Over the past week, Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, released a trio of new profiles on his website to describe the roles of the three senators in his office  himself, the Deputy Leader/"legislative deputy," and the whip/"government liaison."  To the uninitiated, it gives the innocuous appearance of explaining how the roles have changed since the dawn of the new "independent" Senate and how everything is different now than the bad old partisan days.  The problem, of course, is that in the course of crafting his narrative and building his mythology, Harder is painting a picture of things that doesn't match the reality of how things have played out over the past three years.

One of the first things to leap out at me was how Harder talked about how, because he didn't have a caucus to manage, he didn't need either the roles of the deputy whip or the caucus chair in his office.  What's ironic here?  The fact that Harder kept insisting to the Senate's internal economy committee that he needed an office budget to match that of his predecessor which he eventually got.  We still don't know what he's doing with that money, because, as he points out, he doesn't have a caucus to manage, and he's not sponsoring bills or carrying them through the legislative process as he should be.  We do know that he's invented new responsibilities for himself, such as arranging meetings between senators and the premiers of the province that they represent meetings he wants to be part of.  The problem, of course, is that senators don't actually need an intercessor to arrange those meetings, and certainly not an intercessor who ostensibly represents the federal government to be in the room to report back what they say.

Harder went on to say that his role is to work "closely with Senate leadership to plan the legislative agenda, ensuring that all bills are considered in a timely manner."  This is laughable considering that Harder refuses to negotiate with the other caucus groups in the Senate because he's taken the view that horse-trading is partisan.  In the spring, with the crush of bills heading into the Senate, there were other leaders' offices trying to get him to agree to timetables for bills, and they were only getting crickets in response and yet here he is, proclaiming that it's work he's doing.  It's a bit galling, really.  Harder also touts his facilitation to find volunteers to sponsor bills (which he and his team should be doing), and that he ensures that those sponsoring senators coordinate with the minister's office to get adequate briefings again, putting himself in the middleman position for something that he should be doing.

The final eye-rolling and utterly self-aggrandizing task that Harder describes for himself is the champion of reforming the Senate, saying that he "provides best advice on how the Senate can pursue the goal of becoming a less partisan, more independent, accountable and transparent body that acts as a complementary chamber to the House of Commons."  The entire sentence is risible, as Harder's advice has been specious and jejune, and has been focused on eliminating party affiliations in the Senate, which would only serve to weaken any ability to have organized or ideological opposition to the government  something that goes against the principles of our Westminster system.  He's not a champion for a less partisan Senate he's a bureaucratic empire builder who is looking to create a system that would allow him to co-opt independent senators to do his bidding on behalf of the government.

Regarding the page on the "legislative deputy," Harder writes that her primary duty involves going to daily "scroll meetings" to discuss timelines of bills, and he touts that they haven't had to use time allocation as a result, unlike what happened under the previous government.  Again, Harder is spinning this more than a little because as we've established, very little negotiation actually happens like it's supposed to, and neither Harder nor his deputy have tried to invoke time allocation because they can't command the votes to do so.  Funny that.  I would also add that while it's true that the Conservatives did invoke time allocation far more frequently during their tenure, that doesn't take into account the longer view of how the Senate ran, when negotiation would rule the day.

As with Harder calling himself the champion of reforming the Senate, he describes his deputy as championing his idea for a Senate business committee a terrible idea as we've discussed previously, because it means time allocation on all Senate business and has the very real potential to sideline individual senators' rights and voices in favour of a powerful clique that Harder has offloaded his responsibility to negotiate onto.

As for the "government liaison," Harder plays up the fact that the whip's job was about party discipline and enforcing attendance and voting something that doesn't quite match history.  For most of the Senate's history, there was very little whipping of votes, and the whips played more of a logistical role about getting senators office spaces, parking, and resources they needed, along with ensuring that if they were going to be absent that they had someone to cover for them on committees.  Other duties the new "liaison" bills himself as having are the orientation of new senators something I'm not sure the government should be doing if these are to be independent senators and coordinating legislative briefings for interested senators, which is again, something that they should be doing within their own caucus groups.  That's why they have the budgets and resources dollars that they were demanding for that kind of work.

In all, these pages and descriptions are part of the concerted effort to try and reshape and rebrand the Senate's operations under the guidance of someone who doesn't know what he's doing, and refuses to learn because he views everything that came before as being tainted by partisanship.  While it's instructive to see how he views the roles, the fact that he refuses to live up to his own descriptions are probably the most telling sign that the Senate is on a path to a troubled future.

Photo Credit: National Post