Istanbul 2007.

As I start to write here in northern North America, the headlines from the old heartland of the Ottoman empire far away, between the Mediterranean and Black seas, are not encouraging.

(See : “Police lock down Taksim, PM shows off in Istanbul” ; “Turkish PM says it was his ‘duty’ to oust protestors occupying Istanbul park” ; “Turkish protesters kept away from Taksim Square by police” ; and “Turkish riot police crack down on protesters.”)

Istanbul 2013.

I take some solace from “Why Turkey protests are a good thing” by Fareed Zakaria — posted on the CNN website this past Friday. But I can’t pretend to have any idea about what will finally happen. And it seems that, whatever else, things are getting worse before they get better.

The news fills me with a quiet sadness. To start with, I spent two enchanted-tourist days in Turkey not quite half a dozen years ago, in Izmir and Istanbul. Now the current “Descent into confrontation” seems to be stealing some of my warmest recent memories of public spaces in the global village — and even a few upbeat thoughts about the future for our troubled species.

Sumandef Hakkinda, reporting from Istanmbul, 2013. Photo : Kokia Sparis.

And then if some ultimate (almost religious?) faith in democracy is especially important to you, the current descent in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey is bound to point towards some deeper summer of discontent.

The descent began in the “last week of May 2013” when “a group of people most of whom did not belong to any specific organization or ideology got together in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.” Their immediate object was to “prevent and protest the upcoming demolishing of the park for the sake of building yet another shopping mall at very center of the city.”

Istanbul 2007.

Sumandef Hakkinda, a young lady on the spot, has told her version of the story from here: The “police arrived with water cannon vehicles and pepper spray. They chased the crowds out of the park …  In the evening of May 31st the number of protesters multiplied. So did the number of police forces around the park. Meanwhile the local government of Istanbul shut down all the ways leading up to Taksim square where the Gezi Park is located. The metro was shut down, ferries were cancelled, roads were blocked … Yet more and more people made their way up to the center of the city by walking … They came from all around Istanbul. They came from all different backgrounds, different ideologies, different religions. They all gathered to prevent the demolition of something bigger than the park: The right to live as honorable citizens of this country … They gathered and continued sitting in the park. The riot police set fire to the demonstrators’ tents and attacked them with pressurized water, pepper and tear gas during a night raid. Two young people were run over by the vehicles and were killed. Another young woman … was hit in the head by one of the incoming tear gas canisters. The police were shooting them straight into the crowd.”

The first North American article I read on the story was “How Democratic Is Turkey? …  Not as democratic as Washington thinks it is,” published on the Foreign Policy website on June 3, 2013. Since then the plot has thickened — several times and in various directions. The question now is how much thicker can it get? (And personally, I can’t help asking, how much sadder will I be when it is all over, for the time being at least?)

Istanbul then and now … a miniature photo gallery

Istanbul 2007.

I did what tourists do in Istanbul, in late September 2007. I took photographs — in an especially intense and urgent state of mind, I think now, because there were so many interesting things to photograph. And the downtown street scene seemed very urbane, and open and inviting.

If you were religious when the call to prayer came, as it did a few times while I was walking around, you could go to prayers at a nearby mosque. If you were not religious, you could just keep sipping your coffee, or doing whatever else you were doing.

Women protesters, 2013. ADEM ALTAN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES.

People were friendly. Many among those I bumped into spoke English (at least a lot better than I spoke Turkish). If you used euros, you would get change in Turkish currency, but you could use euros. And it quickly seemed to me you could take any photograph you wanted.

Fareed Zakaria has written that in the late spring of 2013 the “people protesting in Taksim Square are urban, middle class, secular. Notice that none of the women protestors wear headscarves.” Some six years before, I noticed more than a few women in beautiful downtown Istanbul (aka Sultanamet) who were not wearing headscarves (or, some might say, much of anything else either).

Istanbul 2007.

Yet there were also many women who did wear headscarves — and clothing that covered their entire bodies, from head to foot. But this clothing was not black or dark blue, as can even be sometimes seen nowadays on the streets of such North American places as Mississauga, Ontario. It came in bright and even (almost) sexually provocative colours. And the women wearing it had a lot to say — at least to each other — on the streets of Istanbul.

Istanbul 2007.

I think what I liked most about the city was the mood I picked up as I walked around. Words finally fail at such assignments. But, stabbing in the air somewhat blindly, the mood of Istanbul in the early fall of 2007 seemed to me about some kind of increasingly successful blending of various opposite or at least different things. As simple as old and new, as complex as tradition and modernity, stability and innovation, religious security and secular liberation, east and west (of course : blending east and west is what Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul has always been about, for more than 2500 years; or at least that’s what I think when I try to think about it now).

Istanbul 2007.

From another angle, the mood of Istanbul in the early fall of 2007 that I felt (on a single sunny day of walking around, to clarify how foolish my feelings may have been) was upbeat. The city seemed to be a place that knew it had many layers of a fascinating past, but that was also starting to think it could see new layers of an interesting future too. The global village, it seemed to be saying, is changing in altogether new ways, and nothing will ever be quite the same again. Istanbul  — and even all of Turkey (based on another day in and around Izmir) is/was at a point where several key currents of the change intersected. It was beginning to understand how to navigate this intersection. And it probably had things to tell the rest of us about all this as well.

As already alluded to, I came away, in any event, with enchanted-tourist memories. When I look at the photographs I took then I seem to recover at least something of the original enchantment. (No one else may feel that way looking at some of the photographs here, but I cannot be blamed for that!)  When I look at the most recent photographs of the city, not quite six years later, from the local, regional, and international media in the late spring of 2013, far too much of my earlier enchantment seems to vanish. It gives way to more troubling feelings about not just Turkey, but even the North America where I live myself today.

The future of Islamic democracy … and the Islamic republic

Istanbul 2007.

According to Adam Shatz, Iran today is “the world’s first and only Islamic republic.” And in some very exacting sense of ultimate theocratic rule by Muslim clerics, this is no doubt true enough.

But Pakistan, eg, began calling itself the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as long ago as 1956. (Canadians, and Australians etc, will be intrigued to remember that before that, Pakistan was known as the Dominion of Pakistan, from 1947 to 1956  — having lasted considerably longer than its partner of sorts the Dominion of India, which officially gave way to the ostensibly quite secular Republic of India in 1950.)

Similarly, the modern Turkey that Kemal Atatürk established in 1923 was a republic (and the successor of the old Ottoman Sultanate). But, although the great majority of its people were Muslims, it was aggressively secular (as well as somewhat proto-fascist or perhaps crypto-fascist or quasi-fascist), rather than politically Islamic. And it did not even start to try to become democratic in any serious way until after 1945.

Protesters gather inTaksim Square, June 4, 2013.

Over the past decade, however, under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi in Turkish or AKP) , Turkey has seemed to qualify as both a kind of new model Islamic republic and an Islamic democracy. In its brightest light, it has even posed as a new model Islamic democratic republic, in blissful contrast to the example of Iran. It could be (or so the story goes) a template for aspiring Islamic democratic republics in such places as Egypt, Iraq, and virtually the entire Middle East and beyond.

Istanbul 2007.

The most troubling interpretation of the events that began during the last week of May 2013 in Istanbul’s Gezi Park is that they sadly mark the unhappy end of any and all illusions of this sort. So you hear : “How Democratic Is Turkey? …  Not as democratic as Washington thinks it is.” And you wonder : is this the end of the Erdogan regime as any kind of model Islamic democratic republic for any relevant part of the global village? Again, I have no idea myself. I just do not know at all enough about Turkey. That having been said, as of this exact moment, I am not entirely persuaded that the situation is quite this grim. But who knows? It may be.

At the same time, some of the intelligence reported in the North American media over the past few weeks has also made me wonder whether some of the political things that are going on in Turkey right now are in fact strangely similar to some of the political things that are going on in my own North American backyard..

Istanbul 2013.

I go back to Fareed Zakaria’s posting on the CNN wesbite this past Friday: “Erdogan’s people, tend to be more conservative, religious, from places like Anatolia in the countryside. The people protesting in Taksim Square are urban, middle class, secular. Notice that none of the women protestors wear headscarves … If you’re looking for historical parallels, think of the images of the democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. There, too, you had an elected government that believed it had a mandate to maintain order but protestors on the street who were deeply frustrated and angry. And there, too, there was a culture gap – between the college educated protestors and the blue-collar cops who were policing the streets.”

Istanbul 2007.

My first thought after I read this was that you don’t have to go back to Chicago in 1968 for parallels in North America. The clash between more conservative, religious voters in the countryside (and the exurbs and suburbs) and the urban secular middle class — or what has elsewhere been described as the “conservative religious heartland largely backing Erdogan while Western-facing liberals swell the ranks of the protesters” — has at least broad analogues much closer to home. (As just one case in point, the much-criticized authoritarian style of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan may strike some Canadians as vaguely reminiscent of the bullying model of democracy sometimes associated with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is also no friend of the aggressive liberal secularists in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.)

Istanbul 2007.

Erdogan himself has been taking pains to stress, with his own recent mass rallies, that he still does have his own quite impressive democratic support — and an up-to-now impressive track record in government.

So a political scientist specializing in Turkish government and currently residing in Spain explained this past Thursday : “The now decade-long AKParti rule has in many ways been a success. Turkey witnessed a decade of economic growth and stability, and since 2007 has continued to grow despite the global economic recession. Initial efforts to relax restrictions on religious expression were met with support not only from religious conservatives, but also from a subset of liberals and intellectuals who saw these policies as promoting civil rights. As well, the provision of basic services has improved, especially in rural and working-class urban districts. Citizens who have benefited from these developments, many of whom are more religious than their urban middle- and upper-class counterparts, consistently support the AKParti, whose vote share increased from 34% in 2002, to 47% in 2007, to 50% in 2011.” (Parliamentary democratic Canadians will not have trouble understanding that even with its only 34% first popular vote victory, the AKP has always had solid majorities of seats in the Turkish parliament, as a result of the country’s multi-party system — even though it actually only won just under 50% of the popular vote, even most recently,  in 2011.)

Istanbul 2007.

Even so, the protestors do seem to be showing that there are more than a few things lacking in  Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s model of an Islamic democratic republic. And, for the moment at any rate, he seems to be showing that, in spite of all his other achievements, he may not be the man to fix the model. The various current weaknesses and failures of our own regional models of democracy in various parts of the so-called West may help set the struggles in Turkey today in some kind of more benign perspective. And such altogether up-to-date headlines from today as “Poll shows rising support for Turkish opposition amid protests” may still hold out some optimistic prospects. But such other headlines as “Turkey could deploy army to quell protests” make me think that the enchanted-tourist mood I found on the streets of Istanbul in the early fall of 2007 (just a few months after the Erdogan AKP’s second big electoral victory, I now realize) is probably not going to return any time soon.

Istanbul 2007.

(Oh and btw, Business Week has recently reported that “Turkey is one of the top 10 tourist destinations in the world, attracting more than 31.78 million visitors in 2012, up 1.04 percent from the previous year … In April, the number of foreigners in Turkey jumped 13.02 percent year on year, the last month that data were available.” Not surprisingly, however, according to Kaya Demirer, president of Turyid, a Turkish restaurant and entertainment association, over the first week of June this year “hotels have seen a 30 percent cancellation rate and restaurants are empty.” Moreover, “Bloomberg News reports that retail sales in Istanbul’s Beyoglu area, which includes Taksim Square, have dropped as much as 80 percent in the past week … ’Will this have a long-term effect? If it continues to be a chaotic situation in Istanbul there’s no way it won’t,’ Demirer says, ‘When you lose one year, it takes three or four years to recover.’” So … stay tuned. The news from the old heartland of the Ottoman empire far away seems bound to be interesting, for a while yet.)

This may have surprised you, if you were paying serious attention to such Toronto Sun headlines as : “PCs call for former Liberal staffers to turn over USB sticks containing e-mails” ; “Shame on Andrea Horwath for propping up the Liberals” ; “Liberals as bad as Rob Ford” ; and “Gas plant scandal puts Dalton McGuinty back in the hot seat.”

The best antidote for the misleading impressions conveyed by such alleged political journalism (to say nothing of the latest round of rancourous over-the-top rhetoric from the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, off which it feeds) is the June 11, 2013 edition of the ontarionewswatch Insiders (Howard Hampton, Jeff Bangs, and Hershell Ezrin, presided over by the lovely Susanna Kelley).

As the relevant caption explains : “While the OPP investigates deleted emails from top McGuinty aides in the gas plant scandal, the Insiders step back to assess each leader’s performance this sitting.” And from Conservative Jeff Bangs to New Democrat Howard Hampton (to say nothing of Liberal Hershell Ezrin), all three ONW Insiders gave Kathleen Wynne’s transitional performance as Ontario Liberal minority government leader pretty high marks (granting that only Mr. Ezrin felt able to be altogether unrestrained in his evaluation).

Robert Benzie had already reported in the Toronto Star yesterday that “Liberals’ budget is set to pass Tuesday despite Progressive Conservative attempts to shame the New Democrats into defeating it over the gas-plant email controversy.”  And Mr. Benzie’s account of NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s explanation  —  “‘the Tories are only looking after their own interests,’ while the New Democrats are concerned about the greater good” — almost had the ring of the plain truth to us (well almost : this is politics and not a Sunday school picnic after all, etc, etc).

Of course, the front page of the Toronto Star print edition this morning — with “Head of eHealth Greg Reed leaving post early with $406,250” in big bold print — was a reminder of the undeniable flaws in the Liberal stewardship of Canada’s most populous province over the past decade. Yet even with the latest searing revelations about deleted emails, the OPP, Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, and possible “law-breaking” under the Archives and Recordkeeping Act (mmmmm …), brought in by the McGuinty Liberals in 2006, to us the so-called gas plant scandal still seems something considerably less than Sodom and Gomorrah. The old McGuinty Liberals’ ultimate best defence may even be PC Dynasty Premier William Grenville Davis’s memorable (and o-so-apt) regional aphorism of long ago: “The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by too much perfection in government.”

UPDATE JUNE 12, 2013: McGUINTY RESIGNATION : Click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.

History will be kinder to Dalton McGuinty than his June 2013 critics

With Premier Kathleen Wynne’s first budget now safely through the legislature — in some perhaps new age of Liberal-New Democrat co-operation in Canada’s most populous province (however long it may or may not last) — her predecessor has now resigned from the Ontario Legislative Assembly, somewhat earlier than he originally intended.

Dalton McGuinty and William Davis in the Ontario legislature.

Is anyone surprised that Christina Blizzard at the Toronto Sun greeted this news with : “Dalton McGuinty has broken his last political promise …  The former premier is stepping down as MPP for Ottawa South after saying he’d stay on until the next election” ?? (But surely others, and even Ms Blizzard herself, would say, “was that a threat or a promise?”.)

