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Article by Rebel News staff

Tonight, on The Ezra Levant Show, Mark Carney has bribed another Conservative MP — and the Toronto press thinks that's hilarious.

Richard Martel, the Conservative MP for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Quebec, has been appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Mark Carney. That means a byelection will open up in his riding, and it will most likely go to the Liberals.

This is not the will of the people in that riding. It is not the output of Canada's democratic process, messy as that process is.

Call it a Rube Goldberg machine, if you like — one of those goofy contraptions that, in a very complicated way, accomplishes a very simple task. Canadian democracy is exactly that messy. Parties hold nomination battles. Candidates go door to door. They sign up members and convince them to pay the fee to join the party, then make sure those members turn out on nomination day.

Ezra, who briefly ran for office in Calgary South about 30 years ago, knows the process well: the door knocking, the memberships, the turnout operation, the constant balancing of conscience against duty to the riding and to the party. It is complicated, noisy and imperfect by design. Authoritarianism, by contrast, is faster, easier and simpler. But that busyness is the stuff of democracy, and it is also an excellent test of the candidate.

That messy process elected Martel in his riding eight years ago. He first won in a 2018 by-election. He rose to become the party's Quebec lieutenant. Just one week ago, he accepted a position in the shadow cabinet. Instead of any of that continuing, there was simply a bribe.

What was offered is not publicly known. Money? Power? Influence? Access? Donations? Nobody has said. What is known is that Mark Carney ran a secret, parallel process that delivered his desired result without going anywhere near the Rube Goldberg machine of actual democracy — no door knocking, no memberships, no messy business at all. Get to the Senate, and the rest takes care of itself.

The delight among Canada's regime media over this outcome has been universal, and the person they are busy criticizing is not Mark Carney. It is Pierre Poilievre.

The Globe and Mail's headline on the story: "The humiliation of Pierre Poilievre continues."

The Globe called the move a smart one by Carney, noting it shrinks the Conservative caucus by one while opening a by-election in a Quebec riding the Tories held by only a handful of votes over the Bloc in the last general election. Given recent by-election results elsewhere in Quebec, the paper suggested Carney has a good shot at adding another Liberal seat.

The Globe went on to needle Poilievre further, noting that despite winning support from more than 87 percent of delegates at a leadership review in January, he has since lost two floor-crossers and watched a Liberal majority form. The suggestion in the article is that Poilievre is holding on for dear life.

That is how it reads from the Globe and Mail's newsroom in Toronto. It does not reflect how party members actually see it. Parliament is not treated as a game by most Canadians the way it apparently is by the commentariat at the Globe and Mail, who find bribery a source of amusement rather than a subject for scrutiny.

Speaking of bribery, Section 119 of the Criminal Code of Canada is not something Canadians are likely to see cited on the CBC, CTV, Global, or in the Globe and Mail. It reads, in full:

Every one is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years who… being the holder of a judicial office, or being a member of Parliament or of the legislature of a province, directly or indirectly, corruptly accepts, obtains, agrees to accept or attempts to obtain, for themselves or another person, any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by them in their official capacity, or directly or indirectly, corruptly gives or offers to a person mentioned in paragraph (a) or to any one for the benefit of that person, any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by them in their official capacity.

In plain terms: if someone promises another person a political office — such as a Senate appointment — in exchange for doing something else — like resigning a seat — that can be treated as a bribe under Section 119. Whether that happened here is a fair question. The optics, at minimum, invite it.

Martel landed one of the richest appointments available in Ottawa: a Senate seat until age 75, fully paid, with no further elections and none of the demanding work of building a riding organization ever again. Martel is only 65, meaning a full decade of power and pay without further campaigning. In exchange, he stepped down from the House of Commons, clearing the way for Mark Carney's Liberals to contest the byelection.

But of course, all of that slips the mind of the media establishment. After all, several factions have an interest in undermining Poilievre right now.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has floated the idea of becoming prime minister himself; premiers do not typically bring television cameras to the Calgary Stampede unless they are positioning for a bigger job. Ford's allies have reason to chip away at Poilievre's standing.

Then there is the media itself, including the conservative-branded panellists who appear on CTV, CBC and Global. Decades ago, a Newfoundland lobbyist named Tim Powers appeared regularly on television as a conservative strategist despite having no real connection to the Reform Party of the day and disagreeing openly with its leader, Preston Manning. Networks billed him as the voice of the right anyway. Lobbyists like him appear on air less to represent a party's views than to advertise their own access and influence to prospective clients. The pattern has not changed: conservative-branded pundits, Doug Ford's camp and Toronto's editorial boards can all land on the same anti-Poilievre note, and it will look, on television, like consensus.

It is not the consensus. It is the inside track — the Parliament Hill people, the lobbyist class, the Laurentian elite — talking to itself. Meanwhile, in Alberta, this is exactly the kind of story that reinforces the sense that the rules Ottawa enforces on ordinary people do not apply to its own political and media class.

Rebel News will continue following the byelection call for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord and whether any authority examines Richard Martel's Senate appointment under the provisions of the Criminal Code written specifically for cases like this one.

GUEST: Lorne Gunter of the Edmonton Journal.