🇨🇦 Independent Senate, except for the PM’s friends

Mark Carney’s first Senate stamp is pure Ottawa comedy: appoint his own senior adviser Tom Pitfield, parachute in outgoing Conservative MP Richard Martel, then slap the Independent label on both and call it reform. So the Trudeau model that preached nonpartisanship for a decade suddenly gets revised the moment the new manager wants his own people in red robes. Even the analysis admits the spectre of a return to old-school patronage.

This is how the Laurentian machine preserves itself: rebrand patronage as modernization, centralize power, then sell the public a fairy tale about independence. We are told the Senate became nobler because it amended 37 bills since 2016, compared with one from 2011 to 2015. Fine. It also became a playground for unelected insiders with zero democratic mandate. Carney is not breaking the system. He is revealing what it always was: an elite holding pen for party operators, now wrapped in technocratic perfume. Sovereignty does not mean rule by banker-prime ministers and their advisory boards.

🍁 Maple Chronicles