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As the interim order to expand Senate committees expires on Tuesday, and new rules come into place around who can form a caucus in the Senate, there is a bit of a shakeup going on with how those committees are organizing themselves.  With the Independent Senators Group now firmly in the plurality in the Chamber, the demands that they start shouldering a greater responsibility on committees is ramping up.

Back in early December, the Senate groups came together and agreed to an interim order that would expand committees by an additional three members each in order to accommodate the arrival of new independent senators who otherwise wouldn't be allowed to take committee spots until the session expired via either a prorogation or the dissolution of Parliament for an election.  This order expires on October 31st, which means that committees are set to return to their original sizes of either nine or twelve members, depending on the committee.

At the time of this writing, negotiations between the caucuses were still ongoing as to how they planned to return to those previous sizes, and what kind of distribution will be granted between the various caucuses (as the ISG will now officially be deemed a caucus with new rules changes that also come into effect at the same time).  And some of those negotiations have been testy, based on what I've heard from my sources.

One of the proposals floated had been for each caucus to eliminate one member from each committee, which would bring them back down to the original size, and with a distribution where the percentages roughly mirror those in the chamber.  That means that on a twelve-member committee, it would be five Independents, five Conservatives, and two Liberals; and on a nine-member committee it would be four-four-one.

What I've heard is that the ISG's leadership initially balked at this proposal, and demanded that they get half of the seats on committees because they wanted to include not only their current members, but also the future senators that have yet to be appointed (there are currently ten vacancies, and will soon be an eleventh as Conservative Senator Kelvin Ogilvie reaches his age of mandatory retirement next month), as well as those unaffiliated senators who haven't joined the ISG and that figure includes the three senators on the government representative team.  I will note that this particular demand doesn't make a lot of sense given that just two weeks ago, the ISG passed a rule that they have to approve of any new members by a 60 percent threshold, which would seem to indicate that they're not taking it for granted that all new senators would join their group automatically.  My understanding is that they eventually backed down from this demand, but the final disposition remains to be seen.

The fact that the ISG now has the plurality in the chamber cemented with by the fact that former Conservative Senators Stephen Greene and Josée Verner joined them, and on Monday, Liberal Senator Paul Massicotte left the caucus to join the ISG means that they are also looking to control the committees that have the real power in the Senate when it comes to operational matters internal economy, and likely the rules committee as well.  And this is where things will really start to get interesting, and partly why I suspect they were trying to ensure that they were afforded half of the seats on committees.

The fact that the Independents will start to control those fundamental committees means that they will get to start reshaping the Senate in their own image starting with getting an increased budget for their operations, but also with changing the Rules of the Senate in order to start shaping the modernization with an eye toward taking away any role that partisan caucuses play.  I haven't yet heard whether the ISG plans to take on the role of the opposition in the Senate given that there hasn't been an Official Opposition designation in the chamber to date given that it tended to only be constituted of two parties until recently and whether they would look to take over that suite of offices in the Centre Block dedicated to that role.

Suffice to say, I am curious to see how quickly they are looking to start flexing their muscles on those committees, whatever the final distribution may be.  I'm also curious to see how long it is before some of the partisan senators Senate Liberals especially start feeling bent out of shape over the demands of the ISG.  I will say that I am very worried that there will be a march toward marginalizing some of the very experienced voices in the Senate because they represent the "old way" of being appointed.  We've seen this kind of attitude already from Senator Peter Harder who made the remark on Power & Politics one night, and was forced to apologize to those partisan senators for impugning that they were of a lesser quality than those appointed by the new "merit-based" appointment process.

While yes, this is an exciting time in the Senate, and we are seeing a renewed vigour in the institution, I worry that there will be a desire to drive a lot of change very quickly without giving the institution time to adjust, which will cause an already stressed body even more strain.  While the new spirit of independence is all well and good, we can't be too quick to dismiss what has come before, and the role that partisan senators play both within the chamber from a Westminster perspective, as well as within their respective national caucuses (although this is now only the case for the Conservatives).  Too much independence in the Senate can be a dangerous thing, whether it's by making it easier to co-opt the "loose fish" model that many are looking for, or whether it's by empowering a group without a democratic mandate to move beyond the complimentary role of the Chamber.  How they reshape the committees will offer us clues as to what comes next.

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