John Oliver has established a reputation for putting the flame under those in power on his HBO show "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver." This makes his take on the Canadian Senate spending scandal all the more mystifying since he missed some juicy red meat.
Oliver focused on the folksiness of the expenses of some Canadian senators, including fishing trips, hockey tickets and a curling club anniversary.
"This scandal could not be any more Canadian if public money was used to get Drake to drink maple syrup on Niagara Falls."
Oliver also pointed out that Canada spent $24 million on an audit that found nearly $1 million in misappropriated funds.
These points were all true, and admittedly this wasn't the 13-minute rants that Oliver is more known for on his show. But Oliver and his team missed the bigger picture about Canada and the Senate and the spending scandal. In the spirit of fair play, let's help out Oliver and his show with a few juicy nuggets.
- Mike Duffy is the primary reason the senators were audited in the first place. Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau played their fair share in the push for the audit but Duffy's trial is going on right now.
- Duffy has been charged with receiving a $90,000 bribe from the then chief of staff Nigel Wright in the Harper government. Wright wrote the check from his own personal account to help bury the story of the Senate expenses. Duffy has been charged with receiving a bribe yet Wright was not charged with giving that bribe. Major hypocrisy.
- The Senate is unelected and not accountable in Canada. The Senate makes the rules that Duffy and other senators are considered to have violated. Oliver's British heritage of the House of Lords is more similar to Canada's circumstance, even if Canada uses the term "senators" rather than "lords."
- If a senator gets in trouble, they are usually stripped of their party status in the Canadian Senate. So when Duffy, Wallin, and Brazeau got into trouble, the Conservative Party stripped them of being Conservative senators. They would still vote as conservatives but they got the advantage of being called former Conservatives yet were still senators. That is comedy gold.
- Occasionally, losing candidates for the House of Commons end up being senators in Canada. The will of the people was that these people weren't good enough to be in the lower body but the power structure allowed them to be fine enough to be in the upper body.
- Duffy and Wallin are former TV journalists brought to the Senate in part for their ability to communicate. Clearly that backfired for the Harper Government.
- Duffy is accused of living in Ottawa and claiming that he lived in Prince Edward Island. Comedy gold? Maybe not, especially if people don't really know PEI too well.
- Jacques Demers is a sitting Conservative senator that admitted to be functionally illiterate. If Oliver wants to mock the idea of the Canadian Senate, Demers is a good example. Perhaps a cheap shot, and Demers is clearly smart in many ways, but the idea of a senator being in that situation is worth a mention.
Oliver does get points for mentioning Sen. Nancy Ruth and her take in airline breakfasts. As Oliver noted, it's difficult to get sympathy when you use the word Camembert.
We have faith that Oliver can be funny about Canada. Saying Canada is essentially 5 hockey rinks guarded by bears was pretty funny. And Oliver did correctly point out that Rob Ford still sits on the Toronto City Council.
All this comes on the heels of the 2015 Canadian federal election. The Daily Show will have a new host by then in Trevor Noah, and its Canadian connections — Samantha Bee and Jason Jones — are long gone. The Nightly Show might touch on the subject, but has found more comedy gold in domestic issues. The Colbert Report would have gone nuts with this story, but while Stephen Colbert is alive, the show is dead.
John Oliver might be the only U.S. TV option to touch on the Canadian political landscape from now until October 19. So we want his show to know as much about Canadian politics as can be found for that comedy gold.
video credit: YouTube/LastTonightWeek
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