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In the sweet declining days of August, Stephen Harper has tossed another sackful of happy conservatives to the Canadian Senate. As is usually the case in these things, there are a few names (Jacques Demers, e.g.) to diversify an otherwise diligently monochrome list.

In the main though, as with Mr. Harper's previous partisan cluster bomb – 18 fresh senators last December – this week's nine are essentially either declared or congenital Harperites, a soup of past servitors, failed candidates or high-powered party functionaries. Identical, need I point out, in this respect to the lineups previous Liberal prime ministers hustled to patronage's very own El Dorado.

Most Canadians, I'd guess, spend less time thinking about the Senate than they give to the empty paint tin in the downstairs closet. Which is reasonable. They can, after all, some time, throw the paint can out. But however sparse such thinking may be it is surely time to retire the ancient description of its function. It is not so much outdated as actively untrue.

The Senate, goes the formula, is the chamber of sober, second thought.

Sobriety, alas, no longer enters into it. The days of the heavy-drinking politician are over. John A. Macdonald couldn't be PM today. Or, he'd be doing ads for “substance abuse.” Parliamentarians jog now more than they tipple, are more apt to be seen at dawn on a treadmill than drooping from a bar at midnight. Legislation doesn't make its way to the upper chamber because it was conceived in the middle of a mighty binge in the lower one.

So the first adjective of the commonplace is idle or otiose. The question of “second thought,” however, is still quite active. Is the Senate indeed a place to get, as we say, another opinion? Well, if you were prime minister and you truly wanted a “second” opinion, an honest view of some idea or legislation of yours – would you seek out a person who had (a) previously worked for you, (b) was, by definition, ideologically a twin, and (c) to whom you'd given a prestige job of $135,000 a year and a whole bandwidth of additional goodies as well?

What are the chances, really, that Stephen Harper, wanting a fresh take on things would, say, go to Doug Finley (now Senator Finley), Mr. Harper's former campaign director, and husband to one of his ministers? Is Mr. Finley's head, under the double burden of previous party service and present party reward, the ideal dome for independent “second thoughts?”

It is difficult, in fact, to wander far from the consideration that Mr. Finley is more of a echo than a sounding board, more of an intellectual Xerox than a testing ground – more likely when pressed by his previous master and current benefactor to offer, “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full ...” than anything more wayward or spinal. He is a mirror, not a lamp. The Senate then is, pace Star Wars, the Reward of the Clones, and the very opposite of that house of second thought the cliché would have us believe.

There is not a lot of space, no ripe field for alternate speculations, between the mind of a former campaign director for a prime minister and that same prime minister. They are Chiclets from the same blue box. The same may, or must, be said, of the addition of Carolyn-Stewart Olsen, Mr. Harper's long-time communications director. The addition of this faithful loyalist to the long cushions of the Red Chamber will not magnify its reputation as a nursery of autonomous contemplation. Rather, it is precisely because these two are loyalists, that they have served the party line so diligently, that they have been rewarded.

The description of the Senate then, as a place of after-consideration, or cold deliberation, of analysis and revisal is an utter contradiction, a reverse image of the actuality: The majority of those appointed are there because they mime the leader who placed them there, have served and been rewarded by him.

Far from incidentally, this is hardly a Conservative vice. The Liberals fertilized their terms in power with matchless largesse to their supporters. Pierre Trudeau, the very god of modern Liberalism, sank his successor John Turner by one of the most shameless patronage blitzes in modern times.

I'm not exercised about this August flush of patronage. These things are so much the norm of our mediocre and mostly rote partisan politics that most people, I'd guess, have given up hoping for better. But let's at least name it for what it is. And unpeel every pretense that the Senate has a constitutional rationale as a bulwark against the haste of the ruling party.

The Senate today – with individual exceptions – is a payback machine, where those with connections are rewarded for having them. It is the ultimate patronage ATM, and it extorts subservience and sycophancy from those appointed to it. It does not have second thoughts. A second thought would kill it.