Prime Minister Stephen Harper's recent appointment of two former MPs to top government posts is rekindling criticism of his failure to keep a 2006 campaign promise to curb patronage.

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) said the favours for former Reform and Conservative MPs—along with the spectacle over the past year-and-a-half of more than 20 Senate seats going to friends and former aides of Prime Minister Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.), defeated candidates and Conservative supporters—contribute to cynicism that keeps young voters away from the ballot box in droves.

"When politics is done this way, it disengages young people," Mr. Trudeau said after news that the government had given senior federal positions to former Reform MP Jim Silye and Carol Skelton, a former Conservative MP and onetime revenue minister for Mr. Harper.

"We have right now a generation of young people who are more interested, more knowledgeable, more engaged with the world around them than any previous generation," Mr. Trudeau told The Hill Times. "However, their interest in politics is lower than it's ever been. Only one out of five young people between the ages of 18 and 25 actually bothered to vote in the last election."

NDP MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, Man.), frustrated after the crucial role he played in getting the government's Accountability Act through the House of Commons, said Prime Minister Harper's approach to public appointments is no different than the "magic Rolodex" that gave Liberal supporters federal posts under successive governments.

And Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch, reaching for even more dramatic phrases to replenish spent ammunition after four years of attacking Prime Minister Harper on the accountability front, calls Conservative appointments "unethical and dangerous to democracy."

The latest appointments went by with little notice in the media, possibly because it has become almost business as usual, possibly because it got lost in Twitter and the relentless cycle of web page news and blogs. But over the past two weeks Prime Minister Harper and his cabinet named Mr. Silye, a former Calgary Reform Party and Progressive Conservative MP, as chair of the board of the federal Museum of Science and Nature in Ottawa. Ms. Skelton became a member of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, responsible for civilian oversight of Canada's spy agency—the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Her government appointment resume lists her pre-political job experience as a coordinator for Canadian Blood Services, with experience in organizations ranging from 4-H to the Royal Canadian Legion.

In the past, Prime Minister Harper's Cabinet appointed two other former Reform and Conservative MPs to federal positions. Former Red Deer, Alta., MP Bob Mills, once a Conservative environment critic in the House of Commons, became a member of the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. Former Edmonton MP Ian McClelland was named the federal government's director at Edmonton's Northlands recreational complex.

Opponents say the latest postings are just salt in the wound after the accumulation of Prime Minister Harper's appointments to the Senate and hundreds of Conservative patronage appointments to boards, agencies and tribunals since 2006. They note the Prime Minister has yet to implement the independent commission to review federal appointments that he first promised during the campaign for the federal election that year.

Prime Minister Harper's Senate choices have included Doug Finley, national campaign director for the Conservative party during the past two elections, Don Plett, the Winnipeg businessman who still serves as the party's president, Carolyn Stewart Olsen, Prime Minister Harper's longtime press secretary, Stephen Greene, who was a chief of staff for former Reform Party Leader Preston Manning, Fabian Manning, a former Conservative MP from Newfoundland and Labrador, Irving Gerstein, the party's chief fundraiser, Yonah Martin, a former Conservative election candidate in Vancouver, and a string of former provincial Conservative lawmakers and organizers. The total is now at least 22 partisan choices out of the 33 Senators Prime Minister Harper has named since he began filling vacant Senate seats in January 2009. His first appointment in 2007 was Bert Brown, an Albertan who had been earlier nominated through a provincial election process.

Mr. Trudeau, the Liberal critic responsible for youth policies in the Commons, said the value system represented by Mr. Harper's decision to favour Conservative supporters and organizers for federal posts is corrosive, especially among young voters. But it benefits Mr. Harper as election turnout declines.

"He makes everybody know that it's better to be a friend of his, it's much better to support him because there might be goodies in it for you," said Mr. Trudeau. "He actually fosters and encourages cynicism about politics, and the more people are cynical about politics, the more voter participation goes down, the more successful he is because he knows he can mobilize his base. Making the appointments system much more based on merit rather than partisanship is a way of restoring faith in general in the political system, particularly for young people who want to see politics as a way of making a difference in the world, but who do not see that it is."

The son of former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau said the appointment of qualified young people to some of the federal boards and agencies now going to political friends of the government would be a step forward.

"You have this climate of cynicism that we absolutely have to deconstruct and one really key way of doing it is to look at these panels and the amount of boards, of organizations, that deal with young people, that are engaged in young peoples' issues, that do not have any young people actually sitting on these boards," he said.

Mr. Martin, the veteran and gritty Winnipeg MP who spent much of his political career battling similar patronage dispensation by previous Liberal governments, said "next to blatant corruption, nothing offends Canadians as much as patronage—that 'who-you-know' kind of appointment process the Conservatives promised to end. Without the Public Appointments Commission [Prime Minister Harper promised] we have no such assurance. In fact, in many cases, you can be sure the appointments process is pure political pork."

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