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When news came last week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had nominated the novelist David Adams Richards to the Senate for a New Brunswick seat, I was decidedly neutral on the issue of a literary figure taking his place among the Red Chamber.  After all, we've had some great writers and artists do very good work in the Senate over the years.  Other friends of mine from the East Coast had a few more opinions.

"I hope any bills he writes don't make me want to kill myself after reading," one of them wrote over social media, before adding that "He will bring a perspective and empathy to the role that I think is missing in many of those that are appointed."

Fair enough with the depressing nature of his general oeuvre, but what started to make me a little more nervous were interviews that he gave once the announcement was made, particularly with Power & Politics.

It wasn't so much where he talked about the desire to move onto something else after writing some thirty-one books, or the fact that he'd like to become a voice for New Brunswick and in particular the Miramichi region being a voice for the regions is part of the role of the Senate, after all.  But it was some of the more policy-related issues that Richards expressed that made me question.

"For years, I've been saying that there has to be something done to have a kind of inclusion for the First Nations in education," Richards said.  "There is one female surgeon that's a First Nations person in all of Canada that's kind of tragic.  I've always tried to promote that in my work, and that's what I'll promote up there.  Also, the salmon stocks on the Miramachi are quite bad, so hopefully we can do something about that."

To both of these issues, I have to question just what he thinks that a senator is supposed to be able to do.  After all, the primary function of the Senate is as a revising and deliberative body the famous "sober second thought," where issues and legislation are examined through a lens that is less about electoral gain than it is about bigger-picture considerations, as well as how it will impact regions or minorities.  Coming in with a list of pet policies tends to be a bit more problematic because that's less the role of senators.  Sure, they can make recommendations, and they often do in the form of committee studies, which have a well-deserved reputation for being some of the highest quality policy development tools in the country, and have earned the Senate its reputation as being parliament's built-in think tank.

Nevertheless, as much as there is a subtler policy role in the Senate, what he expects to be able to do with a fairly complex file like First Nations education, or inland fisheries, is where I have questions.  It is especially more difficult to have that kind of direct influence as a senator because any Senate Public Bills that they draft can't task the government with spending any money.  Add to that fact, this new cohort being appointed as independents limits some of their policy influence even further.  And in Richards' case, he is expecting to be just that.

"I'm sitting as an independent man," Richards said in the same interview.  "I'll make my own decisions to the best of my ability when I'm in the chamber."

There once was a time where Senators could have a great deal of influence in the party's back rooms, behind the closed doors of national caucus because they are the institutional memory of Parliament, and can steer discussions or policy plans based on their years of experience, which many MPs don't have by virtue of the low incumbency rate of Canadian politics.  These new senators don't get to have that role unless they join the ranks of the Conservatives, which is the only caucus by which that kind of influence can still be exerted.

For the rest, many are coming into the Senate with an expectation that they will have a greater legislative role than is traditional for the Canadian Senate, and because many of these new appointees are activists from the social sciences who feel like they now have a place inside the system to start making changes, which could very well be opening up Pandora's box when it comes to the way in which our bicameral system functions.

This is why my discomfort with the way that the current government has set up their Senate nomination advisory panel, which relies on self-nomination, has become quite acute.  If you have a group of activists for any number of worthy causes selecting themselves to the role, once they get it, they come in with the expectation that they have power and influence that they can start to exercise rather than what we used to see, which was taking their years of experience in the field and applying their perspective to the legislation before them.  And given the additional fact that because senators are no longer in the caucus rooms, we have an explosion of ministers lobbying individual senators to get legislation passed, offering to trade favours for votes, we risk empowering a group of individuals beyond what their ambit should be in our system.  If we keep going down this path, the Senate is very likely to be less of a chamber of sober second thought and of applying different minority lenses to legislation than it will be a chamber of activists negotiating with the government of the day over personal policy goals.  So, while it may very well be that a new senator like Richards will bring a voice for the Miramichi to the Red Chamber, or that he may have a perspective and empathy that others may not have, that he has actual goals in mind that exceed his role does give me serious pause.

Photo Credit: National Post

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