There is some drama going down at the Senate’s internal economy committee over Senator Donna Dasko’s poll on the Senate appointment process. Conservative senators say the poll is really partisan and should be a personal expense, whereas Dasko says they just don’t like the results and are trying to shoot the messenger. But I will have to say that I’m leaning more toward the Conservative side on this one because Senator Yuen Pau Woo – the “facilitator” of the Independent Senators Group – and others have been using this poll to push the Senate appointment process as an election issue, knowing full well that Andrew Scheer plans a return to partisan appointments and Jagmeet Singh follows the NDP dogma of preferring to abolish the Senate (but good luck getting the unanimous consent of the provinces). That is de facto partisan, whether Woo and the Independents believe it to be or not (and it’s somewhat galling that they don’t see this as being partisan, and yet they refuse to engage in the horse trading on managing bills in the Senate, because they see that as a partisan activity when it most certainly is not).

We all know that I didn’t find the poll particularly illuminating, because it could have asked Canadians if they wanted a pony and would have achieved similar results. I do especially find it objectionable that these senators are using it to justify their world view of the Senate, which is and of itself a problem – their particular disdain for everything that came before, dismissing it as being partisan and hence evil and wrong, is part of what has caused the myriad of problems the Senate is now facing with its Order Paper crisis and committees that aren’t functioning, because they don’t understand how Parliament or politics works and they don’t care to. But now they have a poll to point to that says that Canadians like the independent appointments process, as though that justifies everything. It doesn’t and it creates more problems in the long term.

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau spent the weekend in Chicago, where his mother is currently performing a one-woman show about her life at Second City.
• Thank Hermes that Carla Qualtrough remains one of the most plainspoken ministers in this government, as she weighed in on the Mark Norman situation here.
• Here’s a look at how the government is trying to balance the pressure put upon it by the Indian government to deal with Sikh extremism, while not alienating Sikhs here.
• Here’s a look at the pipeline of black market firearms in Canada, which also includes straw buyers and increasingly home-made weapons.
• New Zealand is thanking Canada for its work in stopping online extremist materials in the wake of the Christchurch massacre.
• The Secretary General of the UN is concerned that the world is not on track to meet the Paris climate targets.
• Liberal MPs are getting hostile about Google’s decision to ban all election advertising because they didn’t have enough lead time to comply with new laws.
• The opposition are pushing for an emergency meeting of the national defence committee to probe the Mark Norman affair.
• Elizabeth May says she’s not reaching out for Liberal or Conservative voters, but rather those who don’t vote at all.
• The countdown is on for Alberta to start lowering taxes in a bid to regain the mythical “Alberta Advantage” without looking at the full economic picture.
• Kevin Carmichael examines the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s election wish list and finds that while it aligns with the government, they still talk past one another.
• Susan Delacourt notes how odd it is that such a loudly self-proclaimed feminist government won’t treat gun control as a women’s issue.

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