The removal of Senator Lynn Beyak from the Conservative caucus was hailed as the right move by many, albeit better late than never.  I am not of that view.  Because of the institutional independence given to senators, knowing that when you have one who is a problem and that he or she is in your political caucus, cutting ties with them becomes a very fraught thing because what can often happen is that, freed of any kind of adult supervision, they become an even bigger problem than you had initially.  This has happened with Beyak, as some of us knew it would.

Since the initial outrage of Beyak saying that residential schools weren't that bad, and the fact that many First Nations children remained Christians justified their existence, she has been a problem to be managed.  Taking her off of the Aboriginal Peoples committee was damage control, but only served to entrench her views.  When Beyak doubled down and insisted that First Nations Canadians "trade in" their status cards for Canadian citizenship never mind that they're already Canadian citizens the party distanced itself from her views, but otherwise did nothing.  And when Beyak started posting "letters of support" that espoused racist views on her Senate website, it was not monitored and allowed to persist for months, while the leadership of both the party and the Senate caucus, headed by Senator Larry Smith, knew that she was a problem and Andrew Scheer's director of communications went so far as to blame others for not pointing out the letters to Scheer's office, despite the fact that some Indigenous activists had in fact done just that.

So when it came down to Scheer's doing the bare minimum of expelling Beyak from caucus after he lost face for not having actively managed her during the months that this was an ongoing issue, it did exactly what the situation should have managed to avoid it created a monster.  Freed from constraints, Beyak is now free to cast herself as a martyr for free speech, fighting against the forces of political correctness something that Scheer himself likes to try and weaponize as a Dollarama knock-off brand provocateur and Beyak did just that in her press release responding to Scheer.  (That the very same release also accused Scheer of lying when he said that he asked her to remove the letters from her site also goes to show just how little she was being managed by the caucus).

Because Beyak is now a senator without affiliation (she will certainly not be accepted as a member of the Independent Senators Group), she can carry on offering her particularly odious commentary on Indigenous issues, taxpayer dollars (and in particular demanding that First Nations be subjected to stringent audits), and now free speech in opposition to supposed PC-culture.  And because she has been punished for what she can deem a free speech issue, she will attract a whole host of defenders in the alt-right who will use her as an example of someone who was made an example of for "wrongthink."  Andrew Scheer didn't solve a problem he created an even bigger one.

Beyak's Senate term isn't up until February 2024, and because she has institutional independence, she is protected from removal unless she is found guilty of an indictable offence, or commits a breach of the Senate's ethics code, and while some may feel that she should be investigated for such a breach, there is no indication that she has breached its rules (which are mostly around conflicts of interest).  There ongoing calls for her to resign will carry on, and Beyak will ignore them, and will, in fact, be further emboldened by them.  After all, she's the martyr in all of this.

NDP MP Charlie Angus sent an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week, demanding that he use his moral authority to reach out to the various caucuses in the Senate in order to "use the tools of the Senate to address Ms. Beyak's fundamental unfitness to serve as a representative of the Canadian people."  By that, he means having Senators vote to expel Beyak without meeting the actual conditions that would merit it, and if he thinks that he can use his bully pulpit to intimidate the senators into doing his bidding, well, he'd be mistaken.  Senators are keenly aware of due process, particularly after the way in which the suspensions of senators Duffy, Brazeau, and Wallin were handled, and they made sure to have every t-crossed and i-dotted when it came to recommending that now-former Senator Don Meredith be expelled for his ethics violations.  Nothing Beyak has done warrants expulsion, no matter how much we may dislike her words and the platform she has given others.  And when the Senate doesn't expel her, Angus will once again man the barricades to demand that the Senate be abolished because they can't get rid of a problem like Beyak.

Ministers Carolyn Bennett and Jane Philpott, meanwhile, have asked Senator Smith to rally the Conservative senators to use their influence to get those letters removed from Beyak's Senate website.  Of course, it won't really matter Beyak can simply create her own site to post them, and link it to her Senate page (which the Senate will post a disclaimer next to, but otherwise do little else).

All of this, meanwhile, will simply continue to embolden Beyak and her new devotees. Now that she is a martyr for those who have been "silenced" by political correctness, she has a platform and bully pulpit of her own, with an audience that is increasingly feeling empowered by the era of Donald Trump to insist that they are the real victims when challenged about their odious views.  Beyak was a problem that could have been managed if Smith and Scheer had done their jobs properly.  They didn't, and now they have a rogue senator who has no one to keep her in check.  When she fashions herself as the next Jordan Peterson, Scheer will have nobody to blame but himself.

Photo Credit: National Post