Similarly : “New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns said he respects McGuinty’s many years of public service and applauded the move to full-day kindergarten despite implementation problems …But he added the timing of the former premier’s exit is intriguing given last week’s scathing report from Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian into the deleted emails and the subsequent OPP investigation …  ‘Look at what’s happened. The last time things got really hot on the gas plant file, he prorogued parliament and he said he was not going to sit any longer as premier,’ Tabuns told reporters …  ‘The events of the last few days have ratcheted that up substantially. He takes the next step, he resigns as MPP. I think you can draw your own conclusions.’”

And then Adam Radwanski at the Globe and Mail has opined : “For all his success, McGuinty has made one of the ugliest political exits Ontario has ever seen …  a politician who at his better moments seemed capable of piercing the cynicism that contributes to public disengagement will instead have contributed to it … That, in itself, seems reason enough not to be too generous toward him about now.”

The mood at our editorial board meeting this morning was rather different. Why is the old Premier Dad leaving even the legislature now, against his original intentions? One of our most cynical editors suggested “He must just be fed up with it all.” And a consensus of sorts formed around that thought. It may be distressing that some Liberal political staffers deleted emails, and destroyed some public policy documentation. Yet those among us who are former Ontario public servants will remember that (at least before the current new legislation of 2006) the tradition on such matters within the bureaucratic behemoth surrounding Queen’s Park has been far from exacting. The mindless rancorous toxicity of the official (and sometimes unofficial) opposition has been distressing as well. And it remains not at all clear just how interested the people of Ontario really are in the increasingly expensive and distracting efforts to elucidate some unfathomable mystery at the bottom of the so-called gas plant scandal — or how much any of this is actually contributing to any serious conception of the regional public interest? (Even with such recent reports as “Power plant cancellation documents secured from Dalton McGuinty’s office, top civil servant testifies” and “How Ontario civil servants put a stop to practice of deleting e-mails” lingering on the late spring air.)

Kathleen Wynne and William Davis at a Toronto Board of Trade event, before she became Ontario premier.

So … we have been glad to see such countervailing headlines as “Dalton McGuinty resigns as MPP, praised by Kathleen Wynne … Premier Kathleen Wynne has come to praise her predecessor not to bury him.”  From the start of his career as Ontario premier — when the gas-station restroom scuttlebutt was saying he looked like Norman Bates from the Hitchcock movie Psycho, etc, etc, —  McGuinty (or just Dalton, as many who had never met the man came to call him) was the subject of too many bad jokes. He has never been vastly popular, with anyone. Yet in the midst of his various undeniable troubles, he has stood up for what is best in Ontario (past, present, and future) more often than most of his peers and rivals. He has moved the ball ahead, on a number of fronts. We have no doubt that history will treat him more kindly than most interested parties are treating him now. His resignation to make way for Kathleen Wynne still looks like a potentially skilful and benign and even generous climax to a career that, on balance, deserves pretty high marks. And we wish him all the best in the rest of his interesting life.

Downtown Orillia Street Festival and Sale, 2012.

Dr. Dave Town from Orillia, Ontario offered an intriguing comment on my recent post about Senate reform,  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” (And I believe he is the same person I have now intriguingly discovered on the “gossip-stew of the internet” : successful chiropractor by day, public-spirited  local activist after hours, medal-winning swimmer, close reader of Canadian history, and published local historian.)

Dr. Town complained that my post, while “thorough and thought provoking …didn’t address my biggest question about senate reform —  the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place … I can see the need to tweak it, mostly to tighten up spending oversights and slightly re-distribute the seating arrangement due to growth in the west over 100 years, but abolish? Radically re-align? Elect? I just don’t see the need. Maybe you need a post on that topic.”

Stephen Leacock (centre) during a fly fishing excursion with May "Fitz" Shaw and Francis Page Hett, Orillia, Ontario, 1933. (Photo by Olive Hett Seale 1933).

In my own fresh Canadian Senate reforming spirit of trying to pay more attention to what others  are saying, I am taking up Dr. Town’s challenge, as best I can. And his position on the issue, I think it’s worth stressing, isn’t just something that he is thinking about all by himself  in Orillia, Ontario (also btw an old haunt of the humourist and political scientist, Stephen Leacock, 1869–1944 — a fresh biography of whom, by Margaret Macmillan, appeared just a few years back).

As Aaron Wherry urged on the Maclean’s website several days ago: “If you believe that there needs to be a second chamber (I don’t) or that the odds of abolishing the Senate are too long (I refuse to give in to such defeatism), there is a case to be made that an appointed and thus less-legitimate Senate is preferable to an elected and thus democratically empowered Senate. I’m not convinced by any of the arguments for maintaining a Senate, but if you insist on having one, you’ve actually got to decide what sort of Parliament you want. And those who favour an elected Senate have some important questions to answer in terms of how they imagine the House and the Senate will interact …   You now at least have three options to choose from. Stephen Harper wants an elected Senate. Justin Trudeau wants an appointed Senate, but wants to change the way senators are appointed. And Thomas Mulcair wants to abolish the Senate.”(Italics added.)

Justin Trudeau in Ottawa, January 4, 2013. David Kawai/Postmedia News.

I also want to urge myself, right up front, that, as polling analyst Éric Grenier has recently pointed out: “Opinions about what should be done with the Senate have shifted back and forth for decades, but polls suggest Canadians are becoming less and less accepting of the current process for nominating [ie appointing] senators. Support for abolishing the Senate is creeping upwards, and the recent scandals seem unlikely to reverse the trend … Electing senators is the overwhelming choice for the kind of reform that should take place, and support for it has grown. Angus-Reid has found that support for ‘allowing Canadians to directly elect their senators’ has gone from 60 or 63 per cent in 2008 to around 70 per cent in the last few years.”

At the same time again, the “tweak-appointed” position Dave Town is pointing to, as it were, does seem to me similar enough to the Senate reform position apparently advocated by Justin Trudeau, new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. And if I were Stephen Harper — whose current parliamentary majority in Ottawa depends quite a lot on the same Ontario-beyond-Toronto regions frequented by Dr.Town — I’d be starting to wonder, a little at least, about just what is going on in the Ontario countryside (and other such places elsewhere, across the land).

AND NOW, ONCE AGAIN, HERE IS FOR FAR MORE THAN ANYONE EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE REASONS PEOPLE SAY WE NEED SENATE REFORM IN THE FIRST PLACE … (and/or just quickly scroll through and/or ignore) …

1. Democracy means never having to say you’re sorry, etc, etc …

Senators and Order of Canada recipients Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy resign from Conservative caucus over Senate expense-claim scandal. Ian Hamilton’s Daily Drawings.

The first thing to say about “the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place,” it seems to me, is that reasons of this sort in political debates are ultimately just opinions. You or I may have good or bad reasons for our political opinions, but in the end they are just opinions all the same. And the principle that we are all entitled to our own political opinions is a crucial hallmark of any working real-world democracy.

Similarly, far too many years of arguing about political opinions has convinced me that the process of trying to change such things is not exactly rational. I can tell you what I think my reasons for my opinions are. But my experience has most often been that this is not all that likely to change your opinions. (Just as I am not all that likely to change my opinions if you tell me your reasons for your different opinions.)

I happen to believe that the present unreformed Senate of Canada stands in need of quite major change. And I have believed this for many years — long before the recent Duffy-Wallin-etc Senate expense scandals (which, I agree, are not all that appalling in any broader scheme of utterly outrageous and appalling political scandals).

Pierre Trudeau looks on as Elizabeth II signs Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982.

To me the question of the present unreformed Senate of Canada today is similar to the  question of the British monarchy in Canada today. Both, I feel, are relics of the 19th century colonial era in our history — and are no longer relevant or appropriate in what our Constitution Act, 1982 alludes to as the “free and democratic society” we enjoy in the Canada of the 21st century.

The crux of my feelings here  — or my reasons for saying we need senate reform in the first place — is democracy. The Canadian confederation of 1867 was the first self-governing dominion of the British empire, and not exactly a democracy (as various historians I have read have underlined). But Canada has evolved over the subsequent 146 years. We are no longer a mere dominion of the British empire (which has itself been transformed into the modern Commonwealth of Nations). And we have very much become an independent sovereign (parliamentary) democracy in our own right.

Tim Uppal, Minister of State for Democratic Reform.

The general argument, I think, has been nicely enough summarized on the University of Calgary Faculty of Law Blog : “The present Conservative government criticizes the Senate as being an antiquated and undemocratic institution … Prime Minister Stephen Harper has gone so far as to require all of his Senate nominees to pledge support for his Senate reform agenda …When the [current] Senate Reform Act was introduced in June 2011 Tim Uppal, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, said that the purpose of the Act is to make the Senate ‘more democratic, accountable, and representative of Canadians’ …  Ultimately, reforming the Senate is about resolving its democratic deficit.”

I do not support many or even any other Harper government policies. But I do support this one. (Even if I am not always or lately ever sure that Stephen Harper himself does!) To me, no merely appointed Senate — no matter how impressively the appointments are made, or by whom — can be a seriously credible and legitimate legislative body in the kind of free and democratic society we enjoy in Canada today.

Democratic refugees from Hitler’s Germany in America : Left to right — Franz and Inge Neumann, Golde and Leo Löwenthal, and Herbert and Sophie Marcuse, ca. 1937.

I can also appreciate that other Canadians still do believe some kind of appointed Senate can even serve some kind of democratic purposes in Canada today. But I do not see this myself.

As already noted, there is, I think, ultimately no strictly reasoned way of resolving this kind of conflict.  Philosophically, I like the position taken by the political and legal theorist Franz Neumann, in his late 1950s essay collection on The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: “What [John Stuart] Mill… says so impressively is … that the truth can arise only from the competition of opinions … that it can thus never be a matter of tolerating other views, but that the truth is discoverable only through the clash of different opinions.”

Practically, we finally resolve clashing opinions in a democracy (or we at least ought to) by letting the majority of the active citizenry decide. And in principle I like Senator Hugh Segal’s proposal for a referendum on the fate of the unreformed Senate of Canada.

2. In between the lines of  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?”

Orillia Hockey Team, 1897.

I do think it is broadly correct that my earlier  post about Senate reform in the true north,  “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?,” tended to assume rather than explain the case for major Senate reform (and/or abolition) in Canada today.

But I also think that various ingredients of this case did appear in between or otherwise around the lines. And it may help flesh out my attempt here to explain the reasons people say we need senate reform in the first place to quickly review these arguments between the lines :

* I noted myself : “As matters stand, The Unreformed Senate of Canada (itself the title of a book first published in the 1920s) is still what alleged Senate reformer Stephen Harper nicely called it in a Vancouver speech  more than seven years ago : ‘a relic of the 19th century.’ It desperately needs to be brought into the present (or, others would say, just abolished altogether).”

* I similarly alluded to a parallel passage from Jesse Kline’s National Post article : “Real Senate reform … would turn an anachronism into an asset for Canada.”

Ontario Liberal luminary Gregory Sorbara, talking to the press as provincial Minister of Finance, 2007.

* I alluded to Gregory Sorbara’s “formula for an independent, non-partisan Senate,” appointed  by “a 20-member Senate Appointments Committee (SAC) made up of respected members of the Order of Canada.” And I then commented : “this kind of Senate reform proposal strikes me as essentially anti-democratic. It just perpetuates the elitist, quasi-aristocratic style of the original 1867 Senate of Canada, which was far too inspired by the British House of Lords. I think there is a growing consensus among the people of Canada today that if the Senate is not going to be democratically elected, it ought to be abolished.”

* I wrote: “The original 1867 Senate of Canada, it might be said, had two major purposes. The first was to serve as a kind of quasi-aristocratic chamber of ‘sober second thought’ : a check, as it were, on the more hasty democratic impulses of the popularly elected Canadian House of Commons — more or less after the fashion of the House of Lords in the old Mother Country. The second was ‘regional representation’ beyond mere population numbers, in a geographically vast federation — more or less on the model of the adjacent United States Senate.” What I might have added here (but didn’t) is that, in my view, the first of these original purposes is no longer relevant in what the Constitution Act, 1982 calls the “free and democratic society” we enjoy in Canada today. To me effective regional representation in a geographically vast federation of diverse provinces is the main purpose of a Canadian Senate in the 21st century. (And for an up-to-date second purpose see the last item in this section below, on a recent Saskatoon Star Phoenix Senate reform editorial.)

* I quoted a recent apt complaint from an editorial in the Hants Journal in Nova Scotia : “Currently, new Senate members are appointed by whoever is in power. This time, it’s the Conservatives, and they’ve stacked the Senate with party faithful.”

Democracy in trouble ... even in Canada.

* I quoted what strikes me as an especially apt passage from the Saskatoon Star Phoenix’s May 22, 2013 Senate reform editorial : “Mr. Harper has also demonstrated why Canada needs an effective and democratic check on executive power … In a report issued this month by the Washington-based Transatlantic Academy, entitled Democracy in Trouble, political scientists David Cameron and Robert Vipond compare how two of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies —  Canada and the United States —  have stumbled into difficulty. In the case of America it’s because of partisan-orchestrated stagnation, while in Canada it is the effect on the electorate of the ‘friendly dictatorship’ with all the power emanating from the PMO.” And I should add myself that I do not think any kind of merely appointed Senate could act as a credible and effective check on the overweening power of the friendly PMO dictatorship (any more than the present appointed Senate can seriously perform this kind of important function).

3. Harold Innis’s case from the 1940s

Harold Innis with the Fourth Battery of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Western Europe during the First World War, 1916.

At the risk of altogether boring to death any who have made it this far in what yet again seems to be evolving into yet another far too long “miniature long-winded dissertation on why Canadian Senate reform remains crucial, despite all the arguments against it,” I want to allude to some remarks about the unreformed Senate of Canada from the writings of “Canada’s first and perhaps only genuine intellectual,” Harold Adams Innis.

Born on a family farm in Southwestern Ontario in 1894 (and dead in Toronto all too early in 1952), Innis was the godfather of Alberta-born Marshall McLuhan. He was also the first Canadian born chairman of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto (1937–1952), the first Canadian President of the American Economic Association, and the author of what still strikes me as the single most interesting (and important) book on Canadian history (The Fur Trade in Canada : An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, first published in1930 and still in print).

Harold Innis, researching the fur trade on the Peace River, 1924.

Whatever else might be said about him (and he has more than a few critics), Harold Innis, I think, has probed the depths of the Canadian experience deeper than anyone else, before or since. Along the way, he had a few things to say about what he called “that unique institution,” the Senate of Canada. Without wanting to get into any great detail on the subject right now, I think his more or less random observations on the Senate, and the related issue of Canadian regionalism, add up to a quite sophisticated case for major Senate reform.

