A Commentary by Doug Draper
There is that old line – “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Canada’s Senate at work – nothing more than pigs ripping Canadian taxpayers off. Contact your MP and demand to get rid of it.
Allow me to alter that line to say – “If it looks like a pig, rolls in the mud like a pig and snorts like a pig, then it is probably a pig.” And that just about sums up the unelected, unaccountable barn of Liberal and Conservative appointed party hacks that make up Canada’s senate.
And the worst of the lot at the moment – the poster pig, if I might say so – is Mike Duffy, a former Canadian broadcast journalist who was a Tory hack then and a Tory hack now, who delivered up a pile of pig manure over where he lives in Canada and his Senate expense, and has now had the $90,000 in expenses he finally said he would pay back to us covered by none other than Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright.
Reportedly, this is just plain fine with Harper, who is backing Wright’s generous “gift” to Conservative Senate hack Duffy. That’s so even though any “gift” or whatever else one wants to call it to a Canadian senator apparently must be reported. And this one wasn’t. It leaked out through the media.
Further to this, there are now reports on CBC and other Canadian media that Duffy may have claimed Senate travel expenses that we, the taxpayers of Canada cover, to do some campaigning for Conservative candidates. Some of our tax money might be going to this pig to campaign for candidates in a federal election?!!!!
Think about it. I don’t care if you are a Liberal, Conservative or NDP. Why should any of your tax money be going to a federal senator to campaign for a candidate in an election?
And let’s get back to the appalling news that Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, paid off the expenses Duffy had no business claiming in the first place for claiming that his primary residence was in Prince Edward Island?
Do you actually think, for one moment, that Wright did not cover off the 90 grand without Harper knowing exactly what was going on? I mean let’s get real folks. Every journalist who has covered Harper and company over the past decade know that no decision gets through without Harper’s approval. Conservative MPs like Rick Dykstra of St. Catharines, Ontario or even Rob Nicholson, a cabinet minister for Niagara Falls, Ontario, cannot fire off a fart, let alone speak a few audible lines, in English or French on any issue marginal important to the government, without it being approved through the prime minister’s office.
Canadian Senator Mike Duffy … “If it looks like a pig, ….”
So where the hell are you, my fellow Canadians ? Are so many of us so busy watching hockey or so brain dead by now that we don’t care if we are being ripped off by government in this country?
It is a sad comment on what is little left of our democracy that Canadians aren’t screaming about this and demanding, not only the resignation of a pig like Duffy, but the abolition of the Canadian senate.
We don’t need this non-elected, partisan pig fest of a senate folks. A body of sober second thought? If we work at it, we could and should be the voice of sober, second thought. As a matter of a fact, we should be the voice of first thought.
Let’s call up or email, or otherwise rain down through social media on our federal MPs now, and tell them to gut this senate for the snort, snort hog farm that it is.
(Niagara At Large invites you to join in the conversation by sharing your views on the content of this post below. For reasons of transparency and promoting civil dialogue, NAL only posts comments from individuals who share their first and last name with their views.)
Niagara At Large 
Gee Doug. Give the Duffster a break. He can’t remember where he lives. He can’t repay monies he owes taxpayers. He asks his pals for loans for bills outstanding. He worries he might die and leave his wife with a mess. I guess, unlike many of us, he didn’t preplan anything – not one thing. We should feel sorry for him, right? He was only a famous insider journalist, but he appears not to be aware of the PMO. He doesn’t know the difference between a principal residence and a cottage.
Ahhh, some compassion please for the evidently losing-it, Duffster. Where is Frank Magazine when you need it most?
A Note from NAL – Unfortunately Frank appears to be gone but Niagara At Large is still here.
Hey, Mike, gimme our money back! Out of your own purse.
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Doug – please, let us not insult the porcine race. They are loveable, intelligent and sentient beings – nothing like some of our politicians.
A note from NAL publisher Doug Draper – Dear Catherine, you are so right. My apologies to the real, decent pigs. I grew up next to a farm that had pigs and I was always overwhelmed by how smart these animals were and how much they cared for their young … You are so very right in suggesting that we are insulting them with comparisons to Duffy and the senate.
