Mader Blog

[NOTE: I have partially retracted some of the claims made in this post.]
A very brief thought about the flap over the Senate appointments. While most of the hand-wringing in the media seems to reflect the shock – shock! – that someone would dare to play politics with Senate appointments, there is, I think, one line of criticism that can stick, and that is that Harper and the Tories are (apparently) doing what they said they wouldn’t do.
As an aside, I’m not really sure how much force this line of criticism has; after all, while the goal of the appointment embargo was Senate reform, surely the second-best option, from a Conservative point of view, was the appointment of Conservative – rather than Liberal-Democratic – senators. Maybe the embargo was wrong-headed from the start; but if so, then the proper course would have been to appoint these senators one-by-one over time, rather than all at once. Net difference: zero – except, of course, that doing it all at once, and after the fact, feeds the media cycle.
In any event, whatever its merits, the hypocrisy meme seems popular this morning. So let me just make explicit what’s implicit in every such column you’ll read: the Liberals are able to tag Harper as a hypocrite because he is doing something he said he wouldn’t do – stack the Senate; the 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 stack the Senate with party hacks.
At least Harper tried.