On the Senate Reference

From Colby Cosh at Macleans,

They have always said that the young Stephen Harper admired Pierre Trudeau. A lot. Harper’s original boss at Imperial Oil once told the Edmonton Journal’s David Staples that Harper, having fled the University of Toronto for the frozen prairie, “thought Trudeau was God.” He is even said to have made himself a nuisance at work by insisting on it. This is in a late ’70s Alberta workplace, mind you. It sounds as though he was a bit fortunate not to get dunked in hot bitumen and feathers.

Alberta turned Harper against the Liberal pantheon of his youth, and his rebellion, in time, triumphed. Yet one notices that the new boss has a suspiciously familiar attitude toward the Constitution. Trudeau tried to patriate the Constitution over the heads of the provincial premiers, dismissing the requirements of federalism for the longest possible time as an irritating nullity. Now Harper wants to either kill or emasculate the Senate: his lawyers are arguing that the former could be done with the consent of only seven provinces, and the latter with none at all.