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Yes, lets not call them pigs, pigs would not bleed the country dry, in fact they are clean and smart animals! and I heard he didn’t want to take out a “loan” from the bank, because if he has a heart attack then his wife is left with debt OMG, there are resources called DEBT INSURANCE, every bank in the country tries to sell you that, and with your credit card you can get insurance too!!! I have a feeling he’s so far in debt he can’t borrow, where does all his big salary go then? If he doesn’t have a residence to claim all these “expenses ” he claimed then he should be living quite cheap on his big senator salary…. exactly what does he do for all his salary anyway? Perhaps he should go on a diet, and a debt diet as well like the rest of Canadians have had to do and what government always preaches to us in these Hard Economic Times, maybe for some but certainly not for them. I say we clean out that farm of senators, starting with the animal Herder, Harper and the rest of his sheep.,
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Doug Draper is guilty of speciesism.
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As long as we allow the Prime Minister to run roughshod over us, he will. We all know where the “gift” came from – our pockets!! Mike Duffy isn’t the only one pulled up to the trough; he just happens to be the one that got caught this time. How can we Canadians put a stop to this? Enough is enough!!
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As far as I’m concerned, if Duffy cannot understand the rules or interpret his responsibilities as a Senator, he is not capable of doing the job….whatever that is!!! There is no way in hell that he misinterpreted the residency rules. He was, just as you said Doug, a pig at the trough. Whenever he globs about I get a strange urge to hum the Alfred Hitchcock theme.
Did Brazeau, who is now an independent (although originally appointed as a Conservative) or Harb, an NDP, get any offer to bail them out? Nah! Wrong party. Duffy was also a VERY active campaigner for Emperor Harperius last election. He also claimed expenses for his activities while campaigning.
I’m sure the $90,000 bail out money was a PERSONAL cheque but you can bet your bottom dollar that Wright will be reimbursed somehow, likely by the Conservative party or us, the taxpayers. I wonder if Wright or Harper want to write me a nice cheque. I’ve been needing a vacation myself…or at very least, a cottage in PEI…. for quite a while now. If Joe Q Citizen owes a 50c tax bill, the government will bloody well hound him for payment with interest.
Duffy is nothing but a shyster who got caught playing a shell game with tax dollars…OURS! Duffy, Brazeau and Harb all knew exactly what they were doing. Even when Duffy got caught he still didn’t take responsibility and got special treatment. Try not paying our bills and nobody would bail us out. Meanwhile Brazeau has sexual assault and domestic violence charges to boot. Have people also forgotten Bev Oda’s nice stay at the Savoy in London and her special orange juice and cigarettes? I can’t even afford to drive past the Savoy!
It’s time to wipe the slate clean. Get rid of the Senate entirely. Revise the entire electoral system to make it representational instead of the flawed first past the post system which has allowed Harper to lord over us with 40% of the voter turnout. Prosecute everyone who is caught at the trough. Repayment is total bullsh!t! If you rob a bank and get caught, do they let you return the money to stay out of jail? The robber could always claim “Oh, I didn’t know you couldn’t steal from a bank”.
These guys, along with most politicians, are common thieves and are, in fact, even worse because they’ve been given the public trust. The Conservatives aren’t the sole perpetrators. Other parties have been at the trough for years too. Politics and politicians disgust me. I think they rely on that disgust to create apathy because voters feel there’s nothing they can do.
Wake up Canada.
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We should go Icelandic and kick them all out !!!
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Lets gather together,and get this senate issue to the next federal election ballot, let the people vote on whether to abolish this wasteful practice . How can we fire Canadians up to get this done .
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Just a second here … a Liberal senator was also slammed for wrongful expense claims.
Doug hit the real issue, but then got diverted, like some of the commenters above, by their own political partisanship and turned it into a “slam the Harper conservatives” thing.
The real issue is: Do we need an unelected Senate?
We do need some sort of watchdog, but the Senate, as it stands now, is NOT effective. Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister and as such, are beholden and will vote the way they are told to vote.
An elected senate wouldn’t be much different — in all likelihood, the same part that wins the seats in the Commons will win the seats in the Senate.
We need a watchdog group that will give sober (key word!) second thought to proposed legislation.
I don’t want to see Canada turn to the US model – that just leads to MORE politics … obstructionism for sake of obstructionism, rather than working for the good of the people.
I don’t have an answer, but I sure don’t want to see the (with apologies to pigs in advance) pork-barreling that we have now!
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I believe Mac Harb was a liberal. Please check it out. Not NDP, as far as I know.
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Pigs aren’t all nice. Some sows eat their young.
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