The drama surrounding the second reading vote on the cannabis legalization bill in the Senate was high political theatre. Because of the suggestion that they didn't know how close the vote was going to be, reporters scrambled to cover the Senate that day, and a few pundits listened in to the final speeches, all given by Conservatives, each one more eye-rolling than the last. And given the suggestion that these senators might be able to kill the bill, despite it having been passed by the House of Commons, we got a new raft of columns declaring that it was time for the Senate to be abolished, based on no evidence at all.
To start with, unless you can convince all of the provinces and territories that abolition is the way to go, well, good luck, because that's the only way you're going to abolish it. More to the point, taking a single day's activities and basing whether one of the houses of our Parliament should live or die on it is ludicrous on its face. In fact, if you've looked at some of the single days of debate in the House of Commons, you might think that it's the house that should be shuttered. And despite all of the ridiculous things that Conservative senators may have proffered about concerns over the bill (and the evils of the marihuana), they are no more or less ridiculous than their counterparts in the House of Commons have stated, and it was entirely performative. In order for the vote to go ahead that day as agreed to, the Conservatives filled the speaking slots for the day to register their displeasure with the bill, as is their right. It's also their right to vote against it.
The fact that so many pundits were alarmed that the Senate could defeat the bill was part of their ire, which, again, is a gross lack of basic civic literacy by the voices who are supposed to interpret events for the general public. The very notion that an upper chamber can't defeat a bill no matter what is absurd, because that would obliterate its need. At a press conference that afternoon, Justin Trudeau again trotted out the lines that the Senate shouldn't defeat legislation but should try to improve it, but that again ignores the reason why the Senate has an absolute veto in the first place because sometimes, when you have a majority government that can whip votes and pass any bill it wants, you sometimes need someone with enough institutional independence that they can speak truth to power to tap the brakes and say whoa, you're abusing your power.
The Senate should use this power sparingly, and generally has. It defeated government bills only three times since the 1980s, and in two of those circumstances, rights were at issue (in one case abortion rights, and in the other an unconstitutional bill regarding Pearson Airport contracts), and in the third, it was a budget implementation bill that attempted to stream federal agencies and tribunals that the then-government's own senators couldn't support. These were not cases where the Senate capriciously defeated these bills most were defeated on tie votes and in each case it was done at Third Reading, so that even when they had reservations, they at least gave the bills full committee study beforehand. Senators tend to know that they don't have the "democratic legitimacy" to overrule the House of Commons unless the circumstances are dire, and that's why it's rare when they do defeat a bill.
If the Senate had defeated C-45 at Second Reading, it would have been unprecedented, but it would also have been something of a warning to the government that their "independent Senate" experiment can backfire. That this possibility exists doesn't mean that the Senate should cease to exist, or have their powers curtailed. After all, if a majority government didn't have reason to fear that its legislation could be defeated if it angered enough senators, then they would almost certainly be more abusive in how they exercised their powers. That's why the Senate exists, and why they have an absolute veto, and it's something that this government needs to learn to cope with on a more consistent basis moving forward as they put forward ambitious legislation that may not have universal approval.
This all having been said, some of the artificial drama around this vote comes down to the performance of Justin Trudeau's chosen Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder. Given that there is no whip for the new Independent senators, nor for the Senate Liberals for that matter, you would think that the person responsible for shepherding government bills through the Senate would take it upon themselves to start canvassing those senators to see what their voting intentions were in order to assure themselves (and Cabinet) that the bill could pass, and if it really was in danger, to start negotiating what it would take to get it to committee so that amendments could be contemplated. But Harder and his office did not do that, according to my sources, which again makes me wonder just what he's doing with his legion of staff and his $1.5 million office budget.
For Harder to go before the microphones and say "I have no idea how this is going to turn out," and to rely on his whip err, "Government Liaison" and the Independent Senator Group's "Liaison" to work the phones and ensure that enough Independent senators travelling on committee business could be present to vote, seems to indicate that there is a general lack of ability when it comes to managing the flow of legislation in the Senate. And the drama was really all for naught the vote wasn't even close, and everyone's panic attacks were for nothing. That's not how things should be managed in the Chamber, and it raises yet more questions about the direction of this new "independent" Senate.