Oh, did I say I was against Senate appointments?
Word today that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has mysteriously now found enough faith in the institution of the Senate to appoint all 18 vacant positions. Obviously he has the right to do this. Just like he has a right to prorogue parliament, to run adds demonizing the opposition, to use every legal and parliamentary tactic available. The fact that he hasn’t made these appointments until now is because he doesn’t respect the institution as it is and wanted to change it. But now that he may lose the chance to make those sweet appointments, he’s doing them all at once. To do this at a time when he has so little support in the commons, its quite hypocritical. It requires some impressive doublethink for Conservative supporters to praise this while supporting his reluctance to fill the seats in the past two years. Its just opportunism and it doesn’t do anything to change the tone in Ottawa. He should have appointed half of them and then waited until after the confidence vote in January if he respected our democracy at all.
I think the Conservatives will find that all of these little issues will add up to a very solid resistance to voting conservative with Harper at its head next election. Of course if the opposition votes are still split they’ll win another minority, but I think those that were not in favour of Harper before but were beginning to soften on him, thats all gone. They’ll never get above their current support level without getting rid of Stephen Harper.
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