Brandon Sun - PRINT EDITION
Canada’s Red Chamber hasn’t had so much publicity in the summer months in recent memory.
The most recent headline grabber is the Liberal lothario and his decades-younger wife, who are now in hot water after an incident on a jetliner.
The 23-year-old wife of a 69-year-old Manitoba senator was charged with causing a disturbance and uttering threats.
Maygan Sensenberger was charged after an alleged ruckus on a flight from Ottawa last week.
Sen. Rod Zimmer — known as an “ultimate schmoozer” at political functions — was like most senators, out of the public eye. But Zimmer zoomed into a media storm when Sensenberger allegedly threatened him and caused a major disruption on board an Air Canada flight from Ottawa to Saskatoon. She spent three days in jail before being released on Monday.
Zimmer has been a senator for seven years and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Liberal party.
They met through friends, according to Sensenberger’s grandmother, herself one year Zimmer’s junior.
That’s right — she’s married to a man old enough to be her grandfather. That’s not a May-December marriage, that’s a January-December marriage.
Former Manitoba Liberal senator Sharon Carstairs said it was well known Zimmer’s bride was more than four decades his junior, but she said fellow senators shrugged it off.
Well, almost everybody did.
“It was really the cause of a great deal of embarrassment to the party,” one Liberal insider told the media of the relationship.
Another said there was a lot of joking about the relationship on Parliament Hill.
But that’s not the only story emerging out of the Senate in recent times.
This one has a sadder tone to it.
Friends and colleagues of a Liberal senator diagnosed with Alzheimer’s are calling on critics to treat her with dignity as she goes on sick leave — and defending her decision to stay on as long as she did in the Upper Chamber.
Joyce Fairbairn, 73, will not return to the Senate when it resumes in the fall. Her departure had long been expected around Parliament Hill, but friends, family and colleagues have been grappling with the delicate question of exactly how and when to make it happen, reported The Canadian Press.
Despite a legal declaration of incompetence in February, Fairbairn herself had insisted on staying rather than moving back to her hometown of Lethbridge, Alta. The situation has raised questions about the appropriateness of someone in her condition being allowed to continue voting on federal legislation and spending public funds.
Then we have the case of the truant Tory senator.
The youngest senator in the upper chamber also has the poorest attendance record for this session of Parliament.
Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau, 37, was absent for 25 per cent of the 72 sittings between June 2011 and April 2012, the Senate attendance register shows.
“The very simple answer to your question with respect to my attendance or lack thereof is for personal matters,” said Brazeau, former national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.
As an NDP MP later commented, Brazeau is the “latest poster boy” for a democratically challenged institution.
The NDP supports abolishing the Senate.
Currently, senators are appointed by the Governor General on the recommendation of the prime minister and they serve until age 75.
Canada’s 105 senators examine bills and have traditionally served as the sober second thought on all legislation proposed by members of parliament in the House of Commons. A bill cannot become law without the approval of the Senate.
But either the Senate is important and needs to be retained, or it needs to be reformed. But in any case, it needs members who have some common sense, have their wits about them and actually show up for work.
Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition August 30, 2012
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Canada’s Red Chamber hasn’t had so much publicity in the summer months in recent memory.
The most recent headline grabber is the Liberal lothario and his decades-younger wife, who are now in hot water after an incident on a jetliner.
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Canada’s Red Chamber hasn’t had so much publicity in the summer months in recent memory.
The most recent headline grabber is the Liberal lothario and his decades-younger wife, who are now in hot water after an incident on a jetliner.
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Posted by:Bill the Needle
August 30, 2012 at 7:26 AM
The senate is one reason why so many perfectly sensible Canadians see Ottawa as no friend
of theirs.