You hate to tell this to our optimistic Prime Minister but occasionally it rains. We were thinking of that when we noted that in the past week, few people really appreciated the government’s feeble, last-minute attempt to manage assisted dying and the Senate was having trouble making the PM’s silly Senate solution functional. The combination was sad but amusing.
The Supreme Court wants a law in place by June that will satisfy the need for control of physician-assisted dying. It does not mean it is a fair law when it seems half of Canadians think it is too restrictive and the other half think it does not go far enough. It just means the people writing the law are too wishy-washy by half!
The only people to benefit from this assisted dying law will be the opposition parties. They will have a field day ripping this piece of legislation to shreds. They can hardly block it but the Senate just might do that for them.
The physician-assisted dying law will have little chance of being passed in a hurry by our dysfunctional Senate. They are too busy arguing whether Justin Trudeau’s selection of an ‘independent’ Senate Leader should have an office budget. Mind you, he and whatever staff he will have are hardly worth close to a million dollars.
Leave it to a bureaucrat such as Peter Harder to get into a fight over his budget. He knows that in Ottawa, if your office budget is less than a million, you are practically a nobody. Where is Harder’s authority if he has no minions to carry out his wishes and bring him coffee?
It just goes to show you how much thought our dear Justin has put into his elitist scheme of things in the Senate. His sad solution is a joke just waiting to implode on him. It is among the stupidest of his promises in last year’s election. (Mind you, promising that the 2015 election will be the last use of first-past-the-post voting in federal elections might also be a mountain too high to leap.)
Without party discipline in the Senate, Trudeau has little hope of any laws moving through that body with any responsible amount of speed. The Conservatives are currently the only caucus left in the Senate and they are hardly in the mood to cooperate with anybody.
Sunny Ways are great but Justin needs to understand: If you play in that barnyard of Ottawa long enough, you will eventually step into some warm and squishy ones.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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