Blacklock's Reporter

Cabinet is widening a legal battle over whether Senate vacancies must be filled by the Prime Minister. The government is appealing a Federal Court ruling that the case proceed after federal attorneys argued the claim was frivolous.

“It’s difficult to avoid the inference that the respondents are trying to drag this out,” said Aniz Alani, a Vancouver attorney who filed the original lawsuit to appoint more senators. There are currently 20 vacancies in the 105-seat chamber, with another five senators due to leave within a year as they reach the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper halted all new Senate appointments last August 23 after three Conservative senators were suspended in an expense scandal. Two – Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy – subsequently faced criminal charges, still unproven in court.

Alani said he’d hoped to have his legal claim settled by this October’s federal election till the government responded with a series of challenges, first arguing the lawsuit should be dismissed as pointless, and then appealing the ruling of a federal judge that it was worthy enough to proceed.

“They have in correspondence vigorously opposed any effort to expedite the hearings,” said Alani; “I suppose I always considered it was a possibility they could do that, but wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Alani argues that under the 1867 Constitution Act the Prime Minister has no choice but to immediately fill Senate vacancies as they occur. Under section 32 of the Act, “When a vacancy happens in the Senate by resignation, death or otherwise, the Governor General shall by summons to a fit and qualified person fill the vacancy.”

Prof. Adam Dodek of the University of Ottawa law faculty said the lawsuit illustrates a valid constitutional point. “The case raises the important issue of whether there is any legal recourse if the Prime Minister simply refuses to appoint persons to the Senate,” Dodek said. “In other words, is it legally permissible for the Prime Minister to simply let the Senate wither away into nothingness?”

Federal Judge Sean Harrington, who earlier rejected the government’s claim the issue was not a court matter, wrote that new senators will eventually have to be appointed as age and attrition take their toll. “Certainly at some stage senators have to be appointed,” Harrington wrote. “If there were to be no quorum, Parliament could not function as it is composed of both the House of Commons and Senate.”

The Senate requires a quorum of 15 members. It currently has 82.

By Dale Smith

Nordstrom and Whole Foods are moving in;

David’s Tea is announcing a major expansion;

Parliament undergoes a $3 billion renovation; and

full-page ads by Rocky Mountaineer

offer life-changing trips

for over $1,000 a day.

Oh, and for one senator,

cold Camembert isn’t good enough.

The Liberals have yet to hear about all this;

they still think

the next election

is about the economy.

(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)

Of all populist movements to spring from the Prairies in the Mulroney era – and there were dozens – none achieved a more enduring impact than the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Disparaged by critics as a Conservative shill, nobody gave spendthrift Conservatives more grief.

The group once rolled up its giant debt clock outside the party’s national convention: “It was detained by the RCMP and searched by bomb-sniffing dogs,” recalls Federation president Troy Lanigan.

Does the language commissioner really need a car and chauffeur? Did cabinet really have to spend $12 million training geologists in Ethiopia? What was the defence department thinking when it wrote 167 pages of specifications to order mukluks? The Federation has an opinion on that.

Fighting For Taxpayers is an affectionate account of the group’s founding and grassroots financing. Born as the Association of Saskatchewan Taxpayers in 1989, it became a kind of national magpie caw-cawing over frugality in a cheeky, abrasive manner guaranteed to irritate officialdom. “Years ago a TV reporter in the Victoria press gallery, Robin Adair, made the point to me that government employee unions had spokespeople in the capitals who built relationships with legislature reporters and were available for quick comment on provincial affairs,” Lanigan writes. “Part of our media success, especially breaking into the daily news cycle, was building similar relationships and offering a counterpoint in an arena where big-government advocates had enjoyed a virtual monopoly for decades.”

In the pre-Federation era media heard no taxpayers’ voice save the annual rumblings of the Auditor General and Question Period needling of opposition MPs. The Federation opted for pitchforks and torch parades. The results delighted ratepayers.

“Few things have provided more laughs than writing the Teddies script each year”, the name given the Federation’s dubious awards for wasteful spending, Lanigan writes: “From snowplows moving nothing but air in Montreal, to an escalator going straight into a wall; the Saskatchewan government losing $36 million trying to grow potatoes; the federal government advertising a non-existent jobs program; Liberal Senator Raymond Lavigne ordering his staff to cut down trees on his neighbour’s property.” This is gold.

Fighting For Taxpayers pulls some punches. The Federation has always been strangely silent on farm subsidies; many farmers are subscribers. And it pays homage to Jason Kenney, a pioneering organizer from 1991 to ’95, without noting Kenney as a member of cabinet voted for the largest single deficit in Canadian history, a whopping $55.6 billion in 2013. “Post-Kenney, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation would become a better organized, more stable place, but it would lose the naïveté, the fearlessness and the rawness that defined those early years,” Fighting reports. Taxpayers are left to wonder what it was that Kenney took from the experience.

Yet the Federation remains essentially true to its mandate. Few employees have taken government jobs – Lanigan counts 10 in 25 years: “If I had my way the number would be zero”. And Federation directors to their credit are rarely seen at Ottawa cocktail parties.

The Federation remains a hell-raiser that delights in ridicule, as shown in their choice of mascot: Porky The Waste Hater, the invention of former research director Adam Taylor: “It cost $50 to rent Porky at Malabar costume rentals in Ottawa, but since it was rarely rented, the owner told Adam in 2005 ‘for an extra $40 you can have it’. And so, for the princely sum of $90, Porky earns hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of publicity each year, primarily as the star attraction of the Teddy Waste Awards.”

Fight the man!

By Holly Doan

Fighting For Taxpayers: Battles Fought & Battles Ahead, by Troy Lanigan; Canadian Taxpayers Federation; 163 pages; ISBN 9780-9940-13200; $21.95