Here are eight quotations of this sort from Chairman Innis, so to speak. They are taken from two of his later essays from the 1940s, “Great Britain, the United States and Canada” and “Decentralization and Democracy.” These essays were re-published in Essays in Canadian Economic History (edited by Mary Q. Innis, 1956), and, more recently, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change (edited by Daniel Drache, 1995) :

* “Our constitution has proved inadequate in the face of the demands made upon it. The Senate, that unique institution, has lent itself to political manipulation …  Politicians have before them as their reward for activity an appointment to the Senate for life …” [My note: This was changed to retirement at 75 in 1965, or as the Harper government explains:“Senators were originally appointed to the Senate ‘for Life’, but that was changed unilaterally by Parliament through an amendment to section 29 of the Constitution Act, 1867 ... that created the current mandatory retirement provision for senators attaining the age of 75 years.”]

Harold Innis (l), Hans Seyle (c), and Alf Earling Porsild (r) on a visit to the Soviet Union, just after the end of the Second World War in 1945.

* “The Senate … provides … a support to party organizations throughout Canada. A federal party organizer can be appointed to the Senate and the cost for secretarial services charged to services to the country…”

* “A senatorship is also a reward for journalists who have been active in the party’s interest and who will presumably continue active after their appointment …”

* “A senator stands as a guard over the party’s interest and is expected to be continually alert to the improvement of the party’s position in the region from which he is appointed. The entrenched position of the party in the Senate contributes to inflexible government, makes political instruments less sensitive to economic demands, and possibly contributes to the rise of new provincial parties …”

* “Provincialism has paralleled the new industrialism … Confederation as an instrument of steam power has been compelled to face the implications of hydro-electric power and petroleum …  Strains on the political structure have been evident on all sides as problems of adjustment have become more acute …”

* “The Senate … was created in a period with limited political capacity and little effort has been made to adjust its membership to the increase in talent available. Necessities of party organization have made it a pasture for old party war horses …  With limitations of the Senate the strain on the courts has not been lessened …”

* “The complex problems of regionalization in the recent development of Canada render the political structure obsolete and necessitate concentration on the problem of machinery by which interests can become more vocal and their demands be met more efficiently … serious attention should be given to the problem of revising political machinery so that democracy can work out solutions to modern problems …”

* “The dangers of an obsolescent political structure cannot be avoided by patchwork solutions … Each region has its conditions of equilibrium in relation to the rest of Canada and to the rest of the world …”

4.  Last thoughts

I have a few final thoughts — and/or final quotations :

(1) A passion for democracy, as noted earlier, lies at the crux of my own belief that the present unreformed Senate of Canada stands in need of quite major change. Yet I also agree that it is important not to romanticize or be naive about such passions.

Ed Dorn in action.

One of the most sensible things I have read lately on this front comes from the late great poet of the American West, Ed Dorn: “I take democracy very seriously, but on the other hand, it’s a form of government that you have to change your mind about a lot because its form is protean, and its instinct, essentially, comes from a mob psychology. Unlike an adherent to a dogmatic position like Marxism, about which there is very little to change your mind, a democrat is liable to change his mind a lot. So none of these concerns and principles ever leave my mind much, but I vary my attitude according to the angles of perspective I’m able to get on them. Democracy literally has to be cracked on the head all the time to keep it in good condition. But all other forms are more or less sudden death.”

Or, if you like, I think the kind of at least more or less major reform I tried to point to in “Is doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada just a vain fantasy?” would do Canada a lot of good. But nothing in the real world of politics is even close to perfect. (Or, as Bland Bill Davis once said about the home province of both myself and Dave Town : “The people of Ontario have never been spoiled by too much perfection in government.”)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks to his caucus on Parliament Hill in the midst of growing scandal over senators' expenses and the abrupt departure of his chief of staff. He told party members he's "unhappy" with the situation. Later in the day he flew to South America.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand.

Almost a quarter of a century after my book on the subject, I remain somewhat sceptical at best about the realistic prospects for even some modest brand of Senate reform in Canada. I refuse to give up hope altogether, but …

(2) I have been impressed by another recent Senate reform article in the Saskatoon Star Phoneix, this time by John D. Whyte, “a policy fellow at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School at the University of Regina.” It makes a number of apt concluding points for my purposes here : “A well-functioning second chamber represents an essential constitutional structure for Canada. Nevertheless, an unelected Senate is an anomaly in a modern democratic nation, and reform is necessary …  Some raise an alarm over the idea of an elected Senate on the ground that it would gain too much political legitimacy and frustrate the capacity of the Commons to enact laws. This overstates the risk … First, the Senate’s moral compass and, hence, its boundary of legitimacy, will be to check excesses in the government’s legislative agenda, not take over the legislative program …  Second, if senators are elected, it is difficult to see their democratic deficit in making legislative decisions. Third, other countries’ constitutions … stipulate mechanisms for overriding upper chamber decisions in significant instances.”

Aaron Wherry, that is to say, recently urged on the Maclean’s website :“I’m not convinced by any of the arguments for maintaining a Senate, but if you insist on having one, you’ve actually got to decide what sort of Parliament you want. And those who favour an elected Senate have some important questions to answer in terms of how they imagine the House and the Senate will interact.” I think, however, that he’s just showing he hasn’t done quite enough research yet.

NDP leader Tom Mulcair speaks with the media in the Foyer of the Senate following caucus meetings on Parliament Hill Wednesday May 22, 2013 in Ottawa. (Adrian Wyld/THE CANADIAN PRESS).

The example of the US Senate and House of Representatives next door, I agree, is a bit troubling. But it is finally not relevant for us in Canada, because we have a rather different British-style or “Westminister” parliamentary form of democracy. The elected Senate that our fellow former British dominion and continuing parliamentary democracy in Australia has lived with quite successfully for some 112 years is the example we should be concentrating on.

As I argued in my earlier post : “Canada’s fellow parliamentary democracy of Australia already has a procedure for dealing with intermittent conflict between its ‘upper’ Senate and its ‘lower’ House of Representatives. And Canada may want to take some useful instruction from that source.”  The Senate reform proposal in our own 1992 Charlottetown Accord also addressed the problem Aaron Wherry is so worried about. And Canadian Senate reformers of the 21st century might want to have a second look at that as well.

* * * *

Monument of Samuel de Champlain in Couchiching Beach Park Park, Orillia, Ontario. Image courtesy of Ken Jarvis Photography.

Two very final quick thoughts … First,  as far as I’m concerned, there is no point at all in carrying on with any kind of merely appointed Senate of Canada today. I agree with those who feel that if we cannot find the resources within ourselves to create an effective, elected Senate that more adequately represents our current regional geography, then we should just abolish the thing. (And if that really is impossible, then we should just stop talking about the “Red Chamber” in Ottawa altogether, and stop giving it more money than it needs to survive on an austere diet of day-old bread and tap water.)

As an absolutely very final thought, no matter how many vain words I and others try to throw at the subject, Chantal  Hébert at the Toronto Star is probably right when she urges that “Even Senate scandal will fade before next election …  Two years from now, there will likely be little or no external trace of the beating the federal government is enduring now …” As the summer barbecue season of 2013 comes into view, we are probably a little closer to the kind of elected, effective, and regionally representative (EERR?) Senate of Canada I would like to see myself. But we still have many, many, many kilometres to go before we rest.

Randall White, a former Ontario public servant who now works as an independent public policy consultant, is the author of a number of books on Canadian history and politics, including Voice of Region : The Long Journey to Senate Reform in Canada.

Reading through all these pieces at one sitting induces a kind of comic despair. The current debate on Senate reform in Canada has been going on since the 1980s. As matters stand, The Unreformed Senate of Canada (itself the title of a book first published in the 1920s) is still what alleged Senate reformer Stephen Harper nicely called it in a Vancouver speech  more than seven years ago : “a relic of the 19th century.” It desperately needs to be brought into the present (or, others would say, just abolished altogether).

The Senate reform debate of  the past few weeks in the press has been induced by a bizarre scandal over outrageous expense claims by a few senators, involving modest but popularly intelligible sums of money. Yet what is most striking about this debate is just how little progress we Canadians have made in debating the larger Senate reform issue over the past 30 years.

(And that includes the Harper government in Ottawa, which has drafted and re-drafted stalled legislation on Senate reform since 2006. Most recently it has referred the constitutional fine points of the issue to the Supreme Court of Canada. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper once said he would never appoint an unelected senator. He has now “personally appointed more than half of those in the upper house.” Nice work if you can get away with it, eh?)

It would be agreeable to lay all the blame here on professional politicians, more interested in the perks of office today than in the longer term Canadian future. I like,  eg, a recent Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial,  which  ends on a soothing populist note: “Canadians are constantly told they don’t have the stomach for the Constitutional reform necessary to right the ship. In fact, it’s the politicians who don’t have the stomach for it.”

Alas, as I finished reading all 32 recent articles from the press, a somewhat different thought was looming in my mind. I am a non-politician ordinary citizen of Canada, with a semi-professional interest in Senate reform, as it were. And I  have probably also been guilty of fiddling while Rome burns — of navel-gazing at my own bright ideas on Senate reform, without seriously considering what anyone else is saying. As Pogo once put it in a now forgotten era: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

AND NOW FOR FAR MORE THAN ANYONE EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE SENATE REFORM ART IN CANADA… (or just quickly scroll through and/or ignore) …

1. When There’s a Breeze on Lake Louise — or how come old Triple E Senate advocates never die?

“When there’s a breeze on Lake Louise ... there on a cool Canadian June night” — from this Hollywood movie — was a hit tune for the Freddy Martin Orchestra in 1942. In Canada it was also a big hit for the Western Gentlemen led by Mart Kenney, grandfather of the present-day Harper government cabinet minister, Jason Kenney.

In the real world of rational thought (if not Canadian practical politics), the debate about Senate reform in Canada over the past 30 years has made at least one thing clear. The kind of so-called “Triple E” or elected, equal, and effective Senate that has operated in the United States and Australia since the early 20th century will not work in Canada’s more diverse federation. The big fly in the ointment here is “equal” — which means equal provincial representation, or an equal number of Senate seats for each province. (And see below for more detailed reasons why.)

Some from Western Canada — original hotbed of Canadian Triple E enthusiasm — have got this message. The Alberta journalist Lorne Gunter, eg, nowadays at least alludes to redistributing the present allocation of Senate seats “so each province has more nearly equal representation” (italics mine). Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has lost faith in Senate reform altogether. Like the Tommy Douglas New Democrats who once dominated his province, he is now saying that “his Saskatchewan Party will hold a referendum to see whether its members think the Senate should be abolished.”

At the same time, Alberta Premier Alison Redford is still urging (as she did last week) : “The province of Alberta and our government has been very clear that we think the Senate needs to be Triple-E … It needs to be equal. It needs to be elected and it needs to be effective.”

Similarly, Jesse Kline at the National Post who “holds a Master of Journalism degree from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a degree in Policy Studies from Mount Royal University in Calgary,” has recently written that back in the day when the modern Senate reform movement started in Western Canada : “It was hoped that a Triple-E Senate could provide better representation for Canadians who lived outside of Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.” Yet a reformed Senate with equal provincial representation would give a Senate majority to “Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces” (which has six provinces to Western Canada’s four provinces). Mr. Kline still urges that : “Dismissing constitutional reform as too hard is no longer an excuse for inaction. Real Senate reform — ideally the realization of the long-sought Triple-E model — would turn an anachronism into an asset for Canada.” I would warmly embrace this argument myself, if “ ideally the realization of the long-sought Triple-E model” were left out. And, as best I can tell, this model has not in fact been long-sought by the majority of provinces.

2. Justin Trudeau and the province that is not a province like the others in Quebec

Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire meet up after the March 31.2012 boxing match with Senator Patrick Brazeau. Photo by Gio Vanni.

One big reason the equal provincial representation part of the Triple E model won’t work in our more diverse confederation in Canada is that the French-speaking majority province of Quebec has long maintained it is “not a province like the others” (pas une province comme les autres ou une province pas comme les autres). And this was effectively (and overwhelmingly) acknowledged by the Canadian House of Commons in late November 2006, when it recognized “that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.”

The still so sad and unhappy extent to which we in the “Rest of Canada” do not seriously understand or acknowledge all this (despite the late November 2006 recognition by the Canadian House of Commons — and Stephen Harper’s own “PM declares that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada”) is reflected in some crocodile-tear outrage over recent Senate reform comments by new federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau (made in French in Quebec).

On this front, see, eg: “Trudeau defends Senate comments” ; “Tories turn the tables on Trudeau over Senate reform in raucous question period” ; “Is Trudeau showing favouritism for Quebec?” ; “More J.T. anti-West bigotry” ; and “Justin Trudeau again reveals anti-West feelings … Trudeau has revealed himself time and again to think of Quebec as a special province within Confederation, deserving of special treatment and privilege …  His stance is naïve, obnoxious and divisive all at the same time.”

I wouldn’t pretend to know just how to walk around all this successfully, in the incredible Canadian manner, say, of William Lyon Mackenzie King. But I do have three further quick thoughts, which may or may not be helpful to someone, somewhere, at some point in time …

(1)  My semi-professional interest in Senate reform in Canada flows from a book I once wrote on the subject, at a publisher’s suggestion. It appeared in1990, just as the Meech Lake Accord was coming apart. After the failure of the follow-up Charlottetown Accord a few years later, I was invited to give a talk to a Senate Clerks’ staff seminar in Ottawa. The event was also attended by some actual senators, including several from Quebec. One strong memory has stuck with me. I grew up on the anglophone northwest shore of Lake Ontario, and I may have been too impressed by some 1990s coffee-break chatter with Quebec francophone senators. They had their own strong memories of Western Canadians in Ottawa, who happily confessed contempt for the “Frenchies” east of the Ottawa River. We all have our fair shares of blame in these kinds of cross-Canada syndromes, no doubt. Yet as I read Ezra Levant on “More J.T. anti-West bigotry” or Lorne Gunter on “Justin Trudeau again reveals anti-West feelings,” in my collection of 32 Senate reform articles in Canada today, I remember my coffee-break tutorials with Quebec senators in the 1990s . Let he (and/or she too of course) who is without guilt, etc, etc.

Unreformed Senators of Canada at work. March 3, 2010. JAKE WRIGHT / HILL TIMES.

(2) I can also recall contemptuous things Justin Trudeau’s father said about my English-speaking Canadian hometown, years ago. I believe Justin Trudeau himself has said some foolish things on Senate reform and much else, as he struggles to find his mature political feet between now and the next federal election in 2015. Yet his recent controversial Quebec comments on Senate reform are at least trying to show the Québécois nation within a united Canada (and French Canadians outside Quebec too) that they ought to see the Senate of Canada as something which can or at least could work in their Canadien interest. And in my own moments of sober second thought, this strikes me as quite good and forward-looking, regardless of anything else.

(3) No reform of the unreformed Senate of Canada that does not finally have Quebec on board can finally work and endure. According to section 42 of the Constitution Act, 1982, an amendment to the Constitution of Canada with regard to “the powers of the Senate and the method of selecting Senators” and “the number of members by which a province is entitled to be represented in the Senate and the residence qualifications of Senators,” could technically be made without the agreement of Quebec. (Provided that at least Ontario was on board. You need “resolutions of the legislative assemblies of at least two-thirds of the provinces that have, in the aggregate, according to the then latest general census, at least fifty per cent of the population of all the provinces.” At the moment, Ontario has just under 39% of the total Canadian population and Quebec has 23%. So … just do the math.) Yet any major reform of the Senate of Canada passed without Quebec’s endorsement could only significantly weaken the 1867 confederation’s prospects for long-term survival. That of course does not mean Quebec can dictate its own terms. But it doesn’t mean that Quebec can just be ignored either (as some thoughts about the Canadian future since 2006 do sometimes seem to assume).

