Though Charles Adler left his radio gig in Winnipeg to move to Vancouver, he has a new show on satellite radio, from which a podcast is published as well. In the most recent episode he interviews Warren & Lisa Kinsella. Much of the talk was about the Canadian Senate. Mrs. Kinsella has a “unique” perspective starting around 19:00 into the podcast:
“Because Stephen Harper first, of course, stacked the Senate. So we have an imbalance in the Senate. We have Conservatives dominating it.”
Her comment necessitated a quick check of Senate appointments:
Stephen Harper: 59 Tories
Jean Chretien: 72 Liberals + 3 Independents
It’s most interesting that such a prominent Liberal made such a comment, considering that her husband was one of Chretien’s BFF’s during his tenure as PM. Conveniently short memories.
And how many senate appointments were left vacant?
He also recently said he loves how Premier Wynne kicks ass in her negotiations with teachers in Ontario. And that he loves the fact that he voted for her.
Funny how it’s wrong when a conservative/Tory does it but not when a Liberal does. How often have the Liberal’s stacked the Senate in their favour? All the damned time whenever they get a chance.
That little fact doesn’t fit their anti-Conservative agenda driven narrative. Justin will now be able to stack the deck, take back ownership of his Liberal Senators, allow them back in his caucus, the Trudeau Liberal Cabal can get back to business as usual.
Liberals have tunnel vision on such matters,it’s only acceptable and fair when they stack the Senate and the freaking Supreme Court Judges as well.
Kinsella is a simple whore. Most of his career involved freeloading from the former great Liberal empire. When that collapsed, he kept to a wary convenient distance from them, showing up intermittently as a wish-wash bop-bag clown on the Brian Lilley show on Sun News for a time, while he maintained an extremely flat and uninteresting blog. I recall him being negative towards Justin Trudeau in the days preceding his leadership success with LPC, but after that, it’s back to full-whore mode as his appearance at the Alder show might suggest.
With 28 Senate seats vacant,wtf is Harper doing?
He knows damned well they will soon be filled with Justin’s chosen ones,and any chance of delaying this government capitulation to the OWG cabal goes when the Conservative majority in the Senate goes.
No way the Liberals can resist the urge to use the Senate as their patronage playground, as they have in the past, again and again. It should already be clear the JT Liberals will do what they please while pretending to be populist, because it’s clear the truth doesn’t matter in our federal politics right now. It will become a sacred duty to bring the exiled LPC Senators back to the fold and use the vacancies to stack that House in their favour and surprise, surprise the mediocracy will agree with them (well we can’t leave the Tories with a majority, that’s not “what Canadians want”).
Wait and see folks – count on it. These guys have no principles other than naked power.
Why, because the LPC is now a top down party, interested in power over policy; it has been for some time, courtesy of PET, and will ever remain so. They must believe in big government that somehow, mysteriously, creates jobs by taking from productive enterprise to redistribute to unproductive. Transactions of decline reduce national income, that is inescapable. Government is big enough, so the only canard left is to argue, and convince utterly uninformed ignoramuses, aka the LIV, that bigger government increases prosperity, or at least gives them free stuff someone else pays for.
Of course they’re wrong, but they always have been and is irrelevant, as the mediocracy continually allows its utter economic ignorance and illogic, combined with their bias and non-existence of journalistic ethics, to paint the word picture for the voter.
We need a grassroots revolution in this country to deliver us from statists; the media are the enemy of anything approaching non-statist. Liberals are socialists and we need to be more like liberals, the real kind, not the LPC PET top down BS version, but with a healthy sprinkling of conservatism.
Top down conservatism isn’t the answer and never will be; accept it. Harper effectively changed that in our political culture, then let it fade away in an avalanche of HDS and pure economic fiction he let the statists sell the voter by hanging around. Notice now how statists are admitting they can’t change the world around them, but gleefully laid the blame on Harper for that, along with fictionalizing the sterling economic performance under his leadership. Notley for instance says she can’t spare the oilfield from external price pressures, while raising carbon taxes and sending a message new development is not welcome. We are seeing the obvious results as project after project is cancelled or withdrawn, along with their well-paying jobs.
The first fiction that must go is that the western provinces will continue to bankroll the entitlement economies of central and eastern Canada. When they try it they will spur a grassroots revolution that will not only take out any western leaders who support it (recall, impeachment), but also take back their own taxation & spending powers so the grubby statists can’t confiscate others’ hard earned and paid tax dollars.
That’s what’s needed, not some HDS addled idiot saying Harper didn’t do enough to stop the climate change hoax. Well now we need the climate change hoax, it’s our best chance as the science settles against it and the public sees it for the rent seeking, tax grabbing scheme it always has been, as their standards of living truly and inevitably decline under the statist weight of the green economy.
Then we can discuss actual pollution and what can be done about it – what we should do and what others need to take responsibility for (India, China) instead of the ideas of our navel gazing rent seeking morons who traipse off to Paris to sell out our sovereignty.
I don’t care what Trudeau and his band of premiers sign; it’s not permanent – we start today with the work to end that once and for all – to show that non-statists actually have brains and compassion and real families and real communities rather than the contrived, conceived in a political test tube “Canadian values” they assign themselves the monopoly of thinking and feeling.
This westerner says the eastern statists have got a real shit storm on their hands when they try their NEP type confiscation and western subsidized entitlement excesses. We’re mad as hell as we’re not going to take it any more. We’ll be angry, they can be outraged. Dividing Canadians; yup between those who produce and those who take.
It’s on slow boil right now and the statists are the frog in the pot, mark my words. We’ll be called sore losers and whiners – bring it on, that’s all the statists did for nearly ten years. Just remind them of that and clearly show them we’re going to drag this statist monster to the ground before it pulls another Greece, where economic and taxation decisions end up being made by unelected foreign power as statists destroy our ability to manage our own national affairs.
