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The Independent Senators Group has decided that going forward, they will start voting on whether or not to accept new members with a 60 percent threshold to be admitted.  This was one of the first orders of business with the new leadership of the ISG, senators Yuen Pau Woo and Raymonde Saint-Germain, as they start to make their mark on the nascent caucus as it achieves official status under the new rules coming at the end of the month.

Part of why this matters is because there are currently ten, soon to be eleven, vacancies in the Senate, and the next batch of appointments could very well give the ISG the plurality in the Senate.  But at the same time, there has been some level of concern within the group that they've become kind of a catch-all for any senator who is not part of a caucus, including those who have left or been expelled from either the Conservatives or the Senate Liberals (not that the Liberals have expelled anyone).

Who could they possibly mean, you might ask?  Well, former Senator Don Meredith, is a good example.  He was not only welcomed into the ISG in its early days, but was also apparently given some kind of coordination position at the time (though I've heard that it was likely in name only as he didn't exactly live up to his obligations), and when the Senate Ethics Officer released her report on his inappropriate relationship with a teenager, it was only then that the ISG moved to remove him from their ranks.  And while I take their point that at the time, there had been no apparently movement on the ethics investigation and the police declined to lay charges, and he was innocent until proven guilty (and then-facilitator Senator Elaine McCoy is a lawyer so this kind of issue would very much be something she would have thought about), there was nevertheless an optics issue for them to deal with.  And one can imagine that given the Meredith issue that they may want to review some of their current members like, oh, Senator Mike Duffy as his lawsuit against the Senate proceeds.

Part of what the ISG plans to use as a guideline for their members is a "charter of values" that they are in the process of drafting, which would have to do with how they value independence and likely how they intend to have that play out within their caucus things like ensuring that they don't try to coerce votes on issues, but that they would encourage voting together on procedural issues, as they have in the past.  We'll have to see what this "charter" looks like when they finish drafting it, but it does reflect the kind of process-driven decision-making that the ISG has become known for.

So, what will the effect of this new process be as more senators are appointed?  What I'm hoping it means is that it will force new appointees to more carefully take a look at their options when it comes to deciding which caucus to join.  Currently, most of the new senators come in talking about making a pledge to sit as an independent, which has generally meant being caught up with the wide net cast by the ISG, but that may be coming to an end.  If the ISG is no longer going to be a catch-all, and good on them for not wanting to be that, then hopefully it means more options will be open to new appointees.

Part of why this is important is because if we want to maintain multiple caucuses in the Senate, then the existing partisan ones will need to be able to absorb new members in a means that won't be just about the PM appointing them directly as has been the case up until now.  And for those of us who believe in a Westminster system, that ability to have caucuses that have ideological points of view is an important consideration.  In fact, the former ISG facilitator, Senator McCoy, made the point to me last week that she has come to see that the Senate works best with them.

"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.

Currently the Senate Liberals are in a precipitous decline in membership as they age out with no new appointments having been made in over a decade.  If the fact that new independent appointees will no longer automatically join the ISG could mean that they have a chance to potentially entice new senators to consider them as a potential home.  I know that in the past, they have reached out to new senators to say that their door is open, but I'm not sure to what level they have been keeping up the outreach in previous months, but the added incentive is there now.  Given that they too have a fairly independent mindset that is not simply to be cheerleaders for the Liberal government, that they don't whip votes, and that they have enough experienced senators who can act as mentors for new senators may be incentive for potential new members.

It's my hope that as new senators come in, they will start looking at the three caucuses to see if they have a more natural home than simply just sitting as independents out of high-minded principle despite the fact that it may work against them, not having experienced senators to mentor them, or worse, leaves them vulnerable to being co-opted by the Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative" for his own ends.  In order to keep the three-caucus balance, then doors will need to be opened to make that happen, and the ISG may have just made it a good idea to shop around.

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