The sordid tale of Senator Don Meredith and the release of the Senate Ethics Officer's report into his conduct has prompted universal condemnation and calls from all sides for his resignation. But with Meredith unwilling to leave of his own accord, we are about to see a test of the Senate's ability to police itself.
Despite what you may hear from a number of pundits and TV hosts, the Senate has a clear ability to police itself. Just because the kinds of ethics breaches that the SEO has found are not enumerated in Section 31 of the Constitution with regards to an automatic expulsion order from the Senate things like bankruptcy or being convicted of a felony the Senate has parliamentary privileges that don't fall under that section. Why is this important? Because Parliament is a self-governing institution, and it needs the ability to police itself. While the Auditor General may have been horrified by the fact that the Senate makes its own rules, that's actually a feature and not a bug when it comes to the practice of Responsible Government.
The ability for a body that has institutional independence to police its own is well established. We see it with judges and the Canadian Judicial Council, as the recent brouhaha around Justice Robin Camp (of the infamous "knees together" comment) proved when they recommended his removal from the bench. Camp had enough wherewithal to resign before Parliament could vote to remove him. The House of Commons has expelled its own members on several occasions (though few in recent memory), though there was talk about the possibility of needing to do so recently when the revelations about Dean Del Mastro's illegal campaign activities came to light before he too resigned.
While the bar for the Senate expelling one of its own members is high, it is so necessarily. After all, the institution is designed to be a permanent institution of parliament (in contrast to the House of Commons constant changing makeup) that must act as a check on the government of the day without being easily removed. After all, if a sitting Prime Minister with a majority could remove senators, then there would be nothing to stop him or her when things go badly. But the bar is not impossible, and we are about to test it.
Oh, but the more obtuse pundits and talking heads will insist the Senate has never expelled its members before! What about Andrew Thompson? Or Raymond Lavigne? The difference, of course is that those men had just enough shame left in them to resign when they ran out of options before the Senate decided to oust them for their sins. Meredith, however, seems to be absent that sense of shame, and refuses to be moved, but the Senate is also a different place than it was then. A bit battered after years of scandal and overwrought denunciations, particularly in the wake of the ClusterDuff affair, its denizens, many of them new without any particular sense of partisan loyalty to the prime minister that appointed them, have far less patience for the peccadillos of their fellows.
This entire situation is also different from what happened with Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau. In that case, their suspensions were handled in a ham-fisted manner, dictated by a prime minister who controlled his Senate majority caucus, and who wanted the story out of the headlines. His proxies bullied the suspension motions through without due process, and that left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of senators on both sides of the chamber. What happens with Meredith this time around will need to avoid those same pitfalls of process.
But process is also what the Senate has the benefit of. New rules and processes have been put into place over the last number of years as part of their internal reforms that most people haven't paid attention to. Ethics rules that Meredith is subject to will mean that there are grounds to oust him according to the parliamentary privileges of the chamber now that they have the report of the SEO that he has contravened them. But it also means that the Senate and in particular the pundit class are going to need to have enough patience to go through all of the proper steps, and that no one jumps the gun to move a motion on the floor of the chamber to try and oust him immediately in order to silence the critics.
If there is any danger, I think that is the one that senators need to beware of. Yes, this latest incident has again given voice to those same rabble-rousers who constantly call for the chamber's wholesale reform or abolition, damn the broader consequences to our parliamentary institutions as a whole. Wanting to silence the critics during the ClusterDuff affair meant that they were ham-fisted and opened themselves up to bigger problems because they contravened the rules of natural justice during those suspension motions. Going in haste to silence the mob will only end badly for all involved, but that's going to mean needing to ignore some of those same howling voices in the meantime.
The other complicating factor is that Meredith has gone on sick leave since the SEO's report came to light, and that could delay any action that the Senate's ethics committee or the chamber as a whole could take if they want to respect the rules of natural justice and denying Meredith his say in his own defence. But delay though he might, he can't stay on sick leave forever, and will eventually need to face his peers, whose resolve will likely have hardened by that point. He can threaten a court challenge, but the courts are loath to interfere with parliamentary privilege. It's possible he may find a shred of shame and still resign honourably, but I suspect we will soon find ourselves with a precedent for expulsion.
