A wise man knows when it’s time to move on.

Former Premier Lord showed great wisdom in his decision to step down as Leader of New Brunswick’s Conservative Party earlier this week. He is a young man with unique curriculum vitae.

How many forty year olds do you know with a law degree and seven years experience as the premier of a province?

Former U.S. General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him”.

Bernard Lord has wisely chosen to make his own future. My guess is that future will take him back to the law or maybe to the vocation of rainmaker. In a year or two, he could choose to run for the leadership of the federal Conservative Party. In seven or eight years, he might even decide he wants to run again for the job of premier. Whatever, we wish him well.

Mr. Lord’s close friend in Ottawa is another story.

On Wednesday, he introduced a bill in the House of Commons that would ask Canadians to vote in Senate plebiscites to wit results would instruct the Prime Minister as to whom he (or she) should appoint to the Senate. What a waste of money!

Under the current system, the Prime Minister selects senators without public input. The prime minister passes his selection to the Governor General, who makes the official appointment.

There are already Senate elections in Alberta and British Columbia, but they are non-binding and the results are traditionally ignored by the prime minister. The new bill, if passed into law, would allow Harper to make changes (e.g. limit terms to eight years) to the Senate without opening the Constitution.

Voters would be asked in plebiscite to rank their favorite candidates for the Senate in order of preference. There would be no limit on the number of people who could run and the qualifications required for a senator would not change. Presumably, these plebiscites would be run every time a Senate vacancy occurs until such time as the total population of the Senate is made up of individuals recommended to the Prime Minister by voters.

While the bill would ask voters to choose their preferred candidates for the Senate, the Prime Minister would still make the final decision in terms of the appointment(s). So what’s the point?

Conservatives defend the bill by suggesting that it simply "expands the group of people the prime minister consults with". Mr. Harper characterizes his bill as “Senate reform”. You cannot reform the Senate without Constitutional change and you can’t change the Constitution without agreement of the provinces.

The Constitution Act of 1982 makes clear that Constitutional change requires “resolutions of the legislative assemblies of at least two-thirds of the provinces that have, in the aggregate, according to the then latest general census, at least fifty per cent of the population of all the provinces”.

In my view, Mr. Harper’s Senate bill is a joke, just smoke and mirrors, one designed to confuse Canadians, much like his ludicrous bill to “recognize the Québecois as a nation within Canada”.

If Mr. Harper was serious about Senate reform, he would start with the reallocation of seats. The Maritime Provinces have a disproportionate number of seats in the Senate based on their founding status in Canada. That’s a good thing because it gives the Maritimes a voice in national affairs that would be missing if the Senate was based on representation by population.

Harper is not alone in his foolhardiness. The leader of the Bloc Québecois has announced he will introduce a motion in February on the question of Canada’s role in Afghanistan. His initiative would call on the Parliament of Canada to define Canada’s mandate in Afghanistan as a reconstruction mission as distinct from a hunt and kill mission. If Parliament disagrees, Duceppe threatens to introduce a non-confidence motion to defeat the Government and plunge the Country into an election.

The Bloc motion is specious. The party only has 51 seats in Parliament. The Conservatives have 124 seats. To upset the Government, the Bloc would have to attract the support of both the Liberals and the NDP. The NDP is on record in opposition to the Afghanistan mission but the Liberals are compromised. They took Canada to Afghanistan but the Conservatives extended the mission to 2009 and quietly changed the mandate.

Stéphane Dion is uncomfortable with the Conservative mission and sensitive to the fact that some 62% of Quebecers (as distinct from 48% of Canadians) oppose Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Therein lays the Bloc Québecois’ ploy. Force the Liberals to support its motion to grow its Quebec support or join with the rest of Canada to oppose Quebec. Not a pretty choice!

The intent of the Bloc Québecois motion is to force the Official Opposition to subvert its judgment in respect to life and death considerations in Afghanistan to the political imperatives of Quebec.

Canada and its NATO Allies went to Afghanistan to chase down the perpetrators of 9/11 and help with reconstruction of the country after the capture of Osama Bin Laden. The Americans quickly abandoned the hunt and turned their attention to Iraq.

Three years later, the Taliban has re-grouped and the war is on.

For Gilles Duceppe, the issue is not Canada’s role in Afghanistan. The issue is Quebec. If Duceppe introduces his non-confidence motion, the Liberals should introduce a preemptive motion that would render impotent the immoral debate proposed by Duceppe and replace it with a national debate on Canada’s role in Afghanistan.

Perhaps there is a role for Mr. Lord in this debate. He could serve as an arbiter between the Liberals and the Bloc Québecois

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com