Trudeau insults Albertans by ignoring senator voting tradition, appoints his own Liberal senator

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Another day, another Laurentian elite slap in the face to Albertans. The disrespect never ends.

Yesterday, Trudeau announced he was appointing a new senator. If you live in a different province, that might seem like a routine thing — having some leader in Ottawa choose who will represent you in the Senate with a gravy, high-paying patronage appointment, a thank you for being a loyal Liberal for basically the rest of their lives. But not here in Alberta.

Here, we choose our own senators. We have for decades. When we hold municipal elections, we elect our senators at the same time, based on the accepted convention and expectation that the prime minister will appoint who we chose for ourselves.

People put forward their names and usually run under a party banner. But Trudeau knows Albertans would never choose a Liberal senator, after all the Liberals have done to us — blocked pipelines, phased out our jobs, carbon taxed the industry they didn’t kill, caused trade wars that hurt our farmers and grabbed our guns. So yesterday, Trudeau disregarded the will of the entire Alberta electorate. And appointed his own senator, even as we head to the polls to make our own choice in October.

Trudeau appointed the mayor of Banff, Karen Sorenson. And she was happy to take the $161,000 annual salary for the rest of her working life, plus top ups. She was fine to just steal that job from the person Albertans were going to choose, without an ounce of shame. Who does that? Except a Liberal in Alberta, I guess.

If Sorenson thought Albertans wanted her as a senator, why didn’t she just put her name forward? She didn’t, because she knew she’d lose. Easier to just steal the job I guess. How unethical. Oh, and we are all to believe she is an “independent senator.” Look how independent she is in this photo with another quota appointment, disastrous infrastructure minister Catherine McKenna, most recently famous for losing track of 9,000 infrastructure projects.

And here she is gushing over getting a selfie with the sock model in the PMO.

Naturally, Premier Jason Kenney was outraged, issuing a statement that said, “the prime minister's decision to snub his nose at Alberta's democratic tradition is part of a pattern of flippantly disregarding our province’s demands for fair deal in the Canadian federation and the desire of Albertans for democratic accountability.”

We should not have been surprised by this, though. In 2018, Trudeau also appointed another so-called independent senator, former Edmonton Sun columnist Paula Simons, to the senate, overlooking the last one we Albertans elected, a man named Mike Shaikh. And just like Sorenson, Simons happily stole the job from the man we chose to do it, even after she had railed against the unaccountable unelected in the past. I guess she realized being a print journalist is a dead end sunset industry job. She spent the pandemic bragging about her ability to be a shut-in, and not leave the house. These people are so gross. Not even an apology to Shaikh after she stole his job and our votes.

And for being so-called independent, Simons sure likes to support the Liberal government against the will of Albertans, like with her support of pipeline killer C-69.

And this carries on the long standing Liberal tradition of disrespecting our choices. Jean Chrétien appointed Tommy Banks to the Senate instead of Bert Brown, the Reform candidate chosen by Albertans in 1998.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if Trudeau were a plant put there by western separatists, would he be doing anything differently?