The date of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost wholly irrelevant. A diagnosis merely creates an opportunity for treatment that might slow the destructive progress of the disease. But the decline of patient's facilities is apparent for months, and often years, before that dreaded diagnosis comes. As Monica Crowley recounted in her book Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, Richard Nixon commented on Ronald Reagan's apparent befuddlement more than a year before Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As a matter of fact, President Nixon died almost six months before President Reagan's final letter to the American people was written.
As much as some people would like to pretend differently, the story of Senator Joyce Fairbairn isn't about Alzheimer’s. It isn't even so much about Senator Fairbairn herself, despite the wishes of certain partisans to make it so. More precisely, it is about how politics is often crueller than even Alzheimer’s.
Canadians were told last week that Senator Fairbairn was declared legally incompetent in April, and a declaration to that effect was signed by her party's leader in the Senate, James Cowan. Such a declaration would prevent Joyce Fairbairn from buying or selling a home or stock, or testifying in a trial. I can't imagine that she would be legally allowed to drive a car. It did not, however, prevent her from voting in the Senate.
By the point that someone is declared legally incompetent from dementia - something that doctors and judges decidedly do not do frivolously - they often don't know where they are or why they're there. People that they've known their entire lifetimes are strangers to them. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my grandmother spent several years thinking that I was my grandfather, who died about six months before I was born.
Being taken to the Senate chamber every day and sitting there must be a terrifying ritual for the Ms. Fairbairn. God only knows what air travel to and from Alberta must out her through, Remember, this is a woman that requires 24-hour-a-day constant care. And in her moments of clarity, she is very likely tortured by what's happening to her by being reminded of the honourable office that she holds to this day and her inability to carry out its duties. I cannot possibily imagine what this must be doing to her, despite having seen it in close proximity myself.
When I first heard the story, I wondered to myself why the Senator was still in office. If her disease progressed so rapidly that the declaration of legal incompetence was a shock to her and the Liberal Party, that would be one thing. It would also be highly unusual, since Alzheimer's - a slowly degenerative disease - almost never works that way. I suspected that something deeper, and more darkly political was afoot.
In this morning's National Post, Jonathan Kay confirms my suspicions.
“Jim Cowan [is] a serious guy who was appointed to the Senate Liberal leadership by Paul Martin,” he told me. “He has no control over the Senate Liberals, because the most active are Chrétien appointees who have nothing but contempt for the Martin gang. So even if Jim wanted to do the right thing, my bet is the Chrétienites … insisted that [Joyce Fairbairn] be kept in the Chamber despite her illness. They are [allegedly unprincipled individuals] who sent a member of Joyce’s staff to her house every day; to bring her to work when they knew she was ill. All this not to help her, but to delay [Stephen Harper] from appointing another elected Alberta senator to replace her. Watch what happens next. They will try to claim she is on ‘sick leave’ for the next two years. Just another way to [delay] the pick, and use her office budget to hire staff to work on party politics.”
“Their game now,” he added, will be to “attack the nasty Tories” for making an issue of Fairbairn. “These guys have no shame.”
He also added that “the PMO is urging us to keep quiet, because they fear the Liberals will find some way to blame us.” Thus his refusal to let me use his name.
According to this veteran Conservative Senator, Fairbairn’s saga has been going on at least since 2009. Since then, he says, “we [Senators] have been quietly asked not to challenge Joyce in Committee or the Chamber, because she wasn’t well. This game of being ‘nice’ has been going on for too long.”Kay's source, it should be noted, is "a veteran Conservative Senator," so his motives might be less than pure. But it certainly conforms to how politics works. And I include in this the allusion to "being 'nice.'"
This isn't, according to the Conservative Senator, a matter of party politics, at least not entirely. It's a continuation, in the most inhumane way imaginable, of the Chrétien-Martin civil war within the Liberal Party of Canada itself. That makes this story even more repugnant than it otherwise would be. And it would otherwise be plenty repugnant.