3. Has Ontario’s congenital obtuseness on Senate reform in Canada really ended?

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne in Sault Ste. Marie, March 1, 2013.

Another reason the equal provincial representation part of the Triple E model won’t work in Canada  is that, to a greater degree than either the United States or Australia, the Canadian federation is unusually strongly polarized between more populous and less populous provinces. California, eg, the current most populous state of the union (with a population greater than all of Canada in fact), has only about 12% of the total population of the United States. As already just noted, on the other hand, Ontario currently has just under 39% of the total population of Canada (and Quebec has 23%).

Put another way, in the eyes of many Ontario residents a provincially equal Senate would mean that every one person in Prince Edward Island is worth 93 people in Ontario — which, from the standpoint of a cross-Canada democracy of equal citizens does seem outrageous. You can of course say that this is what a regionally representative Senate is supposed to do in a geographically vast federation. But, eg, the comparable number for the United States is at least not quite as egregious. There a Senate with two senators for each state only means that every one person in Wyoming is worth 66 people in California.

With thoughts of this sort no doubt in mind, former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty had come to the same conclusion that Brad Wall now seems to be contemplating in Saskatchewan. The best thing to do with the unreformed Senate of Canada is to abolish it altogether. Ontario’s new Premier Kathleen Wynne, however, has just gone on record with: “I actually believe that there is a role for a chamber of sober second thought, but there is always room for reform …The discussion of what those reforms should be is an important one, and at the provincial level I would be interested in engaging with my colleagues across the country … It’s not something that I have taken a firm or detailed stand on, but it’s certainly something that I’m willing to engage on.”

Two other recent opinion pieces by other eminent Ontarians have nonetheless suggested that a certain traditional congenital obtuseness on Senate reform in Canada’s most populous province remains more or less intact.

The first is “Gregory Sorbara’s formula for an independent, non-partisan Senate … Prime Minister Harper could leave a lasting legacy as the prime minister who gave up the luxury of offering personal privilege to the few in order to more democratically serve the interest of the many” — an opinion piece that appeared in the May 22, 2013 issue of the Toronto Star. Gregory Sorbara is a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister and influential organizational impresario. The crux of his proposal suggests that PM Harper should “voluntarily divest himself of the power to appoint new members of the Senate. That power could be transferred to a 20-member Senate Appointments Committee (SAC) made up of respected members of the Order of Canada. It would be the responsibility of the Governor General, using a lens of diversity regarding the Order of Canada cohort, to populate the members of such a committee from time to time … New senators would be appointed for a term of six years and be eligible for a one-time renewal for a further six years. The SAC would abide by the currently prescribed allocation of seats among the regions of Canada.”

I have vast respect for Mr. Sorbara and his contribution to Ontario public life. But this kind of Senate reform proposal strikes me as essentially anti-democratic. It just perpetuates the elitist, quasi-aristocratic style of the original 1867 Senate of Canada, which was far too inspired by the British House of Lords. I think there is a growing consensus among the people of Canada today that if the Senate is not going to be democratically elected, it ought to be abolished.

Royal Military College cadets in the Senate Chamber, commemorating the official launch of Veteran’s week, November 4, 2011. From left to right: OCdt Abel, OCdt Lane, OCdt LeBoeuf, OCdt Appolloni, OCdt Noris, OCdt Chandler, OCdt Trainor, OCdt Plante, OCdt Brosseau, NCdt Frank.

The second Ontario opinion piece is Matthew Mendelsohn’s “Abolish the Senate? Forget it: Change the Senate? Maybe” — in the May 24 issue of the Globe and Mail.  Mr. Mendelsohn is “the director of the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto and a former Ontario deputy minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. He recently released a paper, ‘A Viable Path to Senate Reform?’” (And his May 24 opinion piece is based on this paper.) The crux of his proposal is that an increasingly elected Senate of the sort which has figured in Mr. Harper’s reform proposals, without a reallocation of the current Senate seats among provinces, and with “no mechanism to break deadlocks between the House and the Senate is truly a crisis-in-waiting.” But the crisis would be defused if the elected Senate had only limited real power. And so: “The federal government should consult with provinces and canvass whether there could be support for a constitutional amendment that would remove many of the Senate’s powers, replacing them with a suspensive veto only. This would allow the Senate to delay but not block legislation.”

Elements of a similar “suspensive veto”  figured in the reformed Senate of Canada proposed by the 1992 Charlottetown Accord — which also included a mechanism to break deadlocks between the House and the Senate (largely in favour of the House). Personally, I’d agree with those who urge that a Senate with only a “suspensive veto …  to delay but not block legislation” is probably not worth the expense. In principle at least, it would make more sense to just abolish the thing.

4. Mike Duffy’s alleged home on the Island and Senate reform in Atlantic Canada

The original 1867 Senate of Canada, it might be said, had two major purposes. The first was to serve as a kind of quasi-aristocratic chamber of “sober second thought” : a check, as it were, on the more hasty democratic impulses of the popularly elected Canadian House of Commons — more or less after the fashion of the House of Lords in the old Mother Country. The second was “regional representation” beyond mere population numbers, in a geographically vast federation — more or less on the model of the adjacent United States Senate. (And note that US senators were not popularly elected until a constitutional amendment in 1913. Before that they were indirectly elected by state legislatures.)

The original Senate regional representation scheme in Canada was, as it were, by region rather than province, strictly speaking. As finally adjusted after the creation of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905, Canada was divided into four regions — each of which had 24 senators : Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, and Western Canada. Back in the earlier 20th century Ontario and Quebec each had larger populations than either Western or especially Atlantic Canada. (In 1911, eg, Ontario had some 2.6 million people, Quebec 2.0 million, the four provinces of Western Canada 1.7 million, and the three provinces of the day in Atlantic Canada a little more than 0.9 million.) Yet each region had equal representation in the Senate.

Especially with the admission of Newfoundland to the confederation (at last) in 1949, this arrangement benefited Atlantic Canada more than any other region. In 1867 Atlantic Canada included only Nova Scotia and New Brunswick — each of which had 12 Senate seats. When Prince Edward Island joined the confederation in 1873, it was assigned four Senate seats and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were each reduced to 10 seats, preserving the 24 seats for the Atlantic Canada region at large. But when Newfoundland finally joined in 1949, the other three Atlantic provinces kept the Senate seats they already had, and Newfoundland (and Labrador) was given an additional six seats.

The resulting arrangement for the country at large today is:

ATLANTIC CANADA —  30 seats (NB and NS 10 each, Nfld and Lab 6 seats, PEI 4 seats)
QUEBEC —  24 seats
ONTARIO —  24 seats
WESTERN CANADA — 24 seats (Alta, BC, Man, and Sask 6 seats each)
TERRITORIES – 3 seats (Nunavut, NWT, and Yukon 1 seat each)
TOTAL — 105 seats.

(The parallel population numbers using Statistics Canada estimates for the first quarter of 2013, btw, are : Ontario 13.6 million people, Western Canada 10.9 million, Quebec 8.1 million, Atlantic Canada 2.4 million, Territories 0.114 million.)

Because it benefits from the Senate’s current regional representation arrangements more than any other part of the country, Atlantic Canada is often seen as the region most resistant to significant Senate reform. Two items from my collection of 32 Senate reform articles in Canada today suggest that conclusions of this sort can be at least somewhat misleading.

Stephen Harper and rare elected appointee Senator Bert Brown from Alberta acknowledge a standing ovation at the start of a Conservative caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, October 17, 2007.

(1) “EDITORIAL: Senate reform sorely needed” from the May 23 Hants Journal (in the Halifax exurbs, more or less) was mostly concerned about how “Mike Duffy should be ashamed.” over his role in the “Senate expense scandal,” which is “enough to make anyone cringe … Political analysts, commentators and journalists are having a field day. Social media is fired up. It’s time to capitalize on this new wave of public discontent. Senate reform is needed … Currently, new Senate members are appointed by whoever is in power. This time, it’s the Conservatives, and they’ve stacked the Senate with party faithful. Duffy falls into that category. He was appointed in 2008 by Prime Minister Stephen Harper … This scandal clearly demonstrates it’s time for a change. In fact, it’s long overdue.” Just what the change might involve was not discussed. But Nova Scotia’s current NDP premier, Darrell Dexter, is on record as a supporter of abolition.

(2) “Alward’s Senate reform plans on hold,” from the CBC News/New Brunswick website on May 30, shows that at least some Atlantic Canadian Conservatives have been interested in Stephen Harper’s Senate reform plots. David Alward’s Conservative government had proposed that“New Brunswickers vote on which names should be submitted to Ottawa for appointment to the Senate by the prime minister” — in the spirit of the longstanding Harper Senate reform proposals. But now the “Alward government has put on hold its plan for Senate elections as it waits to see a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada on reforming the institution …The Progressive Conservatives had tabled a reform bill last year, but it died with that last session … The federal government has since asked the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on whether changing the Senate requires changing the constitution … Deputy Premier Paul Robichaud said there is no point passing a bill before Canada’s top court rules on the question.”

5. “That won’t stop the NDP from consistently calling for abolition, but the Supreme Court’s opinion is what everyone awaits. So we wait.”

The current Senate expense scandal may be increasing popular enthusiasm for just abolishing the Senate of Canada altogether. On May 30, 2013 Éric Grenier, who “writes about politics and polls at ThreeHundredEight.com,” reported : “Support for abolishing the Senate is creeping upwards, and the recent scandals seem unlikely to reverse the trend.”

Abolishing the unreformed Senate of Canada may seem like the simplest reform option, in theory. And I agree myself with a proposition increasingly advanced by frustrated Senate reformers : If the institution cannot be reformed, for whatever complicated low-ground political reasons, then it should just be abolished. The last thing that ought to be done is just leave the unreformed Senate as it is now. (As attractive as that option often still seems to be to many unreformed senators — apparently including some whom Prime Minister Harper has recently appointed, on the understanding that they would support his reform proposals.)

At the same time, it may be that abolishing the Senate will prove almost impossible in practice.  Some critical provinces may feel they have too much to lose if the institution disappears.

According to one part of the amending formula in the Constitution Act, 1982 (sections 38, 42) abolishing the Senate will also require the approval of a majority of members of the Senate itself. And anyone who has paid close attention to the visceral realities cast into bold relief by the expense scandal of the past few weeks may be pardoned for suspecting that it may not be at all easy — even in Stephen Harper’s new Conservative majority Senate of Canada — to put together  a majority of senators willing to vote for their own abolition.

According to another part of the Constitution Act, 1982: “An amendment to the Constitution of Canada … may be made without a resolution of the Senate …  if, within one hundred and eighty days after the adoption by the House of Commons of a resolution … the Senate has not adopted such a resolution and if, at any time after the expiration of that period, the House of Commons again adopts the resolution” (section 47).  Yet there may be some further complications here (which the Supreme Court will hopefully sort out). Abolishing the Senate of Canada may only be possible, or at least most likely, under a New Democratic Party government in Ottawa.  The NDP has long supported abolition. And an NDP federal government (something that has never happened yet, but is arguably closer than ever before) may best be able to mobilize the kind of support — federally and provincially — that abolition would require.

Meanwhile, as Nick Taylor-Vaisey explained on the Maclean’s website, on May 23, 2013 : “In the immediate future, as far as Senate abolition is concerned, nothing happens. That won’t stop the NDP from consistently calling for abolition, but the Supreme Court’s opinion is what everyone awaits. So we wait.”  (And as best as I can make out, the Supreme Court may deliver its Senate reform wisdom by the end of this year, or even sooner. Or it may take a while longer …)

6. My personal Senate reform fantasy — one last time (but how much longer can Canada last, really, if it can’t even reform a Senate that desperately needs reform?)

Alberta has held “Senate Nominee Elections” of the sort the Harper government’s reform plans have contemplated spreading to all provinces, in 1989, 1998, 2004, and 2012. Five “senators in waiting” elected in this way have now been appointed to the Senate — one by Brian Mulroney and four by Stephen Harper. Doug Black is one of them. Bert Brown, Mr. Harper’s first appointment of this sort, is now retired. Three of Alberta’s current six senators have been elected in Senate Nominee Elections.

My 1990 book on Senate reform in Canada was the kind of project in which you learn more after the book is published than you did while you were writing the thing. And for some time now, my views have been somewhat different from what they were when I wrote the book.

Though I have yet to meet someone who really cares, I have also supported Stephen Harper’s so-called “step by step” Senate reform proposals, as at least a useful step forward. They have two main elements — setting senatorial term limits at nine years, and providing for provincial Senate “elections,” to advise the federal prime minister on who to appoint to the Senate for the province in question. The beauty of these proposals was that they were supposed to be possible without a constitutional amendment requiring provincial approval. But the current Supreme Court reference has now tarnished this beauty. (I am among those who believe that if Mr. Harper were altogether serious about Senate reform, he would have finally passed his term limit and Senate election legislation after he won a majority government in the 2011 election — and then let whatever provinces were against what he had done ask the Supreme Court for further advice. That he did not do this may mean he has morphed into a shrewd but over-cautious traditional Canadian politician. Or it may mean he is just not the person who will finally lead Canada into the promised land of an unreformed Senate that is actually reformed at last.)

As far as I’m concerned, the Harper government’s “step by step” Senate reform proposals have been criticized on two main grounds. The first is that they have sidestepped the really crucial question of just how the seats in a reformed Senate are finally going to be allocated by province. The second is that they do not suggest a mechanism for dealing with potential conflicts between the elected Canadian House of Commons and a new elected Canadian Senate.

To confront the second critique of the Harper proposals first, Canada’s fellow parliamentary democracy of Australia already has a procedure for dealing with intermittent conflict between its “upper”Senate and its”lower” House of Representatives. And  Canada may want to take some useful instruction from that source. Meanwhile, some years ago I settled on a scheme of provincial/territorial  representation in the Senate of Canada that meets the local objections to equal provincial representation, just for my own peace of mind. Of course no one has paid much attention to this particular plot. And in my advancing age I am much less persuaded about the power of rational thought than I used to be . In any case here is what I still vainly think the ultimate scheme of provincial representation should be myself :

NB — 3 seats
NFLD & LAB — 3 seats
NS — 3 seats
PEI — 3 seats
ATLANTIC CANADA — 12 seats

QUEBEC — 12 seats
ONTARIO — 6 seats
CENTRAL CANADA — 18 seats

MANITOBA — 3 seats
SASKATCHEWAN — 3 seats
ALBERTA — 6 seats
BRITISH COLUMBIA — 6 seats
WESTERN CANADA — 18 seats

TERRITORIES — 6 seats

TOTAL — 54 seats

Of course I do not know what will ultimately happen in the real world of politics. And it is not very likely that my ultimate “Québécois-nation-within-a-united-Canada/more-nearly-provincially-equal” scheme of provincial representation in a reformed Senate of Canada will finally be realized — any more than a Triple E Senate, or a Senate chosen by the Order of Canada, etc, etc. The current Senate expense scandal also raises in my as no doubt many other minds the prospect that doing anything sensible with the Senate of Canada is just a vain political fantasy. Canada is a country whose fundamental problems are never resolved, and all that.

