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The lone Manitoba member of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is less than enthused with the appointment of broadcaster Charles Adler to the Canadian Senate.
On Saturday, the prime minister’s office announced the senate appointments of Adler and Saskatchewan health-care executive Tracy Muggli. The governor general makes the appointments on the advice of the prime minister.
Saint Boniface-Saint Vital Liberal MP Dan Vandal — whose cabinet responsibilities include northern affairs, Prairies Economic Development Canada and the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency — issued a short statement critical of the Adler appointment.
“There are many eminently qualified Manitobans who are better suited to represent our province than Charles Adler,” Vandal said Monday in a statement.
Vandal served as a city councillor and also ran for mayor of Winnipeg when Adler worked as a talk radio host in the Manitoba capital. The MP’s office said he would not comment further on the senate appointment.
PM names broadcaster Charles Adler, health-care executive Tracy Muggli as new senators
Reached by phone in Winnipeg, Adler said he agrees with Vandal.
“Theoretically, without seeing all these names he must be thinking of, if he says that there are people in Manitoba more qualified than your truly to be in the Senate, he’s probably right,” Adler said in an interview.
Manitoba’s population is approximately 1.5 million.
Winnipeg South Centre MP Ben Carr declined to comment on Adler’s appointment, while Winnipeg South MP Terry Duguid and Winnipeg North MP Kevin Lamoureux did not immediately respond to queries from CBC News.
Adler will serve alongside five other Manitoba senators. Their ranks include one Conservative, one member of the centrist Canadian Senators Group and three unaffiliated senators.
Sen. Marilou McPhedran, who was appointed just over one year after Trudeau initially assumed office, said in a statement she was initially surprised by Adler’s appointment to the Senate but took time to review his “contributions to political and social discourse in Canada” over the decades.
“On reflection, I think Mr. Adler will bring to the Senate value-based eloquence and the kind of conservative decency that I grew up with in rural Manitoba as a young conservative when the Hon. Duff Roblin was premier,” said McPhedran, who sits as a non-affiliated senator.
“I look forward to welcoming him as another truly independent colleague in the Red Chamber.”
Sen. Raymonde Gagné, the speaker of the Senate, declined comment on the basis the speaker does not comment on appointments. Sen. Don Plett said he will reserve his comments for the time being.
Sens. Mary Jane McCallum and Gigi Osler did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CBC News.
Vandal’s criticism, which was first reported by Politico, attracted the attention of Calgary-Nose Hill Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner, a former Manitoban.
“A weird, off Liberal message blast for Vandal to send off on the eve of a cabinet shuffle that will undoubtedly be made based on one’s capacity to bootlick,” she tweeted on Monday.
Her party had already criticized Adler’s appointment as a partisan move to advance the prime minister’s agenda, calling Adler “one of Trudeau’s biggest cheerleaders and most vicious anti-Conservative attack dogs in the media” in a statement on Saturday.
Source: cbc
