Mader Blog

Charles takes issue with my comments below. He writes:

Leave it to Mader to draft up a fancy pseudo-syllogism for what boils down to an old Alliance one-liner about “stacking”. What have you demonstrated here? All you’ve done is re-state your presumption about stacking. Take out the words “stack” and “hacks” in your third paragraph and just put in “appoint” and you see what I mean.

“[T]he Liberals are able to pursue this line of attack without exposing themselves to criticism because nobody expects that the Liberals would ever do anything except appoint members to the Upper House”.

Maybe you’ve read an article about the Liberals attacking the credentials of the appointees, but I haven’t; they’re just highlighting another failure of the ideology Harper arrived in Ottawa with and continues to pay lip service to while acting in a different manner.

I think Charles is criticizing me for taking a substantive position on the merits and demerits of the Senate and its members, but I’m not. Maybe Senate reform is necessary; maybe the Senate is ok the way it is now. My point is simply that (a) the Liberals have acted in a way that suggests they believe it’s ok now (at least as to the appointment process); (b) the Harper Tories announced a policy of reform based on the assumption that reform was necessary; (c) with these recent appointments, the Harper Tories have taken a course of action consistent with the belief that the Senate is ok the way it is now (at least with regard to appointments); (d) the Tories have thereby opened themselves up to a charge of hypocrisy; and (e) the Liberals are only able to take advantage of that opening, while remaining insulated from collateral attack, because they have never indicated any desire or appetite for reform.
Of course, if you believe that the Senate (and particularly the appointments process) is ok the way it is now, then my observation as to the Grits has no rhetorical force; but if that’s the case, the hypocrisy charge becomes exceedingly narrow: Harper is a hypocrite because he’s doing something he said he wouldn’t do, but he was wrong to say he wouldn’t do it – so there’s no intrinsic problem with his doing it now; the only problem is secondary, namely that he (mistakenly or misguidedly) said he wouldn’t do it in the first place.
Hardly a resounding argument!