As I get older, however, I do wonder more and more whether the old kind of Canada whose fundamental problems are never resolved will actually be able to make it through an increasingly challenging 21st century.  I also  unhappily realize that I am not going to live all that much longer myself, and why should I bother at this stage of my life with what may actually be just vain political fantasies? At the same time, I think Canada has done very well by me (and many other people), and I continue to hope it has a very bright future. We ought to be able to solve our now very long-lived Senate reform problem. And I certainly hope we will — before I and others like me go off to some kind of new spiritual existence on the planet Mars, or wherever else it is that we increasingly older people finally go.

Meanwhile, as a still confirmed Canadian Senate reformer I find I can actually take at least some sustenance from my 32 recent press articles on Senate reform in Canada. To take just a few final examples :

* As a longtime Ontario resident, I am pleased that Ontario now has a premier who is seriously open to Senate reform, and has advanced what probably is the wisest strategy for this moment in time: “there is always room for reform …The discussion of what those reforms should be is an important one, and at the provincial level I would be interested in engaging with my colleagues across the country … It’s not something that I have taken a firm or detailed stand on, but it’s certainly something that I’m willing to engage on.” Cheers for Ms Wynne.

According to Maclean’s magazine : “The Senate is Canada’s institution for sober second thought, but some senators have been distracted by other matters lately—namely Sen. Rod Zimmer, 69, and his 23-year-old wife, Maygan Sensenberger ... Sensenberger and Sen. Zimmer became international news in August 2012—their one-year wedding anniversary—when Sensenberger caused a disturbance on a flight from Ottawa to Saskatoon and received a 12-month suspended sentence with one-year probation.” Would Senate reform change this kind of thing? Probably not, but ... Photograph by Blair Gable.

* I disagree with Jesse Kline about “the long-sought Triple-E model.” But other things he has said recently still impress me, and bolster my hope for the future; eg: “a nation that successfully patriated our Constitution from the British, signed a historic free trade agreement with our neighbours and balanced the budget after years of overspending, should not be afraid of big challenges … Dismissing constitutional reform as too hard is no longer an excuse for inaction. Real Senate reform … would turn an anachronism into an asset for Canada.”

* I don’t quite agree with everything in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix’s May 22, 2013 Senate reform editorial either. But I like other parts so much that I want to conclude by quoting from this piece again: “during his time as prime minister Mr. Harper has also demonstrated why Canada needs an effective and democratic check on executive power … In a report issued this month by the Washington-based Transatlantic Academy, entitled Democracy in Trouble, political scientists David Cameron and Robert Vipond compare how two of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies —  Canada and the United States —  have stumbled into difficulty. In the case of America it’s because of partisan-orchestrated stagnation, while in Canada it is the effect on the electorate of the ‘friendly dictatorship’ with all the power emanating from the PMO …But Canadians are constantly told they don’t have the stomach for the Constitutional reform necessary to right the ship. In fact, it’s the politicians who don’t have the stomach for it.”

As alluded to at the start, we the ordinary people of Canada have to assume some responsibility for our country’s present plight as well. Over the past few weeks of Senate reform debate in the true north etc, I have been reminded of what Pogo used to say in a now forgotten era: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” My commitment here is to at least try to think hard about what this means, and then report back to this space about what I have thought, when the Supreme Court of Canada finally tells us what it thinks about Mr. Harper’s questions on Senate reform. And if this doesn’t work, I will probably check myself in for rehab, someplace on Vancouver Island.

Randall White, a former Ontario public servant who now works as an independent public policy consultant, is the author of a number of books on Canadian history and politics, including Voice of Region : The Long Journey to Senate Reform in Canada.

THE 32 ARTICLES:

1. Move to elected senate, says former Liberal leader

2. Senate of Canada: Reform or Abolish?

3. Alward’s Senate reform plans on hold

4. Canadians want to reform or abolish Senate: polls … Éric Grenier

5. PoV: Reform, not abolition, the answer for Senate

6. Stephen Harper’s team keeping Senate minefield behind a smokescreen — Hébert

7. Ontario’s Wynne wants to see Senate reformed

8. Harper goes on attack as Duffy questions mount

9. Senate committee votes to send Mike Duffy matter to the RCMP

10. Jesse Kline: Canada needs Triple-E Senate reform

11. Don’t abolish Senate, reform it for provinces

12. EZRA LEVANT : More J.T. anti-West bigotry

13. LORNE GUNTER : Justin Trudeau again reveals anti-West feelings

14. Stephen Harper turns aside demands for public hearings on Duffy affair

15. Harper divulges little over Mike Duffy affair during Question Period

16. Pessimism about Canada’s future puts bite in Senate scandal: Gwyn

17. Is Trudeau showing favouritism for Quebec?

18. Trudeau defends Senate comments

19. Tories turn the tables on Trudeau over Senate reform in raucous question period

20. House of Lords offers a Plan B for Senate reform

21. National News: Justin Trudeau’s Liberals Oppose Senate Reform, Champion the Status Quo

22.The Senate Scandal Will Be Harper’s Downfall

23. Alberta to continue pushing for elected Senate, Redford says

24. The Soapbox: Senate scandal showcases need for reforms

25. EDITORIAL: Senate reform sorely needed

26. Abolish the Senate? Forget it: Change the Senate? Maybe

27. A Viable Path to Senate Reform

28. Major Upper Chamber reform needed, say Manitoba Senators

29. How to abolish the Senate of Canada

30. Failed reform carries a cost

31. Gregory Sorbara’s formula for an independent, non-partisan Senate

32 Canada PM calls for Senate reform amid expenses scandal

Following our earlier report in “Streetcar Named Rob Ford lives on .. remember when his worship said he “no longer uses marijuana” in 2010 ????,” here are a few  additional links that more or less summarize the current state of the Fordist art :

* “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies crack cocaine allegations.”  This CBC News report includes a video of Ford’s brief remarks before the press at City Hall this afternoon.

* “Rob Ford video scandal: The mayor responds.” This Toronto Star post gives the full written text of the Mayor’s remarks. As best we can tell, the key part comes up front : “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine. As for a video, I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist.”

So, you might ask, just what does all this mean, at last? We certainly don’t know, but we think the following two additional links are intriguing :

* “Rob Ford crack scandal: Gawker’s ‘Crackstarter’ campaign hits snag as it nears $200,000 goal, editor says … John Cook, editor of US website Gawker, hasn’t been able to speak with his source since Sunday …” Various twitterings this afternoon have observed how quaint it seems that Mayor Ford has finally said “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist,” just after reports that the source of the alleged video seems to have disappeared.  And this may or may not be especially intriguing in light of an article this past Tuesday by the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno:

* “To end Rob Ford crack scandal uncertainty, Star must buy the video: DiManno …  If a Ford ally buys the tape, the purported evidence of the mayor smoking crack will be lost forever.” Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Finally, we quickly add two final links that shed some light on our own carefully balanced opinions (well, sort-of balanced, of course) :

* “Rob Ford’s video scandal: ‘I do not use crack cocaine,’ mayor says … Mayor Rob Ford ends eight days of silence to address the cocaine video scandal.” This Toronto Star article includes an online poll, on the question : “Does Mayor Rob Ford’s statement put the issue behind him?” As of 5:45 PM ET this Friday afternoon, the rounded  results are 14% Yes and 86% No. This is of course a Toronto Star poll, and while this is Canada’s most widely read newspaper, Mayor Ford believes it has a vendetta against him.

* “Rob Ford and civic embarrassment: Salutin … Leaders don’t reflect on the citizens who voted them in or suffer under them.” Today’s Toronto Star also includes a piece by columnist Rick Salutin. And this includes a passage with which we particularly agree (and that, as it were, parallels one of our own conclusions in our earlier “Streetcar Named Rob Ford lives on” post). As Mr. Salutin nicely explains : “Here I come to urban guru and U of T prof Richard Florida, who I do find embarrassing in this context, but also instructive. He wrote this week in the Globe and Mail: ‘It is time to convene a blue-ribbon commission on Toronto’s future . . . the top leaders of all of our key institutions must step up — our banks and corporations, schools and universities, labour unions, the city, the province, and more’  …  Does he really not get it — that this is exactly the mentality that led to the Ford mayoralty, out of widespread popular disgust for an unelected elect who think they have the right to gather in blue ribbon bodies and decide on behalf of everyone else?” (Or, put another way, it may not quite be the time to write the altogether final epitaph for Mayor Rob Ford just yet — even if he is still not telling we the people of this increasingly interesting as well as laughed-at city the plain truth!)

UPDATE MAY 25: Not long after Rob Ford’s press conference yesterday Nicholas Köhler on the Maclean’s site wrote : “provided news organizations don’t over the coming days bring forward new evidence, the Fords may still beat all this.”  He couldn’t have known that today’s Globe and Mail would publish a long article examining “the Toronto Ford family’s decades-old connection to illicit drugs.”  This includes a claim that “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s brother Doug sold hashish for several years in the 1980s, in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke.”  Doug Ford has this afternoon denied the truth of (or at least hard evidence for?) the Globe‘s claims. See, eg: “Rob Ford video scandal: Ford family faces fresh drug-related allegations in published report … Doug Ford said there is no truth to new allegations the Ford family has a history with drugs and he was involved in selling hashish.” And some of us came into the office on a Saturday to hear Doug Ford’s interview on cp24. Can “the Fords … still beat all this”? Our current guess would be that the chances are now somewhat less than they were last night. But … stay tuned.

In case you have forgotten, the North West Mounted Police were established by the Canadian federal government on May 23, 1873, to maintain law and order in the old Northwest Territories, which then included what are now northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Yukon.  According to one apparently half-true legend: “In 1873, a gang of American wolf hunters murdered 23 Assiniboine in the Cypress Hills [in present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta] after an argument about stolen horses. In response, Canada established the North West Mounted Police.”

The original Canadian Mounties went on to establish their legendary prowess in always getting their man (or at least sometimes woman too, it would seem) in what is now Western (and northern) Canada. By the late 19th century the legend was reaching beyond Canada’s borders. As explained on the relevant Wikipedia site:  “During the Second Boer War [1899–1902], members of the North-West Mounted Police were given leaves of absence to fight with the 2nd Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR) and Lord Strathcona’s Horse. The force raised the Canadian Mounted Rifles, mostly from NWMP members, for service in South Africa. For the CMR’s distinguished service there, King Edward VII honoured the NWMP.” And so the Mounties’ official name became Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) on June 24, 1904.

North West Mounted Police at Dawson in the Yukon, 1898. Stuart Taylor Wood Collection / National Archives of Canada / C-042755.

From here, as they say, the rest is history. Or more exactly (and officially) : “In February 1920, the Mounted Police absorbed the Dominion Police, which had carried out federal policing in eastern Canada. Headquarters was moved from Regina to Ottawa and the Force became responsible for enforcement of federal laws from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In keeping with its new role, it was renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

* * * *

Twenty years after the original Mountie name had faded into the past,  it was revived by Hollywood, in a Cecil B. DeMille 1940 movie  North West Mounted Police, “starring Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll and Paulette Goddard …  the picture was filmed on location in the Canadian Rockies.” It “tells the story of a Texas Ranger who joins forces with the North West Mounted Police to put down a rebellion [Canada’s North West or Second Riel Rebellion of 1885, in fact, in the suppression of which the real-world NWMP actually did play some part]. The supporting cast features Preston Foster, Robert Preston, George Bancroft, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Robert Ryan.”

More recently, of course, the Mounties have become a more controversial organization in Canada, although official steps have been taken to try to address the various controversies involved. (The counterweights editors looked into this story some four years ago now, in “Are the Mounties getting too many men who don’t need to be got?”)

North West Mounted Police Band at Fort MacLeod in what is now Alberta. 1890.

I for one am nonetheless happy to join Google Canada in commemorating the first-generation Canadian prairie romance of the original North West Mounted Police, from 1873 to 1904. And, having just this morning received an email which began: “We interrupt all the excitement of watching Stephen Harper self-destruct” (assuming this is not just a little too much wishful thinking, of course), I have a proposal for any and/or all of the current opposition parties in the Canadian House of Commons of 2013. (And btw, let me just say in passing, kudos as well to the author of “Hugh Segal: An elected Senate is the only answer” in today’s National Post, which is not a newspaper I usually consult, or otherwise pay attention to.)

Officers of the "B" Division, July 1900.Photographer: Goetzman. Library and Archives Canada, PA-202188.

In the coming great race to succeed the current self-destructing prime minister and his new but still just far too old-fashioned Conservative Party of Canada (again, assuming that this actually is what has begun with the bizarre Canadian Senate scandal apparently haunting Ottawa right now), I promise that, in the still rather far away Canadian federal election of 2015, I will vote for any party which includes in its written platform a promise to restore the original 1873 name of the Canadian Mounties — as the first step in a real present-day thorough-going reform of this once cherished Canadian institution.

Paulette Goddard in North West Mounted Police movie, 1940.

Some will say, of course, that “North West Mounted Police” does not fit a police force whose mandate nowadays stretches from the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific oceans. I have two quick answers here. First, Canada itself, from coast to coast to coast, is a country in the North West of the global village, that we all live in today, like it or not. Second, if you absolutely cannot get your head around this thought, I will settle for just dropping the prefix “Royal” from the present name of the organization (to give, that is, the at least much more free and democratic name of Canadian Mounted Police — paid for, after all, by the hard-earned tax dollars of the Canadian people, and not by any member of the offshore royal family, in the United Kingdom across the seas).

Finally I should note that I live in the rest of Canada outside Quebec, and the Bloc Quebecois does not usually run candidates in the riding where my house is located. Yet if the Bloc both does run a candidate in my riding in 2015, and puts a proposal as outlined above in its written platform (and, I should add I guess, if no other opposition party does the same), I will even vote for such a new pan-Canadian Bloc Quebecois. (Even if it includes in its platform another proposal — to make the ghost of M. Louis Riel an honourary colonel of the North West [and/or Canadian] Mounted Police at last.)

Toronto 2010 mayoral candidate Rob Ford is shown in this mugshot taken shortly after his arrest in Florida in February 1999. Miami-Dade Police Department.

We have begun to renovate the bar at the top of the counterweights home page over the past few days. Much remains to be done. Among the starters we have retired our ”Streetcar Named Rob Ford” page. We were getting too jaded about the circus act the current mayor of Toronto, Canada has been offering over the past two and a half years and counting.

