Mike Duffy's corner

The Canadian Senate, that bastion of pork-barrel privilege, is threatening to suspend, without pay, or benefits, or recourse, Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau, all Stephen Harper appointees.
Or, constitutionally-more-correctly, they were recent appointments by the Queen of Canada in Council, which for practical purposes means much the same thing.
They are, to various degrees, contesting this, although all the available evidence so far is that they are guilty of fairly outrageous piggery, even by the slippery standards of the Canadian Senate.
Therefore it is somewhat to my surprise that I find myself in Mike Duffy's corner.
Also Pamela Wallin's. Maybe even Patrick Brazeau's, although that's going to require rather more effort.
That doesn't mean I'm making an argument in favour of keeping the Senate as it is; quite the contrary: I'm a committed abolitionist.
Anyway, a status-quo Senate is not what's on offer, and what the senators are proposing wouldn't improve the Senate. Rather, what they propose to do would render it even more useless than it already is.
Imagine a Senate with a majority of hyper-partisan appointees in the mould of Duffy and Wallin who had the power to silence those inconvenient senators who didn't agree with that majority. Could anything be more redundant? The whole point of senators being appointed is that they cannot be silenced, unless, in the words of the Wikipedia entry, "…he or she fails to attend the Senate for two consecutive parliamentary sessions. Furthermore, senators lose their seats if they are found guilty of treason, an indictable offence, or any "infamous crime"; are declared bankrupt or insolvent; or cease to be qualified." None of the three the Senate proposes to suspend fit those criteria at present, and even if they did, it shouldn't be up to their fellow-senators to discipline them. Once appointed, any senator who continues to clear that low threshold is in until he or she either quits or turns 75.
That's the law, in spite of the fact that Stephen Harper extracted promises of resignation after 8 years from some present members.
So the Senate has no right to render them ineffective in the senate context, no matter how many orders or entreaties they get from the Prime Minister's office. Only the Queen or Her representative in Canada can sign those papers.
What I particularly appreciate about all this is that Stephen Harper came into office on promises to "reform" the Senate, on promises to make it more relevant. So far he has delivered only a partisan atrocity, an embarrassment of flag-waving Conservative cheerleaders even less relevant than the mostly-irrelevant Liberal majorities that preceded them.
So I'm with Mike, Pam, and maybe even Patrick: long may they be burrs under the Conservative saddle, long may they remind Mr Harper of why his nasty brand of politics is often corrosive, and long may they remind us why we'd be better off without not just them, but the entire institution.