that keeps on giving, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

The cuckolded (probably not the most accurate term in hearkening to his treatment by the vamp Belinda, but delicious nonetheless) Foreign Affairs Minister Peter McKay also got into the act. His Department first lied about the existence of a report on conditions in Afghanistan. It then produced a heavily censored version. When an intrepid Globe and Mail reporter produced the original, Canadians discovered that the censored report left all of the good news in, and the bad news out - an odious coverup. Canadians already felt queasy about Afghanistan, there being no end in sight to our sacrifice of lives and money. Now they are left with the firm conviction that the Government does not know what it is doing there. The treatment of the detainees handed over by Canadian troops to the Afghani authorities who tortured them, sounded to them an awful lot like the evil-doers Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanomo.

Next on the Agenda was the Global warming issue. This is the one promise that Bush's pal Steve Harper obviously did not want to break - the promise that he would go easier on industry than the Grits' Kyoto policy. The basis of Stevie's policy is the reduction of intensity levels of green house gas emissions, as opposed to an absolute reduction of emissions. A reduction of intensity levels will not necessarily reduce emissions. Canadians understand that in the case of the oilsands, the biggest greehouse gas belcher in the country, absolute emissions will increase regardless of intensity reductions because the production of oil from the oilsands is expected to triple in less than 10 years. The Canadian policy based on intensity reductions is - in the words of Al Gore, the guru of global warming - "a complete and total fraud."

To sell his flim-flam plan, Stevie sent into the battle, his doorman, John Baird - the chippy and burly, highly-partisan political hit man whose Frat boy demeanor reminds one of the anchorman on the college relay beer-drinking team. Yes, Baird was the designated hitter to take on the saintly Suzuki and the immensely popular Al Gore. The Frat boy never had a chance.

And finally, we have the plight of NHL star Shane Doan. Doan, from Halkirk, Alberta, is the highly effective and popular Captain of the Canadian National Team presently duking it out for the world hockey championship in Moscow. He had a dust-up with some NHL officials a couple of years ago, who accused him of making an anti-French slur during a heated hockey game. He denied it. There was an investigation, and he was cleared. But it wasn't enough to satisfy the politicians. Led by the Bloc, a hearing ensued last week before the Commons Official Languages Committee. All of the parties wanted in on this keystone kops act. By God, they were going to fall all over each other protecting our country from racial slurs in the hockey rink. Here, Steve had an opportunity of picking up some lost points. He could have and should have said, 'This is ridiculous. There's been an investigation and he's been cleared. Get off his case." He let Shane twist slowly in the wind until the debate petered out. Stevie just couldn't resist the further pandering to the nationalist vote in Quebec. He said nothing. And he lost more points. The whole Ottawa political scene became even more of a laughing stock than usual. Oh, yes, when it was all over and there were no further real or imaginary points to get, Bush's pal Steve Harper called Shane to congratulate him on a hat trick. Talk about trying to have your cake and eat it. Fortunately, the Canadian people saw it for the crass opportunism that it was.

Today Canadians received further information that the polls, already getting soft for Stevie, have taken an alarming anti-Conservative turn. An Ipsos Read poll released today shows the Conservatives with 35%, Liberals at 34%, NDP at 14%, the Bloc with 9% and Greens at 7%.

Most importantly, the Grits lead in Ontario 44% to 34%. And in Quebec, with the people obviously having more pride than Steve gives them credit for, the Grits are second to the Bloc and ahead of the Tories: The Bloc has 35%, the Grits 25% and the Conservatives 20%. In Atlantic Canada the Grits are ahead with 43% to 32% for the Conservatives. Only in the west, do the Conservatives lead the Grits: in British Columbia, 43% to 32%, in Alberta 66% to 20%, and in Saskatchewan, 46% to 25%.

If the election were held tomorrow, Stephane Dion and the Grits would win, because the overwhelming Conservative lead in Alberta does not translate into enough seats.

Bush's pal Steve Harper is in deep political trouble. What's worse, the Canadian people don't care much for him. Get ready for a Dion Government. You can say you heard it here first.

STEPHEN HARPER AND THE GREAT UNRAVELING

It all looked so easy at first - the new Liberal leader Stephane Dion struggling to get his message across in English, a youthful (if portly) Prime Minister that seemed to stick to his promises and deliver well crafted speeches, a Government party unburdened by scandal, party coffers bursting at the seams, the Premier of Quebec making nice, an economy going gangbusters - shurely, it was only a matter of time and the Conservatives would form a majority Government.

The chattering class by a wide margin interpreted the Quebec election results as boding well for Steve. The public seemed to show strong initial support for the budget - initial polls showed the Conservatives' support spiked to 40%. It all looked so rosy for Bush's pal Steve Harper. It was going to be a waltz. A breeze. A romp. He had the bucks, the brand new hi-tech 17500 square foot, shiny headquarters. And the polls that showed him to be a 2 to 1 favorite as the leader who would make the best Prime Minister.