Now, as if to show us how wrong we were, a quite amazing new story about his worship has suddenly surfaced. It begs for attention. And one thing you have to give Mayor Ford is that, whatever else, he is getting attention for Toronto around the world. (Well, not exactly the whole world : but he did, eg, rate a mention by Bill Maher in Southern California last night.)

We certainly don’t have anything to add to the vast amount of digital and real-world ink that has already been almost instantly spilled over this latest Fordist adventure. But in our own desire to inform ourselves about the story, we have collected a dozen provocative links that may be of some slight interest to those who have not had time to undertake any similar digging.

Alleged photo of Mayor Ford with cocaine salesmen, 2013?

Our collection is in two parts. Part one includes eight links about the current story, which is nicely summarized in the headline and lead from one of these links — on the website HIPHOPWIRED : “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Allegedly Seen Smoking Crack On Camera … Don’t tell Drake, but somebody is trying to make Toronto look bad. A video has surfaced, allegedly showing Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack …  The recording is being shopped around by drug dealers.”)

Part two includes four links about what may or may not finally prove to be a somewhat similar incident from the summer of 2010 — when Rob Ford was just campaigning for the job of Mayor of Toronto (a job he finally won, impressively enough, in the municipal election of October 25, 2010). This earlier story is summarized in the front end of one of these links, on the CBC News website: “Rob Ford to Miami cop: ‘Take me to jail’ …  Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford told a Miami police officer to ‘go ahead take me to jail’ just before he was arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession, according to a police document.”

The point in looking back to the summer of 2010 like this is that in the here and now of spring 2013, Mayor Ford has said that the allegations about him “Smoking Crack On Camera” are “ridiculous” and “absolutely not true.” He may just be telling the plain truth here. It is certainly easy to do almost anything with photoshop nowadays, and in any case how do you know from just watching a video that someone is actually smoking crack, etc, etc. [UPDATE MAY 24: Feedback from several sources has made clear that our comment on photoshop was misleading  for the kind of video involved here. See, eg:  "Digitizing a fake Rob Ford in a video is a technical impossibility ...  But advances in technology have made us doubt visual evidence."  At the same time, there have been recent reports about problems with the editing of videos to "create a misleading impression."  See, eg, the Wikipedia article on "ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy," and the more recent Slate article : "How to Frame an Abortionist (VIDEO) ... The deceptive editing of pro-life videos to make abortion clinics look bad."]

In our own jaded view, all this would be more convincing, if citizens of Toronto did not already have memories about the mayoral campaign in the summer of 2010. Back then, when the story about how Rob Ford “was arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession” first surfaced, he at first claimed that this was simply not true either.

Mayor Ford — a happy guy, sometimes.

A report of the day from the aggressively conservative tabloid, the Toronto Sun, sticks in our collective minds here: “Ford said he’s never had any trouble crossing the border since the incident and no longer uses marijuana … ‘I don’t use drugs. I’m not in that scene,’ he said …  He put the incident so far behind him, he said he was caught off guard and adamantly denied having been charged when first approached by the Sun … ‘No to answer your question,’ Ford said … ‘I’m dead serious. When I say no, I mean never. No question, Now I’m getting offended. No means no’ … But after Ford was provided with details from a Florida state criminal history record obtained by the Sun, he admitted the incident …  ‘I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it right now,’ he said.”  (Mmmmmm … and if you want to inquire further into our complete dozen-link collection, click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.)

Part One : the Allegedly Seen Smoking Crack On Camera story today

The mayor looking somewhat something or other at another 2013 Toronto event!

* For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine.

* Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford allegedly smoking crack is up for sale: Gawker.

* Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Allegedly Seen Smoking Crack On Camera … Don’t tell Drake, but somebody is trying to make Toronto look bad. A video has surfaced, allegedly showing Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack …  The recording is being shopped around by drug dealers.

* GLOBE EDITORIAL: FIRST TAKE …  Alleged video of Rob Ford raises one very troubling question.

* Rob Ford crack scandal: Toronto mayor calls it ‘ridiculous’ but doesn’t issue denial … [This Toronto Star article includes links to seven other related items on the Star website.]

* Besieged Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies ‘ridiculous’ crack pipe reports as campaign to buy alleged video grows.

* Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies drug video allegations as world watches …  The latest controversy surrounding Toronto’s mayor has also captured a great deal of attention internationally, with CNN, Fox News and the BBC all reporting on the allegations … Politico, a US politics blog, had taken to linking Ford to Marion Barry — the former Washington mayor who arrested by FBI after being recorded smoking crack.

* How the Gawker and Toronto Star allegations against Mayor Rob Ford stack up.

Part Two: the arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession back in the summer of 2010

Mayor Ford with the local Toronto high school football team he coaches, November 15, 2012.

* Rob Ford to Miami cop: ‘Take me to jail’ … Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford told a Miami police officer to “go ahead take me to jail” just before he was arrested in Florida 11 years ago on charges of drunk driving and marijuana possession, according to a police document …  An arrest affidavit written by a Miami-Dade police officer on Feb. 15, 1999, states that Ford’s car was pulled over at 1:30 a.m. because its lights were off …  When the officer asked Ford for his licence and registration, Ford got out of the car, “threw his hands up in the air and said ‘go ahead take me to jail,’” the affidavit said …  Ford also took out all of his money and threw it onto the ground, the officer wrote …  The officer noted that he could “smell a strong odour of an alcoholic beverage on his breath. His eyes were bloodshot” … Ford also appeared to be “acting nervous,” and after searching him, the officer found a “marijuana joint” in his right rear pants pocket.

* Rob Ford bracing for fallout over US drug and alcohol charges revealed.

* Ford dodges pot bust in Florida … Ford said he’s never had any trouble crossing the border since the incident and no longer uses marijuana … “I don’t use drugs. I’m not in that scene,” he said …  He put the incident so far behind him, he said he was caught off guard and adamantly denied having been charged when first approached by the Sun … “No to answer your question,” Ford said … “I’m dead serious. When I say no, I mean never. No question, Now I’m getting offended. No means no.” … But after Ford was provided with details from a Florida state criminal history record obtained by the Sun, he admitted the incident …  “I completely forgot about it until you mentioned it right now,” he said.

* Ford’s drunk driving conviction could steer his campaign into the ditch …  KELLY GRANT – CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF …The Globe and Mail …

L’Envoi

MAYOR ROB FORD AT 2011 LEVEE. (Note: This is NOT the same woman who claimed he groped her when they posed for a photo.)

We’d just like to make two final points about our own opinions :

* We ourselves actually believe in the legalization of marijuana at least. And the news that Rob Ford got caught with a joint in his back pocket in Florida just humanizes him for people like us. We’d note as well some further intelligence from the 2010 Toronto Sun report noted in the third part two link above : “One toke over the line can be a career-ender if the line in question is the US border …  But not for mayoral candidate Rob Ford, who successfully beat a marijuana possession charge in Florida in 1999, even though he admits he was guilty as charged … ‘They pulled me over,’ Ford said. ‘I was with my wife. They found one joint in my back pocket’ … It was Valentine’s Day 1999 and Ford and his wife-to-be were in the Miami area for a winter break …  He was arrested, booked and fingerprinted, then released on his own recognizance … But Ford said he never had to appear in court —  he hired a lawyer and the charge was eventually dropped, for reasons Ford can’t remember.”  What Rob Ford is really guilty of here, in our view, is hypocrisy. He does not support the legalization of marijuana. He pretends he is in the altogether different conservative camp, that just wants to throw anyone who comes anywhere near any kind of (non-prescription) drugs in jail.

* We’d also recognize that the Gawker website characterization of Rob Ford as “Toronto’s conservative mayor …  a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements and randomly slapping refrigerator magnets on cars” is … well, a bit naive may be the best way of putting it. Rob Ford, in our view is not “racist” (and in 2010, eg, he received a  lot of votes from various quite non-white people who now reside in the old Toronto suburbs — and especially in Scarborough). Similarly, the fourth part two link above suggested that “Ford’s drunk driving conviction could steer his campaign into the ditch.” But it did not do anything of the sort. Even now, the Yahoo Canada site is running an online poll on”What do you think of the Rob Ford drug allegations?” There are two possible answers : “I think they’re true” ; and “I don’t believe them.” When we first checked in, the tide was running at about 50% for each side. At the moment (c. 2:15 AM ET, May 18) the popular verdict is 53% “they’re true” and 47% “don’t believe them.” On our counterweights site, we’re all for streetcars, and Mayor Ford is all against them, and we are consequently all against him (and his in some ways even worse brother, Doug). But we also think the forces of progress are making a great mistake when they just try to dismiss politicians like Rob Ford as nothing more than “a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements.” Rob Ford appeals to many among the democratic masses — white, yellow, beige, brown, or black —  because the left alternative too often actually is too “elitist.” And even if his alleged crack smoking does finally prove a true enough story, it is not at all clear that this will ruin the political career of Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford — a man who is perhaps not quite as bulky as Chris Christie in New Jersey, but is certainly competitive nonetheless.

BC Liberal leader Christy Clark casts her ballot during advanced voting in Burnaby. Wednesday, May 8, 2013. Photograph by Jonathan Hayward, THE CANADIAN PRESS.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2013. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON.  So …  here back east (well at least on the north shore of the most easterly of the North American Great Lakes, in anglophone Central Canada), we have only recently passed from May 14 to May 15.

But already it seems that the current Western Canada Provincial Politics Syndrome remains intact.  “Are we seeing a Wildrose Party-type collapse in the BC election?,” the hard-working Andy Radia asked a week and a half ago. As of 12:30 AM ET on May 15, at least the CTV election desk in Vancouver (where it is still only 9:30 PM PT on May 14) is saying YES!

Both CTV and CBC at this point are reporting that Christy Clark’s Liberals are elected or leading in 50 seats, with Adrian Dix’s New Democrats elected or leading in 33 seats, and 1 Green Party and 1 Independent seat. (Oh, wait a sec, as a sign of the continuing volatility in these numbers, one of our counterweights BC election focus junkies has just come into the computer room from the main office reception area, saying that both networks are now reporting Liberals 49, NDP 34, Green 1, Independent 1.)

The count is still far from complete. And these results are (as with the Wildrose Party collapse in Alberta, just a little over a year ago) so different from the last batch of polling and pundit collective wisdom, just before the election, that more than a few observers of various persuasions continue to urge it is still too early for altogether definitive judgments. But even the current CBC website report is saying “Liberals take strong lead in BC election … Clark on verge of historic come-from-behind victory.”

(Oh and btw, as a quick and final update before we all go to bed back east, as of 1:10 AM ET on the 15th both CTV and CBC are projecting a Liberal majority government, and the current seat results are LIB 53, NDP 30, GRN 1, IND 1.  Some ears here in Ontario also perked up when a Vancouver CTV commentator gave quite a lot of credit for Christy Clark’s big surprise — for which she herself no doubt deserves a lot of credit too — to the former Dalton McGuinty campaign wizard Don Guy. We’ll have more to say tomorrow about what we make of it all, from a cross-Canada slant. Meanwhile, for the very latest results CLICK HERE.)

(LATER THAT MORNING UPDATE: The final seat count is LIB 50, NDP 33, GRN 1, IND 1. Another  very final wrinkle was clear when we woke up. Pollsters and New Democrats did manage to exact some slight revenge on Ms Clark, when, in the midst of her astounding victory elsewhere, she lost her own seat in Vancouver-Point Grey. For more on this and on the broader significance of the big surprise, click on “Read the rest of this page” and/or scroll below.)

Final tally — Cross-province popular vote and number of seats in Legislative Assembly

LIB 44.4% pop vote, 50 seats

NDP 39.5% pop vote, 33 seats

GRN 8.0% pop vote, 1 seat

OTHERS 3.3% pop vote, 1 seat

CON 4.8% pop vote, 0 seats

Minor revenge of pollsters and New Democrats — Christy Clark’s lost seat

According to the Vancouver Sun : “David Eby snatches Vancouver-Point Grey riding from Premier Christy Clark …  By the time all 147 ballot boxes were counted around 1 a.m., Eby had beaten Clark by 785 votes — 10,162 to 9,377, according to Elections BC …

“Clark made no reference to her own battle in Point Grey during her victory speech, but Liberal advisers said on background that if Clark loses her seat to Eby they expect one of the Liberal MLA-elects will step aside to create a byelection for her …

“It’s relatively rare in Canada for a premier to lose their seat while their party gains government, but it has happened. In 1985 Robert Bourassa’s Liberal government won power but he lost to a Parti Quebecois candidate. He later was elected in a byelection in a Liberal stronghold. And in 1989 Don Getty lost his seat in Alberta. He was re-elected in a byelection in Stettler.”

What happened to the pollsters and pundits and commentators (again)!

Sign on Broadway in the Burnaby-Lougheed riding on May 1, 2013. And this is a riding the NDP actually did win on May 14. Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG.

Also according to the Vancouver Sun: “Pollsters data showed narrowing NDP lead, but failed to predict Liberal victory …  ‘I think people are going to re-examine the truthfulness of polls,’’ Premier Christy Clark said shortly after learning her party would form the next BC government …  ‘If there is any lesson in this, it’s that pollsters and pundits and commentators do not choose the government. It’s the people of British Columbia that choose the government’ …

“Innovative Research Group Inc.’s managing director Greg Lyle said that … after miscalculating recent election wins in Alberta and Quebec, polling firms must re-evaluate an online political polling system that may be inherently flawed … ‘This is actually the third one where the polls have been out (of whack),’ he said. Some of the last online polls before Tuesday’s election were almost 10 points off the actual level of support the parties received from voters …  That’s because these online poll respondents are more likely to be younger peope who enjoy sharing their points of view, which skews support in favour of the NDP Lyle said. He added that other flaws inherent in the online polls are that 20 per cent of voters can’t be found online and close to 10 per cent of BC’s population has a lower level of English that prevents them from participating … ‘I believe a big part of the problem was relying on online polls without using something like telephone weighting on something like party (affiliations),’ Lyle said. ‘The only way you can be sure you have a complete sample is with telephone’ …

“Polling also tended to dominate the discourse of media coverage during the campaign, he added …’Right off the bat it set expectations, there was basically an expectation that the Liberals would lose and the NDP would win and that other parties weren’t real players,’ Lyle said. ‘A lot of discussion about one or two point differences, and not really the depth of discussion there might have been, for example, about health care or education’ …

“Hamish Telford, a political scientist at the University of the Fraser Valley … said … pollsters in BC may have failed to properly account for undecided voters …  ‘The last polls I saw over the weekend said it was about 20 per cent of the electorate was undecided. It would appear that that undecided broke heavily for the Liberals,’ he said.”

What does it all mean for the rest of Canada?

Premier Christy Clark addresses BC Liberals at the Wall Centre in Vancouver after the result of 2013 provincial election. Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann , PNG.

