Western Standard - June 15, 2022


CORY'S RANT： The senate is suddenly doing its job well.

Topics
Senate scrutiny and reforms
Mentioned
Trudeau Marco Mendicino Brian Mulroney Lester Pearson Grant Mitchell Patrick Brazzo Mike Duffy Bill S-233
EXCLUSIVE： Aurora Townsend of Planet Theta WHO renames monkeypox because scientists call it “discriminatory”

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

214.31

Word count

1,118

Sentence count

61

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canadian Senate has long been a place of patronage and abuse of power, but there are some signs of life in there lately, and it s good to see them actually question the actions of government in ways we haven t seen in a long time.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And I've always railed against the Canadian Senate, demanding either massive reform of the institution or outright abolition of it.
00:00:07.420 In the late 1980s, you know, when I was just really starting to pay attention to politics and early 90s,
00:00:13.120 the Tripoli Senate was the rallying cry from the Reform Party as it gained steam in the West.
00:00:18.240 And that stood for, if those remember it, equal, elected, and effective.
00:00:21.880 And it was presumed if we got those first two E's, the third would follow.
00:00:25.460 The Senate looked as if it would take a stance and shoot down Brian Mulroney's GST legislation in 1990, for example.
00:00:31.280 But then Mulroney just expanded the number of senators and appointed enough complacent PC senators to ensure his bill would pass.
00:00:37.980 He stacked it.
00:00:38.960 And it demonstrated just how weak and beholden the Senate is to a prime minister with a majority government.
00:00:44.980 The Canadian Senate, for the most part, has been a patronage pit.
00:00:48.020 It's a place to return political favors to well-connected party supporters where they could garner a good income with an incredible pension
00:00:54.440 while putting in a minimum of work.
00:00:56.240 So I'm going to give a little more Senate history.
00:00:58.060 Andrew Thompson, for those who might remember, was a prime example of a useless senator with a bad case of personal entitlement to taxpayers' dollars.
00:01:05.740 Now, Thompson had served as a somewhat lackluster leader of the Liberal Party of Ontario in the early 60s.
00:01:10.740 And as a reward for his time representing the provincial liberals, he was appointed to the Senate by Lester Pearson.
00:01:15.500 We did the same with that useless liberal out here, Grant Mitchell in Alberta. 0.68
00:01:19.080 Now, once there, Thompson kept his head low and resided there for decades.
00:01:23.660 In 1997, Thompson suddenly hit the public spotlight.
00:01:26.140 Yeah, 30 years later, when it was found, he only attended Senate sessions for a few days a year.
00:01:30.600 Not only had he done next to nothing in the Senate, he actually lived in Mexico. 0.99
00:01:34.340 He rarely even set foot in Canadian soil in years.
00:01:36.680 But he was drawing a nice six-figure salary full of benefits.
00:01:40.400 Now, Thompson, he was indignant at being called out for his absences.
00:01:43.220 With this exposure of such an embarrassing example of a senator, the Chrétien Liberals expired Thompson from caucus.
00:01:49.100 And senators struck a subcommittee to examine the issue, and Thompson wouldn't even come back from Mexico to speak to it.
00:01:55.000 He didn't feel he needed to defend himself.
00:01:57.240 He was found in contempt to the committee and stripped of some compensation.
00:01:59.640 But still, he remained as a senator until 1998, when he resigned on his own shortly before mandatory retirement anyways,
00:02:05.380 and continued to collect a huge pension for the remainder of his life.
00:02:08.980 These are the kind of examples that made me give up all hope of Senate reform.
00:02:13.020 Now, over the years, we've seen some Senate committees, you know, improving some bills at times.
00:02:17.980 But they haven't really done much, and we've been forgotten for the most part,
00:02:21.200 except for when periodic scandals hit with, again, senators in entitlement like Mike Duffy or Patrick Brazzo.
00:02:26.460 And they made the news for all the wrong reasons.
00:02:29.420 And while the Senate still needs massive reforms that are probably never going to happen,
00:02:32.760 I've been seeing some signs of life in there lately, and it's been great to see.
00:02:36.380 They've actually been scrutinizing bills and questioning the actions of government in ways we haven't seen in a long time.
00:02:43.420 A joint Senate committee has been examining Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act,
00:02:50.400 and it's been putting Trudeau's ministers on the spot and asking all the right questions.
00:02:53.740 Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino, you know, the Minister of Lies,
00:02:59.180 has been under fire for months as the narrative crumbles for the justification of invoking the act.
00:03:03.200 And despite Mendocino's claims that the police asked for invocation to the act,
00:03:07.400 committees have determined, no, that wasn't the case.
00:03:09.580 Nor were there firearms found among the protesters, nor were there rape gangs or arsonists or Russian funding.
00:03:14.980 That was all shredded in these committee meetings, and the senators were a lot pushing that.
00:03:19.660 So, the government had built a mountain of BS, and thanks to that tough questioning,
00:03:23.300 it's been exposed.
00:03:24.680 You know, we've got a judicial inquiry into Trudeau's actions coming up,
00:03:27.580 and it's likely not going to end well as their case is already crumbling before it gets there.
00:03:31.960 So, in their latest action, this really got me going happily here,
00:03:35.580 a Senate committee has shot down Bill S-7.
00:03:38.200 Now, that's the bill that would have empowered border agents to search personal devices
00:03:41.520 of citizens on the most flimsy of justifications.
00:03:44.360 It was a gross invasion of privacy rights, and while the Senate called it out,
00:03:48.300 well, the Senate did call it out.
00:03:50.000 And while the bill is still alive, the Senate committee has proposed an amendment
00:03:53.420 which pretty much defangs it.
00:03:54.980 If the bill does pass the Senate, and then back and into Parliament,
00:03:58.500 it won't have much of an impact.
00:04:00.160 The intent behind the government's creation of the bill has been stripped from it.
00:04:03.380 Now, Trudeau's government still has some odious bills coming down the pipe.
00:04:06.180 They're trying to ramrod C-11, C-18, and C-21.
00:04:09.700 And those bills, in their current form, threaten free press, free speech, and property rights,
00:04:13.900 as they're modeled to try and control the internet,
00:04:15.460 and they're going after law-abiding firearm owners.
00:04:18.320 But those bills still have to go through Senate scrutiny.
00:04:21.880 And I'm hoping, I'm hoping now that with many senators suddenly embracing their role
00:04:25.480 as being that voice of sober second thought,
00:04:27.940 that those bills might actually be amended or perhaps shot down altogether.
00:04:31.460 Maybe some of those senators are finally relishing taking an active role
00:04:34.860 in policy creation and approval, and they want to take it further.
00:04:37.920 The Emergencies Act itself was dropped, you know,
00:04:39.900 within 48 hours of passing through Parliament,
00:04:41.700 and I suspect part of that reason was that Trudeau didn't have confidence
00:04:45.160 that he was going to make it through the Senate.
00:04:47.060 We've been through infringements upon civil liberties these last two years,
00:04:50.360 unlike any seen in Generations.
00:04:51.860 We need to apply scrutiny to these actions in hindsight now, too,
00:04:55.320 with a mind to prevent that sort of overreach again.
00:04:58.120 My optimism could be misplaced, but I hope not.
00:05:00.800 The sleepy Senate could start embracing its job again,
00:05:03.220 and I can't think of a better time for him to get on it.
00:05:05.700 So, hey, let's give a thumbs up to those senators 0.94
00:05:07.620 and encourage them to stay awake and keep at it.
00:05:09.920 They're finally doing a good job.
00:05:11.700 Thank you.
00:05:12.840 Thank you.