Sometimes in this business, whether as individual reporters or a part of the vaguely defined group “The Media,” sometimes we miss the point, and this week we can see a prime example of that.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or are news phobic, not likely the case since you’re reading this, you’ve heard there’s a bit of turmoil in the Canadian Parliament’s upper chamber.
And if you’ve been following the story of Senator Mike Duffy’s questionable expenses, or even if you’ve been doing your level best to avoid it, you’ll undoubtedly have heard story after story about the culture of entitlement that pervades the Red Chamber.
It started with a lot of reasonable concerns about how our government officials are spending our money, something that’s crucial to be poking around at and asking about if we’re truly interested in accountability from the institutions that are nominally supposed to represent us.
It’s good that when potentially illegal activities were uncovered, the RCMP investigated, laid charges, and the facts will now have a full airing in court.
It’s good that auditors are now looking a lot harder at how senators are spending our money and exposing that some of them, like Senator Nancy Ruth, are ostensibly buying extra breakfasts on the taxpayer dollar so they can enjoy their fancy cheese at a suitably runny consistency.
But while all this makes for entertaining reading, and allows us to cluck our tongues at those high-on-the-hog partisan appointees of governments past and present, it distracts from a bigger, much more pressing issue.
The real question is why do we still have an appointed Senate that doesn’t even come close to reflecting the gender, racial, economic or religious background of the country it’s meant to represent?
Why are these people still in positions of power, and why do our elected officials keep appointing them?
In Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s case, he has talked a big talk about Senate reform but he has nonetheless appointed a whole slew of them, including the one who’s now facing a criminal trial for his allegedly shady activities.
The root of this problem lies in the founding documents of this country, whether we’re talking about the Canada Act in the British Parliament that allows us to have a country (how magnanimous of them!) and our own constitution that says we’ve got this senate and everything that goes with it.
The fact is, spending all this time focusing on the intricacies of Senate expenses is near-sighted and narrow-minded, and isn’t likely to result in any kind of substantial positive change.
We’re talking about expenses instead of broad democratic reform, however, because it’s easy. You can take a 10-second audio clip about “ice-cold camembert and broken crackers” and try to condense this complicated issue and turn it into an easy, light-hearted conversation.
Conversations about democratic reform, on the other hand, are much more difficult, time-consuming, and undoubtedly costly. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t conversations worth having.