The “What happened to the pollsters and pundits and commentators (again)!” issue probably ought to have just as many implications in the rest of Canada as it has in BC itself.  We especially liked Greg Lyle’s complaint that “Polling also tended to dominate the discourse of media coverage.” If the polling everywhere and on everything is as sketchy as recent provincial elections have seemed to suggest, it shouldn’t be dominating the discourse of media coverage at all as much as it often does (everywhere and on everything, again : and, no doubt, the discourse of we obscure bloggers is almost as guilty as that of the mainstream media).

Meanwhile, Chantal  Hébert’s column in the Toronto Star today nicely summarizes one perspective on the Canada-wide impact of yesterday’s BC provincial election. See : “NDP across Canada must be mourning stunning B.C. election loss: Hébert …   Thomas Mulcair and Ontario’s Andrea Horwath really needed British Columbians to lead by example by handing the reins of their province to the NDP.”

See also the perhaps somewhat related piece by University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz in today’s Globe and Mail: “Lessons from the BC election: The economy trumps all for voters.” One caveat we’d have here, however, is that if Professor Mintz means voters are starting to think about “the economy” the same way business leaders do, he (or more exactly the Globe editor who came up with the headline for his article) is being somewhat naive. As Christy Clark also made clear enough in her victory speech last night, the succinct four-word slogan of her winning campaign — “Strong Economy Secure Tomorrow” — means something considerably more subtle (and even vaguely social democratic) than “The economy trumps all for voters.”

BC NDP Leader Adrian Dix waves to supporters after conceding defeat in Vancouver. Photograph by Darryl Dyck , Canadian Press.

Finally, something that cropped up often enough in the TV commentary from Vancouver last night strikes us as well worth also bearing in mind when pondering cross-Canada implications. In the pre-election polls voters were comparing Christy Clark to the almighty in some perfect universe. When voting day came around they were just comparing her with the alternative. The deepest truth about May 14, 2013 in beautiful BC may just be that Ms Clark was a considerably more attractive and charismatic candidate than Adrian Dix. If the NDP leader had been the more attractive and charismatic of the two front runners, his or her party actually might have won — as all the polls and pundits were predicting.

Our earlier report, with the last batch of polling and pundit collective wisdom, just before the election, follows below:

TUESDAY, MAY 14, 2013. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. Here in the streetcar suburbs of Canada’s most hated city, on the old Iroquois shore of the most easterly of the North American Great Lakes, the biggest political excitement today is taking place more than 3000 kilometres northwest (as the crow flies), across the Rocky Mountains.

For those among our official counterweights BC election focus junkies who like to get to bed at a reasonable hour, the worst news is that the TV coverage here won’t even start until 11 PM local time (which will of course only be 8 PM PT, out there where it really counts). Coffee and assorted non-sugar sweets will be available to help keep everyone awake.

The good news, it would seem, is that the essential election result will probably be known before the wee hours of Wednesday, May 15 ET get all that much bigger. Everyone remembers the last Alberta election, when the combined pundit and pollster wisdom finally proved to be wrong. And the lovely Christy Clark, Liberal leader (and incumbent premier), is no doubt hoping that something similar will happen in beautiful BC on May 14, 2013.

For a time, deep into the campaign, it did almost seem as if Ms. Clark’s fantasies might actually come true. Her Liberals were suddenly gaining in the polls! But this trend has apparently now abated. According to The Tyee’s Election Hook : “ POLL: Latest Angus Reid stays steady, giving NDP nine-point lead … POLL: EKOS puts NDP lead at six points among likely voters.” And according to the Final Prediction of the Sauder School of Business Prediction Markets, Adrian Dix’s New Democrats will wind up with 52 seats in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, compared with a mere 30 seats for Ms Clark’s Liberals.

BC NDP leader Adrian Dix stops to try on a hat as he tours a historic site in Barkervile. Wednesday, May 1, 2013. Photograph by JONATHAN HAYWARD, THE CANADIAN PRESS.

As  Vaughn Palmer at the Vancouver Sun has put the current collective wisdom: “Hungry NDP likely to win …  but Christy Clark has earned a consolation prize … the odds continue to favour a change of government … But it now appears as if the voters will award Clark the consolation prize of electing a good-sized Liberal Opposition to hold the New Democrats to account.”

As of 11 PM ET, we BC election focus junkies here back east at counterweights HQ will be glued to the office TV sets, just to see how close to the ultimate truth the collective expert wisdom beforehand proves to be this time. And we will be reporting the final verdict of the people of Canada’s Pacific Coast (and Interior etc) in this space, as soon as it becomes clear. Stay tuned, etc, etc.

Father and son. Photo: John Mahoney.

Like many others, I am still trying to figure out new Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau, and what he may or may not mean for our Canadian future.

I note such recent headlines as : “Quebec undergoing a Liberal revival, new poll finds” ; “Justin Trudeau Liberals jump to seven-point lead over Tories, poll suggests” ; “Justin Trudeau’s ‘honeymoon with Canadians’ could last a long time” ; and “Conservative attack ads aren’t doing much damage to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, poll finds.”

Then I ponder : “Liberals raise $1M in first 3 weeks under Justin Trudeau”; and “Justin Trudeau’s cargo shorts overshadow Liberal Party success story.”

And then I delve into : “Justin Trudeau offers key glimpses of next Liberal platform” ; “Justin Trudeau praises Alberta premier for Keystone efforts” ; and “Justin Trudeau is making a mistake on Senate reform” (from this very website, this past February). And then (from the Hill Times, Tuesday, May 7, 2013) I contemplate these provocative sentences: “Justin Trudeau, boy king …  Don’t hold your breath. The real Justin Trudeau is the empty vessel interviewed by Peter Mansbridge, and that means the party is in the hands of the same hypocritical apparatchiks who wrote—and then casually betrayed—the rosy promises in Jean Chrétien’s 1993 Red Book. Welcome back to the future.”

I am certainly not on the kind of Ottawa grapevines that presumably nourish the Hill Times. But as I think about all these things, I am suddenly struck by the thought that there just may be a historical Canadian prime minister, who can tell us something interesting about the kind of Canadian politician Justin Trudeau is shaping up to be.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King helps figure skater Barbara Ann Scott celebrate her 1948 gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

The person I have in mind is certainly not Justin Trudeau’s famous  father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution Act, 1982, and all that). It is someone who most of us alive today cannot really claim to remember, in the flesh, as it were. This person still holds the record for longevity in office in Ottawa. He has been described by one author as The Incredible Canadian, and by another as “the representative Canadian, the typical Canadian, the essential Canadian, the ideal Canadian, the Canadian as he exists in the mind of God.” In case you haven’t already guessed, I am talking about William Lyon Mackenzie King, grandson of the leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie, and Prime Minister of Canada,  1921–1926, 1926–1930, 1935–1948.

Has Justin Trudeau ever read Frank Scott’s poem about Mackenzie King?

At first glance, of course, it could also easily enough be said that it is hard to think of a historical Canadian prime minister who is less like Justin Trudeau than Mackenzie King. Prime Minister King, eg, was a lifelong bachelor unusually close to his mother. Justin Trudeau has a striking wife and two children — an almost model young Canadian family.

Federal CCF Party delegation attending the conference of Commonwealth Labour Parties in London, England September 1944. From Left to right : Clarie Gillis, MP for Cape Breton South; David Lewis, National Secretary; M.J. Coldwell, National Leader, MP for Rosetown-Biggar ; Percy E. Wright, MP for Melfort, Saskatchewan; and Frank Scott, National Chairman.

Similarly, whatever else Justin Trudeau may lack, he has some kind of semi-magical charisma coming out his ears. Some say it is just his father’s name that accounts for his almost miraculous performance as Liberal leader in recent opinion polls. But people my age remember the old “Trudeaumania.” Trudeaumania II, with the provocative Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and Xavier Trudeau and Ella-Grace Trudeau in tow from the start, is quite different. And, whatever else again, no one would ever accuse William Lyon Mackenzie King of suffering from any kind of charisma. (According to more than a few reports from now vanishing generations: “No one ever admitted to actually voting for Mackenzie King.”)

Yet as I ponder everything that Justin Trudeau has done — or more importantly not done — as he has risen to the perhaps still high enough office of leader of the Liberal Party of Canada — I finally seem to hear echoes of the William Lyon Mackeznie King memorably captured in the poem by F.R.Scott, that Canadian political junkies of my own persuasion still remember:

How shall we speak of Canada,
Mackenzie King dead?
The Mother’s boy in the lonely room
With his dog, his medium and his ruins?

He blunted us.

We had no shape
Because he never took sides,
And no sides
Because he never allowed them to take shape.

He skilfully avoided what was wrong
Without saying what was right,
And never let his on the one hand
Know what his on the other hand was doing.

The height of his ambition
Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission,
To have “conscription if necessary
But not necessarily conscription,”
To let Parliament decide —
Later …

Or what about Bruce Hutchison from Victoria and Vancouver on The Incredible Canadian?

There is certainly some truth to all this. But it is also worth underlining, I think, that Frank Scott was a Montreal law professor, poet, and social democratic activist, who never really bought into the peculiar Canadian political magic of William Lyon Mackenzie King.

For a more positive take on the long-lived Prime Minister King, who so “skilfully avoided what was wrong / Without saying what was right,” you have to consult Bruce Hutchison’s 1952 classic, The Incredible Canadian — A candid portrait of Mackenzie King : his works, his times, and his nation — still probably the best book ever written on its subject.

As I think of all this, another related point strikes me. Although technically born in eastern Ontario, at an early age Bruce Hutchison moved with his family to Victoria, BC, where he was educated and grew up. And although he spent much of his earlier adulthood in Ottawa, from his 50s onward his career was based in Victoria and then Vancouver. And it is no accident that The Incredible Canadian was happily republished in 2011 — almost 20 years after Hutchison’s death — with a new introduction by Vaughn Palmer of the Vancouver Sun.

It may also be no accident that Justin Trudeau is often said to be  more his mother’s than his father’s son. And his mother was herself born and raised in Vancouver. Justin himself has “a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of British Columbia.” And : “After graduation, he worked as a social studies and French teacher at West Point Grey Academy and Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School in Vancouver.”

Justin Trudeau’s Papineau riding and the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion

Mother and son in Richmond BC, October 2012. Canadian Press.

There is, somewhat arguably at any rate, some parallel symbolism in the name of the Montreal riding Justin Trudeau now sits for in the Canadian House of Commons.

He has represented the so-called “ largely lower-middle-class” riding of Papineau north of downtown Montreal since the 2008 election. It “includes a contingent of voters who have historically supported the pro-independence Bloc Québécois.” But except for the brief two years between 2006 and 2008, the riding and its antecedents have consistently returned Liberals in federal elections since the 1950s. And it is named after Louis Joseph Papineau — leader of the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38.

Louis Joseph Papineau (for those who may have forgotten) was the Lower Canada (ie Quebec)  analogue/colleague of William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the Upper Canada (ie Ontario) Rebellion of 1837. And (once again) William Lyon Mackenzie was the grandfather of William Lyon Mackenzie King. So … you may of course say “So What.” But there is some at least minor nominal symbolism here — Papineau, Mackenzie, Mackenzie King, Trudeau, etc, etc.

Bruce Hutchison as a young Ottawa journalist from Canada’s Pacific Coast.

Various forms of cold water may no doubt be cast on this symbolism, especially if you push Mackenzie and Papineau into the 20th century universe of  the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion — the independent Canadian contingent in the Spanish Civil War of the later 1930s. Just to say the very least, the government of Justin Trudeau’s father would not accept a December 1980 proposal by then New Democratic Party MP Bob Rae, to grant official veteran status “to Canadians who fought on the side of Republican Spain” in the 1930s. Even so, if Papineau’s colleague Mackenize could ultimately beget Mackenzie King, why couldn’t Pierre Trudeau beget a son who will finally most resemble Mackenzie King (while representing the riding of Papineau in the Canadian House of Commons)?

Could the Canadian federal election of 2015 bear some kind of vague family resemblance to the election of 1921?

A very final historical analogy may or may not be slightly more (or less) convincing. William Lyon Mackenzie King first became Prime Minister of Canada as a result of the December 6, 1921 federal election. And there seems some slight prospect that the next Canadian federal election today in 2015 — in which Justin Trudeau may or may not first become Prime Minister of Canada — could bear a few vague family resemblances to the election of 1921.

An 18-year-old Justin Trudeau with fellow counsellor Marie Clement readying a sailboat at Camp Ahmek in Algonquin Park. Trudeau worked at the camp as a counsellor in 1992.

By 1921, eg, Canada had at least been governed by Conservative prime ministers for some 10 years, since the defeat of the Laurier Liberals in the “reciprocity” or Canada-US free trade election of 1911. (In 1917 the issue of conscription or compulsory military service in the First World War, 1914–1918, prompted some Liberals to briefly join Conservative Robert Borden’s new “Unionist” government.) By the time of the 2015 federal election Canada will have been governed by the Stephen Harper Conservatives for more than nine years.

The Canadian federal election of 1921 marked the first time the majority of Canadian women could vote. One of its unique results was that Agnes Macphail from Grey County, Ontario became the first woman elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Somewhat more importantly, in some respects, the Mackenzie King Liberals won 116 seats in a 235-seat House — just short of a bare majority. And King would form Canada’s first minority government.

Mackenzie King with Wilfrid Laurier.

Still more intriguingly again, a new rural-based Progressive Party with 24 seats in Ontario and 37 seats in the three Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, actually won more seats than the Conservatives. The Progressives were Canada’s first major third party. And Mackenzie King’s new minority government would lean on them (many of whom were, in King’s view, “just Liberals in a hurry”) for support in passing legislation.

At the same time again, the conscription issue during the First World War had isolated Quebec in federal politics. Mackenzie King, however, had remained loyal to Laurier’s anti-conscription policy and did not join the “Unionist” Liberals who supported Robert Borden in 1917. He was rewarded in 1921 with all 65 of Quebec’s 65 seats. And “the Liberal victory with Quebec support in 1921 meant that French Canada would have a more prominent place in Canadian politics.”

In the spring of 2013, at any rate, it seems plausible enough that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals could emerge with more seats than any other party in 2015 — but still fall short of a majority government. And his first government could wind up depending on Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats to pass legislation — just as Mackenzie King depended on the Progressives in the first half of the 1920s.

Justin Trudeau, his wife Sohpie Gregoire (L), son Xavier (C) and daughter Ella-Grace react after he was named the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in Ottawa April 14, 2013. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi.

Moreover, if it is true that Quebec is “undergoing a Liberal revival, new poll finds, as PQ slump drags on” (and even if this is only half true), the accession of Justin Trudeau  from the Montreal riding of Papineau to the office of Prime Minister of Canada would almost certainly mean “that French Canada would have a more prominent place in Canadian politics” — after more than nine years in the wilderness of Stephen Harper’s Canada.

Seven-month-old Justin Trudeau looks around impatiently in his mothers arms as Prime Minister and Mrs. Trudeau prepare to board the train Wednesday July 20, 1972 for a summer vacation on the west coast. (CP PHOTO/ Peter Bregg).