It seems logical to conclude that Senator Fairbairn is being kept in office for no other reason than that the Liberals want to hold her seat for as long as possible. My foreign readers should know that the Canadian Senate is an body appointed by the Prime Minister, in this case the Conservative Stephen Harper.
Of course, that only delays the inevitable. Under Canadian law, Senators are required to retire at 75, which Senator Fairbairn does in the fall of 2014, well before the next federal election. Harper will name her replacement, sooner or later. Until then, her staff is literally dragging her across Ottawa and sometimes across the country. And at any given time she might not know who those people are, where she's being taken, or why.
But there's money involved. Even if Joyce Fairbairn is on medical leave, the Grits will continue to be allowed to exploit her office budget to the party's political ends. And that's truly despicable. A political party that can't get along with one another is using a desperately ill woman for money and politics. This might be one of the more personally awful things that I've heard about in politics. And if Jonathan Kay and his Conservative source are correct, this has been ongoing since sometime in 2009, not this past April.
But it gets worse. Because Liberals are Liberals, they're hiding their own conduct behind the shield of Senator Fairbairn's savage suffering. Their more rabid partisans are threatening to exploit the frailties of Conservative MPs and Senators should anyone treat l'affaire Fairbairn with anything other than complete silence.
To that I say, "Good."
I haven't voted for the Conservatives in well over a decade, and everything about Harper's governance has affirmed the correctness of that decision. I carry no water for them whatsoever. If anything, the Tory insistence on becoming the Liberals causes me to hold them in even greater contempt than I hold the Grits. And I wasn't sure that I was capable of that.
More importantly, the people need to know if their constitutional representatives, whether elected or appointed, are in any way impaired from carrying out their duties, either physically, ethically or morally. An uninformed democracy isn't a democracy at all, and we're plenty uninformed without some insider code of silence that prevents us from knowing everything we should.
You might recall that I didn't share the conservative (large or small "C") outrage when Public Safety Minister Vic Towes' divorce pleadings were leaked by a Liberal staffer. That's exactly the kind of thing the people should know about those at the very top of the legal establishment of the nation, especially when they consciously compare their political opponents to child pornographers.
As a Manitoba Cabinet minister, Towes was responsible for naming judges to the bench and he presumes to become a Court of Appeal judge himself. And the Conservatives who were outraged by the Towes story are themselves hypocrites, given the fun they had with the story of Jack Layton's massage parlour arrest in the 90's, which was almost certainly leaked by the Liberals.
I'm of the opinion that Adam Carroll (aka Vikileaks) and Anonymous performed a valuable public service. If the Liberals want to seek "vengeance" by exposing lawmakers in situations similar to Senator Fairbairn's, I'm actually okay with that.
But I know they won't. They'll report seeing a Member drunk in a bar or doing something that in no way impairs their legislative duties. The Liberals (and in fairness, the Conservatives increasingly) are masters of false equivilience.
I have yet to see anyone, anyone at all, treat Senator Joyce Fairbairn unfairly except the Liberal Party of Canada. To keep her in Ottawa when she's been legally declared unable to fulfill her constitutional duties is nothing short of a national disgrace. And to do it for reasons of political advantage and money should tell you everything you need to know about the people doing it. This has nothing to do with Senator Fairbairn and everything to do with the political apparatus that surrounds her.
At this point, I would normally go on a 300-plus word, wildly entertaining rant about why the Liberals no longer deserve to exist. Today, I don't have to. Their actions make my argument far better than I ever could.
Update - 4:19 PM: Ah, I see it's already begun. I do hope that this column names names, gives dates and cites specifics, allowing those involved to defend their reputations in a court of law against its author and the media conglomerate that publishes him. If the column doesn't do that, then you again know everything you need to about the author and publisher.
It's very probably yet another chickenshit attempt to defend the indefensible without having the courage to do it honestly, instead relying on blackmail.
Of course, the coulmn could cite dead politicians, cleverly protecting himself and his publisher from libel action. I wouldn't expect anything less.
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