Conservative Senators Prove They Can Steal Like Conservative MPs

When Bob Runciman was in Mike Harris's cabinet in Ontario, he got into trouble for releasing the name of a young offender. After much public backlash Harris was forced to demote him, though only temporarily.

He has been part of the neoconservative Reform movement for some time. A former member of the Alliance for the Preservation of English, the group that burned and stomped on a Quebec flag in Brockville, because of bilingualism, he is clearly a devotee.

So learning that he has been abusing our tax dollars to campaign for his party should not come as a surprise.

Is this the first time he's done it, or the first time he got caught?

And he says that the party itself gave him his instructions, after already being in trouble for wasting so many of our tax dollars on this practice.

When is it going to end?

Conservative Senators are quietly using taxpayer-funded literature to target opposition ridings with a partisan crime message as the party gears up for the next election, the Toronto Star has learned. And at least one of the Senators sent the mailers out at the direction of the Conservative Party of Canada’s national campaign office.

That Senator was Bob Runciman (Ontario). It is not clear whether Senator Don Plett (Manitoba), who distributed almost identical material, did so at the behest of the party. The tactic of Senators using their office budgets to demonize Liberal MPs in their own ridings is unheard of and an affront to the Senate’s role as a chamber of sober second thought, Liberal Senator Jim Munson, said in an interview.

So many things are unheard of with this government. We've never seen anything like it.

[Anita] Neville also said that the Senators’ “tough on crime” message was hard to take seriously, since Prime Minister Stephen Harper killed 18 justice bills – virtually his entire law and order agenda –when he prorogued Parliament for the third time last January. “These mailings are another example of why the Conservatives are the biggest-borrowing, biggest-spending government in Canadian history ... In their mind, taxpayers’ money means free money that they can waste as they please ...

This Harper crony must resign.