As Parliament is set to return next week, there is a state of flux with the group of independent senators as their nascent organisation prepares to undergo yet more change. There will soon be a change of leadership for the Independent Senators Group as much as one can call it that which could have lasting repercussions for the whole movement towards Senate modernization.
A new name has been put forward for the role of "facilitator," being BC Senator Yuen Pau Woo, with Senator Raymonde Saint-Germain putting her name forward as deputy facilitator. Former Liberal-turned-independent Senator Larry Campbell was first to declare his intention to run for the facilitator position after Senator Elaine McCoy said that she wasn't going to be running again for the job that she's held since the ISG was first formed as a "working group" looking to organize the new independent senators in order to ensure that their logistics and so on were taken care of without a caucus whip to handle that role (and ensuring that the government's senate team didn't co-opt them all out of the gate).
And it should be stressed that yes, logistical and procedural support is really the point of the ISG, before anyone asks why independent senators require any kind of leadership. It's about working within the power structures of the Senate, and in my personal opinion, it should be trying to keep those structures within the Westminster model as closely as possible as I can only foresee disaster if we wound up with a chamber of 105 complete independents.
To that end, Senator McCoy has been spending her remaining time as facilitator in ensuring that there is a "Secretariat" in place in lieu of a caucus support system, with the goal that those staffers within said secretariat are working for the benefit of all members of the ISG as opposed to being for the benefit of the facilitator. The kinds of support that they're supposed to offer range from getting information on current legislation from external sources, or legal analysis, and ensuring that it gets distributed to members of the ISG. It's about helping with procedural matters, because procedure is very important in any parliamentary body but especially so in the Senate, where the rules have been set up in such a way as to give a great deal of power and latitude to individual senators so that they have the right to speak to every single piece of business on the Order Paper, and that they are not hidebound to caucus organization. While caucuses are important in many ways, the Senate rules ensure that they alone don't determine how much power a senator has to speak and to which issues.
To that end, it's important that there be some procedural experts that the ISG members can draw upon (as there are only so many skilled staffers to go around), and the secretariat is ensuring that they have those supports in place. Part of that means keeping track of what has been going on in the Chamber at all times, particularly when there are late night sittings, and translating what those procedural manoeuvres mean for the ISG members and their staff.
Coordination is another function that the ISG's secretariat is expected to play, not only with the logistical needs of independent senators around things like allocation of offices and parking, and coordinating the selection of senators to sit on committees since there isn't a whip's office to take care of those issues. Most people don't appreciate the fact that in the Senate, a whip's role is less about counting votes than it is about ensuring that these sorts of issues get taken care of. (As for the job of ensuring that any substitutions on committees for absent senators takes place, I'm not sure if this is something the secretariat plans to take care of, or if that is deemed the responsibility of the absent senator).
And then there is the business of the "scroll." This is the term given to the Order Paper and the plans for how each day's sitting plans to play out, from which bills they plan to debate, and which senators plan to speak to them, so that each of the caucuses can plan effectively. This is also where negotiation tends to happen between groups to come up with plans as to which bills they plan to prioritize and get through, and there has traditionally been some give-and-take that happens here. That's been a bit more of a fraught consideration over the past couple of years with the arrival of Senator Peter Harder as the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, I mean "Government representative," and where some of the breakdowns occurred with certain bills that took longer to get through than was probably necessary, as there were times when Harder didn't feel the need to negotiate, and other times where his deputy, Senator Diane Bellemare, would force an issue and undo some of the cooperation that had been building around certain bills. And this again is one of the places where the ISG will play a role, in ensuring that its members have that coordination in terms of planning who is looking to debate which bills and when.
The ISG is planning a summit on the 25th, where they will hold their elections for the facilitator positions, as well as looking to identify their priorities for the fall sitting. It's likely where we'll get a better sense of where they plan to move as a group, whether that group is cohesive or not (and yes, this is a very real issue as the new rules are also soon to come into effect where any group of nine senators will be able to form their own caucus groups, which could splinter the ISG as it is set to become the largest caucus in the chamber), and just how much the new direction of the ISG will respect the Westminster character of the institution or not.
