It seems that the great Tiger Woods is just getting in deeper and deeper. See, e.g., today’s Vancouver Sun: “Tiger Woods voicemail to alleged TV girlfriend released, third woman named as Tiger apologizes.”Â  Or the Yahoo Canada site: “Golfer who introduced Elin to Tiger tees off on Woods.”

To save his reputation someone is going to have to punish him. And why not Canadian minority Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has just been “rebuked by Chinese leader” himself?  For one thing, Mr. Harper has the means at hand. He pretended for years that he would never appoint anyone to the current unreformed Senate of Canada, who hadn’t first been elected, in some way. Then in less than nine months (from late December 2008 to late August 2009)  he appointed 27 senators to the so-called red chamber, on the good old-fashioned raw patronage model – a record for any similar time period in Canadian history since 1867.

Of course, the official spin is that the Harper minority government still supports Senate reform – or at least appointing candidates who have been elected for the purpose, as in the case of Alberta’s legendary Bert Brown, etc. It’s just that the government can’t find a majority in the federal parliament (or among the provinces?) to support their election “consultation” proposals. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper wants to make sure that retiring Senators are replaced by enough reliable Conservatives to maintain a decent right-wing presence in the unreformed “upper house,” etc, etc, etc.

Not to worry. Now an “all-party committee of Manitoba MLAs has suggested that Manitoba elect its Senators using a first past the post system … The committee, consisting of 12 MLAs from all three parties, met four times over the past year and heard submissions from more than 80 people who weighed in on how the federal Senate should be reformed … The committee was struck in response to a federal government request to the provinces to suggest how to change the current system of appointing Senators, which many criticize as political patronage … The committee tabled its report in the Manitoba legislature this afternoon [December 1]. The report recommends that … Three Senators would be elected in Winnipeg, two in southern Manitoba, and one in the north … The votes would be held by Elections Canada every eight years.”

Steven Fletcher, Minister of State for Democratic Reform in Ottawa, has congratulated the Manitoba MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly) on their report. And he has stressed that: “As he has done in the past, Prime Minister Harper is willing to appoint Senators chosen through a democratic Senate selection process.”

Yet as Charles W. Moore explained recently in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal: “early 2010 will see at least three more Opposition senators hit mandatory retirement age, which will allow the prime minister to appoint three more Conservatives pledged to Senate reform, and finally achieve the Upper House majority” that still eludes him in the already elected “lower house” of the federal parliament. Hands up all those who really think Mr. Harper is going to be rushing into the kind of elected Senate reforms endorsed by the Manitoba Legislative Assembly committee any time soon.

Meanwhile, for some further recent intelligence on how the current strictly appointed senators, old and new, are behaving, see: ‘The Jewish Senator’ retires” ; “Senator Frum’s Maiden Speech” ; and “Baldly going where no senator has.” As the last item notes: “For decades now, being appointed to the upper chamber has been like joining a club–not a cool club like the Friars Club or even a useful club like the Hair Club for Men, but a club whose proceedings go entirely unnoticed by society at large. Think of it as Fight Club but with naps instead of fist fights.”

What better punishment could there be for Tiger Woods’s now self-confessed transgressions than being undemocratically appointed to such a body – for as long as eight years, in “the last lumber village before the North Pole”? Like Michael Ignatieff, of course, Mr. Woods would be “just visiting” Canada. But he might take heart from the knowledge that on the Yahoo Canada website today, a full 86% have said “No” to the question: “Does the public have a right to know about Tiger Woods’ personal life?” (And someone should tell Senator Frum that goes for her too! Her maiden speech in the unreformed Senate, posted by her just-visiting-Canada brother, tells us far more about her personal life than we ever needed to know.)