If you can’t count on the loyalty of your friends, particularly friends who owe their job to you, who can you count on?
In politics, it turns out, you can’t always count on loyalty.
Prime minister Stephen Harper is discovering that painful lesson and it threatens to derail or at least delay and dilute his plans for reforming the Senate.
It has been a core policy goal since this Prairie conservative radical got into Reform Party politics more than two decades ago.
And even during his two minority governments after 2006, when a hostile Liberal majority in the Upper House thwarted proposals for modest reforms, he had a plan.
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After criticizing Liberal patronage appointments, he began to fill vacancies with Conservative-connected people who promised to support his reforms including serving for just eight years and endorsing the idea of Senate elections in which his appointees agreed to run.
Now, since the May 2 election when Harper got his coveted majority, he has vowed to proceed with legislation setting term limits and allowing provinces to hold Senate elections with the winners appointed by the prime minister.
Suddenly, some of the Conservative Senators he appointed are having second thoughts about this agenda.
Eight-year terms are too short. Some prefer 15 years in the $132,300 per year job.
Perhaps the idea of provincial elections is not such a good idea, particularly with Quebec threatening a court challenge if federal Senate reform legislation is passed.
On June 21, in the face of the backlash, Harper abandoned plans to have the bill introduced in the Senate as a symbolic act had his Democratic Reform minister Tim Uppal introduce Commons legislation that would increase the term to nine years for anyone appointed since the 2008 election, with only one term allowed, and would allow provinces to follow Alberta’s lead by holding Senate elections.
It will pass the Commons probably this autumn but it also must pass the Senate hurdle to become law.
This new-found unease among appointed Senators about Harper’s well-known reform proposals has led Alberta Senator and Senate reform advocate Bert Brown to circulate a letter chastising the Nervous Nellies.
Harper appointed Brown, a retired farmer and original Reformer, after he topped the polls in an Alberta Senate election.
In the letter, Brown reminded his colleagues who brought them to the Hill with a mandate for reform.
“The answer is simple,” he wrote in a letter that found its way to reporters. “Our loyalty is to the man who brought us here, the man who has wanted Senate reform since he entered politics, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper.”
It is a minor embarrassment for the Conservatives, probably a major irritant for Harper and manna from heaven for the official opposition New Democrats who support Senate abolition and now regularly denounce Conservative appointees who appear to have a sense of entitlement.
They are disproving former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s famous definition of political loyalty: You dance with the one that brung you.
Not necessarily, once you’ve received the keys to the building.
