Andrew Coyne/The Globe and Mail: If there were ever an era when Liberals were “not comfortable appointing their friends,” I must have missed it. Should Mark Carney fill the eight remaining vacancies in the Senate with his supporters the result will be a Senate in which 91 of its 105 members were appointed by Liberal prime ministers. There has never been such a lopsided Senate.
Partly for that reason, it’s widely believed that Pierre Poilievre, had he won the last election, would have returned to appointing senators on scrupulously partisan lines, just to even the odds a little.
It should be understood how uniquely Canadian this tradition of venality is. Few democracies allow the head of the executive branch to appoint his own legislative chamber, for starters…