Text size

E-mail this column

Senator visits and the big ticket

Mike W. Bryant
Staff columnist
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Previous columns 

There have been a lot of senators around lately and I suppose we have to thank our own, Nick Sibbeston, for the pleasure of their company.

Three years ago, the good senator told this newspaper it was doubtful that Ottawa politicians and bureaucrats really think much of the North at all.

"The North is not a big ticket item to them," he said.

Judging by the parade of crimson chamber dwellers to the NWT in recent years that seems to have changed, at least in respect to these esteemed members of the Canadian Senate.

Back in February, the North welcomed the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry - even though there is little of either here - to hold hearings on rural poverty. Last week, we were visited by the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment, and Natural Resources, who were here to hear about how climate change was affecting the North.

The Conservative members of the Agriculture and Forestry committee passed on their opportunity to visit, saying it was a waste of time and money.

Such thoughts apparently didn't enter the mind of the lone Conservative member among the party of six to make this latest trip, Bert Brown, appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper last summer.

A $200,000 junket across the North to study how many polar bears have been turning into grolar bears? Well, why not? I suppose sending a senate committee to study climate change in the North makes more sense than sending us the one with agriculture and forestry in their title.

But then again, I'm not really sure what they're going to do - and can do - with the information once they get it. I was always under the impression that the job of senators was to review legislation not make it.

Of course, there will be a report and the committee, I'm sure, will do their best to make sure the media is aware of it. What good that will do, I don't know.

The current prime minister has made it plainly obvious that he doesn't care all that much for senators, Conservative or otherwise (mostly otherwise) so I doubt he is going to take yet another - there are 17 senate committees all together - senate committee report all that seriously, especially one trumpeted by a former band leader, as in Tommy Banks.

And of course, this senate committee isn't the first bunch to jump on the climate change bandwagon.

The International Polar Year, which is actually going on for two years, has enlisted an army of scientists and researchers to tackle this important problem.

It's such a big deal that it's got Mayor Gord Van Tighem musing openly about plunking down a giant research station on top of Con Mine, one I'm sure will rival the Moonraker station built by James Bond's nemesis Hugo Drax. I'm personally hoping our municipal enforcement manager Doug Gillard will take on the role of Jaws once it opens.

In any event, it's easy to imagine Sibbeston, Banks and company will have a difficult time eking out their share of face time even when they blow hundreds of thousands dollars and travel around with a platoon of executive assistants.

Sibbeston, I should mention, is a great guy; an intelligent, kind and thoughtful man, except maybe when pontificating on gays. As long as we continue on with a "chamber of second, sober thought," then he's the right man for the job.

But the North, in my estimation, is a "big ticket" among the elected class in Ottawa these days, which makes all these senate visits seem like a much ignored and expensive second fiddle.