HANNAFORD: Charles Adler, the man nobody but Trudeau would have picked for the Senate

What is going on with appointing Charles Adler to the Senate? Do they really know the guy? Or do they know him only too well?Here's the Adler deal. The old blowhard having had the sense to get out of near-bankrupt Corus (in 2021) while the getting was good, will now be received into the Senate at the age of 69 with a $178,000 annual salary. That will take him comfortably over the next six years to mandatory retirement at 75. Thereafter, the genteel poverty of a Senate pension.Thus, he follows the primrose path pioneered by Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Paula Simons… parlay a life of talking about politicians into being invited to become one. It's what they call a soft landing, and let it be acknowledged that however much members of the mediocracy may mock, I can’t think of one who would turn down a Senate appointment if it were offered them.But why Adler? What does he bring to the table? Is his appointment another example of the seemingly endemic Liberal inability to screen people? Or something else?To the point about screening, this was the government after all, that famously introduced an elderly Ukrainian SS veteran to receive a standing ovation in the House of Commons, granted Canadian citizenship to a man with alleged ISIS connections who now stands accused of terrorism crimes in Canada and chose an anti-semite to preside over the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Do they even know Adler is Jewish?Have they never heard of Google? Or Youtube?Had they done so, they would know what Adler said about indigenous people on Radio CJOB Winnipeg… that they were ‘boneheads’ who should ‘get a job.’Yes, it was 25 years ago. But it still seems off-message for the government that without any evidence, accepted the Kamloops narrative of buried bodies and lowered flags on Parliament Hill for six months as an act of national penitence.Ask yourself: Would a Liberal constituency association apprised today of such a comment from a prospective MP candidate even bother to forward their application to party headquarters? Until now, I would have said not a chance; I thought there were things that you can say from which you can never recover.Another one-time radio host I can think of who is now Premier of Alberta would never have got away with something like that.Or, is it all the prime minister’s little joke?Once an apparently reliable voice of conservative, kitchen-table common sense, Adler renounced conservatism years ago over the incipient islamophobia he claimed to see in the party, and declared himself a ‘centrist.’There is nothing magic about the middle, Senator; if you’re a centrist, you blindly go as far left (or right) as the road takes you. It’s not a virtue, it just means you lack a compass. (The Senator gives his perspective here.)Today however, no matter which way Adler’s ideological weathervane is pointing, he certainly has the right Liberal attitude to those plebeians with unacceptable opinions that the prime minister conflates with Canada’s conservatives. Interviewed recently by the leftist singer Jann Arden for her podcast, he called them ‘animals,’ indeed ‘not even human beings.’So, he’s going to fit right in.In fact, ever since he hit 65 and did a complete rebrand, he’s been banging away at Conservatives — Jason Kenney, Danielle Smith, Scott Moe, Andrew Scheer and these days Pierre Poilievre. (Cory Morgan has more on this.)“I don’t think much of Poilievre,” he commented to the National Post, going on to condemn Poilievre’s attacks on the media, an arm of democracy which Adler said the Conservative leader is “abusing.”Not that he’s been uncritical of Mr. Trudeau either.But he has been such a friend to Liberals, that one must question the sincerity of his earlier ‘friendship’ to conservativism. In retrospect, it seems pretty shallow.He reminds me of Mike Duffy, whose interest in a Senate appointment extended back to the Chretien/Martin years. Years before Stephen Harper appointed him to the Red Chamber, the parliamentary press gallery joked about ‘Senator’ Duffy. Later, the joke was that Harper had appointed a ‘Liberal’ senator.To give Duffy his due, he delivered a good Conservative line right up to the scandal that brought him down (and arguably the government that appointed him.)As for Adler, lucky stiff or not, it’s the people making him the offer and the reason that they’re making it that should make us ask this simple question: Did you not check him out, or do you really mean to stand behind comments he made that these days would get him kicked off the air?

HANNAFORD: Charles Adler, the man nobody but Trudeau would have picked for the Senate

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