Of course, none of this may ever happen. And who alive today really remembers the Canadian federal election of 1921? (Anyone who voted then would be at least 113 years old now!) Yet it is at least somewhat provocative to read the historian Ramsay Cook’s account of the 47-year-old new Liberal Party of Canada leader on the eve of the 1921 election: “King appeared to be a man of the new age … His political experience was limited … But his political sense was keen, his ambition unbounded and his sense of mission powerful. He believed he had a divine calling to political leadership and he never forgot that he was the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, the rebel leader of 1837.” With not all that many names changed to protect the innocent, this does  seem to me a little like today’s Justin Trudeau (who will be 43 years old on the eve of the 2015 election — just three or so years younger than Mackenzie King in 1921!)

Ed Dorn portrait by Philip Behymer.

I was quite deeply into reading poetry (or verse, as some said), from about my late teens to my early 20s. Then the practicalities of life pushed me in other directions. I returned for a brief time in my late 30s. But fate again conspired to focus my thoughts on the more prosaic realities of business and politics — so much more admired on the street where I lived.

Now in my late 60s I know very little about more recent English language poets. Perhaps far too chauvinistically, I have tended to assume that poetry generally is not as important as it used to be — because I am not reading it the way I used to. When I read reviews of more recent poets’ work, as I still occasionally do, they often seem to confirm both my own and my assumed wider reading community’s growing lack of interest.

Yet, just a few weeks ago, reading Iain Sinclair’s review of Collected Poems by the late Edward Dorn (1929–1999), in the 11 April 2013 issue of the London Review of Books, has almost changed my mind. I have at any rate started thinking that I may catch up on a little of what I have missed, by delving into the poetry of “Ed Dorn” — who was born poor in small-town Illinois, somehow managed to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina,  taught for a time at Idaho State University in the far American West, moved to Essex University in the UK for five years, and finally landed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, after his magnum opus, Gunslinger, appeared in print.

The new 2012 edition of the Collected Poems, edited by Dorn’s second wife, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, with the help of a few other colleagues, weighs in at just under 1,000 pages.  Patrick McGuinness at the Guardian recommends that : “For the reader coming to Dorn for the first time, and faced with a book this long and this unusual, there are three good places to start, none of which is the beginning: the love poems of Nine Songs (1965), the first book of his psychedelic cowboy epic Gunslinger (1968), and the posthumously published Chemo Sabé (2001), in which the dying poet describes his cancer against the background of the Clinton impeachment and American foreign policy adventures.”

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Ed and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn at gallery opening, Pearl Street Mall, Boulder, Colorado.

For me in the year 2013, even wading through Iain Sinclair’s London Review of Books piece on the new almost 1,000 page volume of Dorn’s verse was not exactly easy. And it was a while before I started thinking “Eureka” — I have just found something fresh and new, to wake up and re-charge my aging brain.

I was urged along by rising numbers of intriguing strings of words, that promised further connections with things I identify with. The process began when Sinclair quoted from one of Ed Dorn’s poems: “She’s like Wittgenstein’s lunch, utterly invariable …”  I have almost no idea what this really  means. But I have the two key Wittgenstein books on my shelves, and at one point I actually tried to understand them. Maybe Ed Dorn understood Wittgenstein. (And, according to Luis Miguel Diaz : “After exhausting philosophical work Wittgenstein would often relax by watching a western movie, where he preferred to sit at the very front of the cinema.”)

Then Sinclair quoted Dorn’s fellow poet J.H. Prynne, who commented on Dorn’s fine ear “for spoken English and for the cadences of English speech, both grand and passionate, and ordinary off the street.” Then Sinclair alluded to Dorn’s “lifelong engagement with the American West,” and pointed out how Dorn was “a tough but delicately nuanced geographer, a discriminator of landscape.” Then Sinclair quoted from another poem of Dorn’s, which spoke of “California stiff-as-a-board sensibility.” (I have just enough experience of California, maybe, to imagine that this captures something about the place I have felt, but been unable to articulate.)

I was intrigued as well by Sinclair’s account of the poetry publishing milieu in which Edward Dorn’s writing first emerged. It was a US-UK universe, in which “poets published poets, signalling their affinities the best way, through production, while continuing to strengthen transatlantic traffic, through readings, academic exchanges, hospitality. Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to peers, known and unknown.” It was a small world in which “a certain kind of book, produced by poets, and frequently published by them, and delivered to a modest audience of fellow practitioners, could exist and thrive only in a culture of small independent shops … operating at the outer limits of the possible.” (And then I think, making excuses for myself : no wonder readers like me lost touch with this kind of poetry. But perhaps I have just been too lazy?)

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The Marlboro Man. Photograph by E. Mann, courtesy of Stephen Fredman.

Patrick McGuinness’s “Collected Poems by Edward Dorn – review,” in the 1 February 2013 issue of the Guardian is probably somewhat more accessible (for many readers at least) than Iain Sinclair’s more complex piece in the London Review of Books.

McGuinness rather nicely begins with : “‘You don’t disappear. You reappear, dead,’ wrote Ed Dorn, who died in 1999 and emphatically reappears here: nearly 1,000 pages of poetry ranging over almost 50 years of work. Born in Illinois in 1929, Dorn grew up in rural poverty in what he described, in his 1969 autobiographical novel By the Sound, as ‘the basement stratum of society’. He was associated with Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, writers who, like Dorn, took their early bearings from Charles Olson.”

McGuinness also offers an entertaining (and illuminating) summary or short introduction to Edward Dorn’s magnum opus : “Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes (‘they say he moved to Vegas / or bought Vegas and / moved it. / I can’t remember which’). Charles Olson had insisted, in the wake of Pound, that where Europe had history to make poetry with, America must take geography. Dorn’s contribution to the Great American Long Poem — Pound’s Cantos, WC Williams’s Paterson, Olson’s Maximus … — was Gunslinger, which appeared in five sections over six years. The American west was Dorn’s imaginative home, and his poem is an extraordinary feat of imagination, humour, allusion and lyric invention. It takes the standard fare of a good if surreal western (brothel madams, saloon brawls and gunfights) and melds it with high philosophical riffs.”

The last paragraph of Patrick McGuinness’s Guardian review of the Collected Poems alludes to the compelling political side of Edward Dorn’s work : “Dorn was a radical and a heretic, and his late poems are concerned with heretics and their persecution by states, governments and official religions. In a late reading in London, as he discussed Languedoc Variorum — a sequence which, with typical Dornian dual-time parallel vision, explores the suppression of the Cathars and Albigensians alongside today’s religious turmoil —  he was asked why he thought heretics were persecuted. His answer —  that heretics are the only ones who really care about religion — gives us an insight into his humour, the breadth of his sympathy, and the integrity of his poetry. This book is enormous, but it is navigable and enriching in all sorts of ways: what you get from Dorn is not available anywhere else in poetry.”

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There is, it often seems, a kind of at first glance strange symbiosis between what might be somewhat crudely called Old World Anglo Saxonism and the American West. (Think, eg, of the connections between Cyril Connolly’s UK literary legacy and the Universities of Texas and Tulsa, and of Larry McMurtry’s literary interest in the English aristocracy.) And it seems likely enough that the five years Ed Dorn spent “in England, where, invited by the poet and critic Donald Davie, he taught in the English department at the University of Essex,” were no accident.

The growing heretical reputation that apparently haunted Dorn’s later career may have some misleading or even mistaken connections here as well. Iain Sinclair devotes much of the later part of his London Review of Books piece to explaining all this. He tells us that : “The visceral excitement palpable in the performance of the writing of Gunslinger, supremely a work of its moment [late 60s/early 70s], faded. Dorn recognised early the bleakness of the 1980s.”

Sinclair goes on : “He chose not to publish for much of this period, but to assemble instead, from an amused and alarmed scrutiny of newsprint … whips and scorpions of electively intemperate satire. ‘My tongue has been/my genius and my downfall,’ Dorn said. The position was not popular and he took pride in that … ‘Mediocrity rises to the top in America like cream on milk, and it always has,’ he remarked. ‘If you’re a writer who lets these things bother you, you’re in the wrong business’ …  The coming gossip-stew of the internet didn’t help. ‘Email is MEmail,’ Dorn reckoned. Private remarks or classroom provocations went virally rancid as he was whistled and gibed at for his scorn towards all manifestations of political correctness. Multiculturalism in most of its discursive forms, Dorn said, was ‘the cult par excellence of late imperialism’, dogma customised to serve the agendas of strategic internationalism.”

Remarks of this sort did not go down well in late 20th century academia at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Edward Dorn’s professional career finally landed. In his lectures Dorn wound up “saying more and more outrageous things.” Some of his “poetry students,” keen to “do anything they think will help locate themselves and give themselves some minimal celebrity,” began to “spew back reports of things he said. And distorted, illiterate, stupid versions. And that began the process that led to the noose being put around his neck.” Dorn himself remarked : “It’s a lot easier to be a heretic than it used to be … There are more religions willing to kill you.”

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Ed Dorn at Taos Poetry Circus, 1997, two years before his death. (Photo by John Rudiak.)

Nowadays, getting close to a decade and a half after Edward Dorn’s death from cancer, some two weeks before Christmas 1999, the absurdities of late 20th century political correctness have themselves begun to fade. And the deeper truths of both his real passion for American diversity and his transatlantic anglospheric connections (which he continued to cultivate, almost to his death) are starting to become clearer. The heretic of the past grows closer to the present anti-hero.

And so we can now start to see more clearly, Iain Sinclair also takes pains to stress, how Edward Dorn shaped Howard Hughes’s “non-existence into a divine comedy of cocaine and cactus; virtual travel through high sierras and white deserts zeroing towards the vanishing line of the horizon like the bad craziness of a Monte Hellman western.”

Similarly, Sinclair urges, the “compacted meteorite of the Dorn Collected Poems, so rich and dense, now bombed into our cultural badlands, offers spectacular rewards, as the strategic shifts and heretical inspirations of the poet’s long career are revealed … He mastered a ‘terrific actualism’ … looking at the land with an eye trained by Olson and by the geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer … Dorn would launch one of his seminars by unrolling a railroad map of the US, which showed the sections awarded to the piratical magnates of the 19th century by giveaways of public land. He identified, most powerfully, with the Apache, the warrior remnants of the southwest.”

In the end : “The grand mythopoeic structures of Pound and Olson, magnificent but unresolved, beacons of high modernism, were succeeded by Dorn’s synapse-frying Lenny Bruce performance … Dorn sculpted Gunslinger from the cast of John Ford’s Stagecoach sent out on the road to nowhere (or Las Vegas) in a chemically induced haze … The timelessness of New Mexico’s bandit opportunism means that Dorn’s characters fit very comfortably into the world of the [celebrated present-day] TV series Breaking Bad … Dorn, forty years ahead of the game, exploited that clarity of light, where bad things have a hyper-real outline and the borders between countries and states of consciousness are dangerously porous.” And Iain Sinclair ends his London Review of Books piece with a last highly provocative quotation from the works of Edward Dorn, who was obsessed by the American West: “I have to be there with the Indians. I don’t have a country any more than they do.”

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Ed Dorn's Writing Cabin, Mapleton Street, Boulder. (Photo courtesy Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.)

I have stumbled across a few more intriguing things about the career of Edward Dorn, in my own initial quick and dirty travels among Iain Sinclair’s “gossip-stew of the internet.”

To start with, the Wikipedia article on”Ed Dorn” is not without some interest. It quickly sketches his life and lists his publications, and some internet resources. It also notes that : “Popular horror novelist Stephen King admired Dorn, describing his poetry as ‘talismans of perfect writing’ and even naming the first novel of The Dark Tower series, “The Gunslinger,” in honor of Dorn’s poem. King also opened both the prologue and epilogue of “The Stand” with Dorn’s line, ‘We need help, the Poet reckoned.’”

The publisher’s blurb for the 2012 Collected Poems has some interest as well: “For the first time the vast, experimental totality of Gunslinger poet Edward Dorn’s work is collected in a single volume. After studying with Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, Dorn took on the American West, developing an unmistakable voice, ‘as evocative as a lonesome train whistle in the night’. Olson praised his ‘Shakespearean ear for syllables’. Taking his bearings from Pound and Williams, he found his own way, a pioneer in the old American way …. Peter Ackroyd considers him ‘the only plausible, political poet in America […] one of the masters of our contemporary language.’”

Ed Dorn's Grave, Green Mountain Cemetery, Boulder, Colorado. (Photo courtesy Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.)

Finally, as an illustration of just what it means to say that the late Edward Dorn is/was “the only plausible, political poet in America,” consider this passage from the Poetry Foundation website: “When asked about his poetic critique of America for its imperialism, its carelessness with the environment, and its treatment of minorities, Dorn once remarked: ‘I take democracy very seriously, but on the other hand, it’s a form of government that you have to change your mind about a lot because its form is protean, and its instinct, essentially, comes from a mob psychology. Unlike an adherent to a dogmatic position like Marxism, about which there is very little to change your mind, a democrat is liable to change his mind a lot. So none of these concerns and principles ever leave my mind much, but I vary my attitude according to the angles of perspective I’m able to get on them. Democracy literally has to be cracked on the head all the time to keep it in good condition. But all other forms are more or less sudden death.’”

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Bannock people, Idaho: photographer unknown, n.d.; image by Edulix, 4 July 2006.

Fairly early on in his recent London Review of Books piece, Iain Sinclair refers to “Tom Clark, another itinerant US poet and Essex academic.” In my initial quick and dirty travels among the  “gossip-stew of the internet,” I have happily bumped into a website called “Tom Clark — Beyond the Pale.” And a 30 September 2011 entry on this site reproduces an Edward Dorn poem called “A Vague Love,” from the 1968 edition of a publication called Geography.

Mr. Clark spells out : “Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author’s permission.” If I could find a convenient email address for him on his site. I might actually try to get in touch. Though how he would hold the copyright on one of Ed Dorn’s poems is a mystery to me.

I am in any case grateful indeed for Tom Clark’s website, and I think “A Vague Love” tidily illustrates many of the contentions about Edward Dorn the poet that appear above. And while I have serious plans to purchase Dorn’s Collected Poems very soon (I would have it already, if the Amazon Canada site were not quite so complicated), for the time being I am pleased to end my quick and dirty introduction here with a sample of Ed Dorn’s work (with both apologies and thanks to Tom Clark, if he ever somehow stumbles across this page in cyberspace). I should just altogether finally note that the “Bannocks” referred to in this Ed Dorn poem are a group of Native Americans:

The Bannocks stand by the box.
They sway to the music.
A California truck driver
in with a load of pianos
shoots pool.

Their women
are not beautiful
they are not

but their eyes
have deep corridors in them
of brown hills of pain and
indecision and under every
lash

is a question no man, not
even their own
can answer.

Where is the deer?
That is not the question.

tic tok, stop de clock.
sings Fats Domino.

We all stand swaying.
it’s someone’s turn to shoot.