Well, if I may be permitted to indulge in some trite and hackneyed political truisms, that was then and this is now. Or, dare I say, if two weeks is a long time in politics, one month may seem like an eternity.

Since the Budget was tabled on April 19, its been all downhill for Stevie. It took a few days to settle in, but once Canadians had time to think about the great Quebec giveaway - the billions given to rectify a mythical fiscal imbalance - they were . . . well, they were underwhelmed. Particularly when they thought about Premier Charest - toute de suite, as they would say in La Belle Province -bribing Quebecers with a 700 million tax break upon hearing of of Harper's beneficence on the eve of the Quebec election. Premier Danny Williams, the colourful and fearless newfy and the normally sober and sedate man-of-the-cloth Premier Calvert of Saskatchewan, began leading an attack on the Budget that continues unabated.

Even Bay Streeters, who one would think regarded Stevie as their fair-haired boy, became angry. They were irate over the Budgetary tax change that disallowed Canadian companies deducting loan interest for foreign investments.

The El Stinko Budget seemed to revive that damnable Income Trust issue still festering in the minds of millions of middle class Canadians and income trust business leaders. Harper's shameless broken election promise saw net worths of ordinary Canadians slashed. Cash flows that older families had relied on for their twilight years, thanks to Harper, were now out the window. Furthermore, piranha-like foreign companies were now picking up business assets of the trusts for a song. Ontario MP and Grit finance critic John McCallum was greeted by cheers - in Calgary of all places - as he assailed Harper and his Government for being idiots and morons for trashing income trusts.

But that's not all. Soon to replace Stockwell Day as the gift to the Liberals that keeps on giving, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has been front and center in the Conservative drive to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Former General O'Connor was already in trouble. He had to do an embarassing about face by admitting in the Commons that the Red Cross did not inform Canadian authorities if Taliban prisoners turned over by Canadians to Afghani authorities were mistreated. He had earlier informed the House otherwise. O'Connor was also
under heavy criticism regarding Federal untendered purchasing contracts made between his Department and a company for which he had formerly lobbied.

In recent days O'Connor blithely commented that the Afghanistan war would probably last 15 years. Underlining that statement and in a move indicating Canada would be in the Kandahar debacle far beyond the Commons approved 2009 date, his Department acquired tanks from Holland which will only be delivered in 2009. This comes at a time when plenty of Canadians have become concerned with body bags of our brave young troops, and informed that the good news of our heavy lifting participation in the NATO initiative in Afghanistan is not shared by knowledgeable observers on the ground. The feel-good rhetoric from O'Connor, Day, Toews, and Hillier about success in Afghanistan seems to be shared only among themselves.

And there remains the disquiet felt by many Canadians about the meanness of the Prime Minister, reflected by his partisan and personal attacks which can only be described as extreme - accusations that Liberals support the Taliban instead of our troops, that a Liberal Sikh MP did not support the continuation of measures under the anti-terror legislation so as to keep his father in law from testifying at the Air India Inquiry, and that Liberals are not a friend of Israel, etc. etc.

There's more. Now we have the attack on Kyoto. Harper's Environment Minister Pit bull, John Baird's over the top doomsday scenario unveiled this week in the Senate hearings has met with derision from all quarters - even including traditional Conservative cheerleader Canwest columnist Don Martin. Senator Denis Dawson referring to Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' called Baird's show 'a convenient lie.'

And if all of that wasn't bad enough, now Stephane Dion has begun to find his voice. His environment policy is widely seen by experts to be the most responsible. He and John McCallum have offered up a credible alternative to the Conservative axing of Income Trusts, so as to protect the investments of ordinary Canadians. He has boldly agreed with Elizabeth May not to run a Liberal candidate in the Central Nova Riding that she hopes to win from Peter McKay, and she has agreed to reciprocate in his Montreal Riding. This clears the way for unprecedented cooperation between the Liberals and the Greens (and probably some Green NDP) in the next Federal Election.

The result: a poll released by Decima Research on April 17 shows the Tories at 34% - 2 points below election day in January 2006. The Grits have 31%, the NDP have 15%, the Greens have 11% and the Bloc 7%. And in Quebec, the Budget honeymoon has really gone south: the Bloc has 29% and the Grits lead the Conservatives 23% to 20%. Apparently Quebecers do not liked being bribed. The ND's trail with 10%.

The future is bleak for Bush's pal Steve Harper. With numbers like that he will not win a majority. With a trend like that he is likely to lose if the election is called soon. With gaffes like he and his Government have committed in recent weeks, the result could be a Liberal majority Government. Which of course, I have predicted. Once again, you can say you heard it here first.