Stephen Harper should have filled the vacancies as per our system. He was not responsible for the behavior of those he appointed to the Senate, he does not run that place. Liberals have had the majority in that place and no questions were asked, it was just accepted. What has happened is all down to opposition whiners being backed by their trumpeters in the media making PM Harper the bad guy for doing what is his duty, filling vacant seats in the Senate. PM Harper just got fed up.
The Liberal Cabal will continue on with the job of filling the seats with their own brand. Until we have a different system that’s it. Sit back, watch hypocrisy in action with nary a peep from the media Liberal loving screed shooters.
short memories or short weenies?
Quite a rant Shamrock, if only you could bottle it and sell it like the liberal kool-ade!
Not only did Harper NOT stack the senate, he left 22 vacant seats, which will allow little Turdeau to stack it and give the Liberals more seats.
You missed mentioning the part where Warren, a lawyer, visits blogs like this and then sues them for posters writing libelous comments on them.
Every PM appoints (stacks) the Senate. It’s how it works. When Harper hit the wall on Senate reform he just stopped appointing. With Mulcair saying he’d abolish it outright and Justin cutting ties with the Liberals in the Senate and promising to set up a non-partisan appointment committee…Harper had nothing to lose.
If Justin doesn’t follow through, he’ll have to own it and it won’t be pretty.
Conservative revolution? In Canada? No chance. Any country that votes 60% against an incumbent Conservative PM for Trudeau who will exponentially increase immigration and change FPTP to some sort of Euro proportional representation that hands statists power forever has no chance.
If you want conservatism, the West has to secede.
Agreed.
The vacant senate seats are a landmine for the Liberals.
If you go to the Rebel and listen to Brian Lilley about Harper needs to do one last thing, he will tell you that PM Steven Harper can still do it, by handing in a list of people when he leaves or can do it his last day. Which apparently there has been a few PM’s that have done this especially the Liberals. Pierre Trudeau left a list of names for the Liberal Senate. Or other have done it on their last days. So we need to get PM Harper to name 22 Senate before he leaves office.
Further, as the Dauphin stacks the Senate he will allow the Liberal Senators back into the caucus fold and the media will say nary a word.
I will say Stephen Harper did not handle the issues with his appointees well. Since he does not have anything to do with how the Senate runs itself, he has no responsibility for their actions or the administration of the rules. He need only have asked that they remain out of caucus until the Senate deals with it, instead he raised their ire and made matters worse, enemies within are never good news. This is another case where he played into the hands of the media, they had a feeding frenzy on it. Chretien or no other Liberal leader would have inserted themselves into the fray, it would be a one day story.
Facts and accuracy are not progressive.
As long as it feels good to say, it must be true.
Progressive truth ™.
Both Kinsella’s default mode is lie,lie and lie.
I agree with Shamrock, the situation is going to get tense.
Theft is the accepted practise of Eastern Canadian Political Organizations.
Individual rights still resonant in the West.
The vote has geographical dimensions.
The PM elect has a lazy contempt for Western Canada, he does believe his own BS about Quebecers are better.
Now everyone East of Manitoba has their hand out for more, more “government investment”.
Who is gonna pay?
The Alberta NDP has so little support in Alberta that they have brought in their “operators” from all over.
They know they have 4 years to loot everything they can.
Maybe it is time for free skydiving lessons for all MLAs.
The Globe and Mail is right on cue:
‘Trudeau’s proposal to appoint Senators based on merit shows promise’
Of course some Liberals may have more merit than others.
No they are not. The media will ignore it as much as humanly possible, and if thy do have to report on it they will give it a positive spin and all the Harper History of senate reform and Zoolander kicking the liberal senators out of the senate will be down the memory hole.
I think that the seeds of Western separatism will soon be sprouting everywhere west of Ontario. There is no way that the west will tolerate another NEP or any program that looks like it. If Turdeau is to keep his campaign promises to the Maritimes, Quebec,and Ontario the money has to come from somewhere and guess where that will be. The only other alternative is to do what PET did and borrow us into huge debt. North Americas version of Greece.
“If you want conservatism, the West has to secede”
By “the west”, I guess you mean Saskatchewan. The rest of “the west” doesn’t look too conservative to me.
“stacking the senate”. Three words that show why the senate should be abolished.
Canada is going back to the destructive days of Trudeau 1.
Personally I’m waiting for the mass resignations from the Canadian Forces. Given what Turdough the Elder did, I’m sure the Pony will want to top it. Such is the nature of middle management however, I’m sure the full brigades of captains and majors will hang on until the bitter end.
As for Kansmellya, they don’t call him the Lying Jackal for nothing. I wouldn’t expect his mate to be less of a jackal. These are people for whom the truth is a commodity, to be bought and sold as convenient.
Such a life is it’s own punishment.
I think Harper did the right thing and not appoint anymore senators. He did the right thing during his reign by appointing as many as he needed to get his legislation through but he stood by his principles that the senate should not obstruct the democratic will of the people. He is allowing Trudeau to do the same thing. The senate should be abolished but until it is, we should do our utmost to make sure it has as little power as possible.
Harper failed to provide us with a safeguard guaranteed in the Constitution. He failed to fill the Senate therby speeding up the transition to the Liberal policies. We are guaranteed sober second though and Harper failed. After all the whining about the Senate, Harper failed to allow it to do its one job – slow down the leap to the Liberal duality of Marxism/Capitalist corruption.
The day he is sworn in Trudeau can appoint 22 Senators and have a majority. What is the Liberal whining about?
Liberals who think the U.S. Constitution gives them the right to walk naked down main street while claiming we have no right to self defense