With the election of Senator Woo as the new facilitator of the Independent Senators Group, I sat down with Senator Elaine McCoy to catch up with her now that she has stepped back from the role. McCoy is a senator who has always sat as an independent even when she and the remaining Progressive Conservatives still had a small enough group to call their own, until only McCoy remained. And it cannot be argued that she is probably the only reason why the new independent senators did not end up getting co-opted by Senator Peter Harder, the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government representative" as part of his overall plan to have a chamber free of caucuses.
While the Conservative senators in particular may grouse that the new independent senators are Liberals in all-but-name, that would likely have been the more probable outcome had Harder gotten his way from the start, but thanks to the nascent ISG, the Canadian Senate now has a crossbencher contingent that is on the verge of rivalling the established parties like the Conservatives for supremacy as they head toward plurality.
So in her time as facilitator of the ISG, what did McCoy learn about the Senate?
"Insofar as it concerns the conduct of business in the Chamber, and the conduct of business in committees, we are truly the masters of our own destiny," McCoy said.
Where this then gets complicated is how the application of rules and practices have developed over the years.
"Whose ox is being gored, or hide is being protected?" asked McCoy. "The review of the agreements, some written, some unwritten, is not regular, nor is it rigorous, from my perception."
McCoy notes that over the years, a lot of rules and practices haven't been challenged until something occurs that causes someone to object, at which point new rules get written to plug holes or to shift the balance to the desired outcome, which was exacerbated by the power duopoly that shifted back and forth between the two parties that dominated the Chamber.
"It reaffirms my position that the ideal is to have at least three groups in the Senate at all times, not one of which has an absolute majority, because that does encourage discussion and negotiations, and continual dialogue between senators to arrive at a way of doing things that accommodates most situations, and most senators, most of the time," McCoy said.
As for moving from years as an independent into a group, McCoy noted that she had once been part of a political party, back when she was an MLA and cabinet minister in the Alberta government from 1986 to 1993. She drew her lessons then from former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, whose seat she assumed upon his retirement, and she went on to serve in the government of Don Getty. Back during her days as an independent in the Senate, she felt that because the rules largely excluded her participation, it was something of a waste of resources when she could have contributed more during those years.
"Coming into a group that was just forming was high hopes, but I definitely underestimated the challenge of organizing independents," McCoy said. "I forgot totally that when I walked into the Progressive Conservative caucus in Alberta that it had been in existence for at least twenty years, and I had forgotten that if you walked into the Liberal or Conservative caucus on Parliament Hill, it had been there for at least a hundred years, and certainly in its current form since World War Two."
Because people entering into established caucuses don't have to worry about their values, and would have role models, it was different with the incoming independent senators because none of those structures existed. The first seven members of the "working group" that later became the ISG, plus the next round of six appointees who joined them, was a manageable enough group, but when another 21 appointees were added later, things became more difficult.
"The first six took it upon themselves to think that they had to deliver on behalf of the 21, and they started this division between anyone who was appointed before them and anyone who was not, and the new 21 started to think that they had taken all of the good jobs already, so the tensions started to build," McCoy said.
If a new group goes through the phases of "storming, forming, and norming," the ISG is still too new to have achieved the "norming" stage, and impatience in the group has made it difficult to achieve the repetition of processes that will lead to their normalization.
"I wish them every success, but I think some the organizational challenges will continue because we're human," McCoy said.
As for what she left unfinished when her time came up in the leadership position, McCoy notes that she had wanted to get some critical questions on the table for the ISG members to think about, and norms established, when it comes to how they deal with legislation and how they handle their affairs at committee. While these were up for discussion during the ISG Summit that also saw the election of Senator Woo to the position of facilitator, it still leaves these issues to be worked through.
Moving forward, McCoy hopes that the Senate takes the time to live with the new rules that they've adopted for a while before moving toward any further changes that might radically alter the way the institution works, and it's a sentiment that I have a great deal of sympathy for. While there may be desire for some more wholesale change, be it to further reduce the partisanship, or to go even further in doing away with the more Westminster structure of government versus opposition, I think that a go-slow approach is warranted. Radical change is harder to undo, and the Senate is too important an institution to get messed up because the desire to try something new outweighed what works. Let's hope that the rest of the Senate heeds McCoy's wisdom on this matter.
