Beneath the cover of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Nancy Greene, you'll find enough life-long Conservatives on the list of Senate appointments to fill an Ottawa condo building a few days a week, a few weeks a year. This in itself is neither surprising nor inherently offensive. But what is a little curious is who those Conservatives are.
More than a decade-and-a-half after the last round of Conservative Senate appointments, there should have been a wealth of talent to choose from. Between Mulroney-era ministers, leaders of the Reform movement (assuming they could swallow the hypocrisy of it) and senior provincial politicians, it should have been possible for Stephen Harper to simultaneously help institutionalize the Conservatives as a national party and to legitimately strengthen the Upper Chamber.
Instead, with all due respect to the men and women making their way to Ottawa, the Prime Minister opted for a b-list of bagmen, mid-level backroom boys and (with the arguable exception of erstwhile B.C. energy minister Richard Neufeld) relatively minor provincial politicians.
The Mulroney era is represented by Suzanne Fortin-Duplessis, a former backbench MP whose Wikipedia entry does not suggest an overly prolific parliamentary career. More recent front-line federal experience comes from Fabian Manning, who spent a couple of years as a backbencher in the House of Commons before being losing his Newfoundland seat in the great Danny Williams Massacre of '08. There are no major Reform figures at all; not even John Reynolds, who seemed like a gimme.
It's unclear as of now why exactly it played out this way. Perhaps Senate seats are harder to give away than they used to be. Or maybe, given his thoughts on the Senate, Harper didn't want to legitimize it by appointing the strongest possible people.
Either way, it seems like a lost opportunity. These were always going to be patronage appointments, but they could have benefited more than just the appointees themselves.
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Update: A slight correction, or at least clarification. Stephen Greene, a newly minted Senator for Nova Scotia, did serve for a time as Preston Manning's chief of staff. It's debatable how much of a major player he was in the Reform movement, but he was at least there.
