The Canadian Parliament has been closed since the first week of December when Prime Minister Steven Harper convinced Governor-General Michaelle Jean to suspend activities until the end of January. The opposition parties were preparing to vote against Prime Minister Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada and offer themselves as an alternative in the form of a coalition of two parties, The Liberals and The New Democratic Party (NDP), supported by a third, The Bloc Quebecois.

Now Harper isn't one to sit idly by and let fate rule his destiny, nor is he going miss out on any chance to put his stamp on Canadian government for years to come; he has spent this last week before Christmas doing as much as he can get away with without Parliament in session. He named a new judge to the Supreme Court Of Canada, appointed nineteen friends and fellow travelers to the Senate, and authorized a bailout package to Chrysler and General Motors of four billion dollars.

I'm going to skip the Supreme Court appointment for a second, because I can hear my American friends wondering about Harper naming people to the Senate. The Canadian Senate is not elected. The closest thing to this would be the British House Of Lords, though in Canada rather than being born into a seat you need to be a friend of the sitting government in order to get one of these plum positions. And plum they are, paying out an annual salary of $130,400 until retirement at age seventy-five, followed by a pension indexed to inflation.

Now it's no big thing for a Prime Minister to pack the Senate; it's an old Canadian political tradition. The thing is that Prime Minister Harper was a fierce proponent of an elected Senate long before he was even a member of Parliament. A Prime Minister must evenly divide appointments among the provinces to guarantee equal representation, and Mr. Harper has advocated that provincial legislatures nominate people for Senate appointments and that the sitting federal government should abide by their selections.

The first appointment Harper made was a man who had been put forward by the Alberta legislation, but not this time. Of course he's saying he takes no joy in having to stack the Senate, but it's the provinces fault for not getting it together to nominate anybody. That's why he's found nineteen people to sit in the Senate who all happen to have opposed the proposed coalition government. The Senate does not have the power to defeat any motion passed by the House of Commons and could not overturn a vote of non-confidence taken in the house, but they can make things difficult for a government.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the recently published What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and online all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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