With the end of the year fast approaching, the self-congratulatory press releases are flying, and this week we got one from Senator Peter Harder, the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government representative," who wanted us to know just how many great things were accomplished.  But digging beneath the praise just a little raises a few questions, particularly on the part of the government with how it needs to handle things.

For starters, only three new senators were appointed this year, and two of those just happened in the past few weeks.  In the meantime, the number of vacant seats in the Senate continues to climb we are currently at eleven, with a potential early retirement happening early in the New Year, and the next scheduled one in May.  We all know that this government has had a terrible time with making needed appointments with any reasonable pace (Supreme Court of Canada excepted), but that's a full ten percent of the Senate that's vacant, and provinces going without representation that they're constitutionally guaranteed.  And while I am generally in favour of not making mass appointments, the government had best pick up their pace on making these.

Another thing that I found concerning was the fact that only eight government bills got passed in the fall sitting, and only 22 over the course of the year, which is a very small number, and more concerning was the fact that several bills remain on the Order Paper in the Senate that were left untouched before they rose for the Christmas break, a week earlier than planned.  And normally I would be the first person to say that the quantity of bills passed is less of a measure than the quality of the work, but there is a noticeable backlog developing, which is concerning.

Part of this backlog is due to the fact that there are political games being played by the Conservatives, who take frequent adjournments to debates, and stall the progress of bills.  Compounding this is the fact that the new independent senators now hold the plurality in the Chamber, but they still don't have enough procedural know-how in the Senate to get around these roadblocks being put before them, and that is delaying things.  Apparently, they are learning these things as quickly as they can, but in the interim, the slowdown of business in the chamber means not only that the government's agenda is being delayed, but more than that, it leaves the Senate in a vulnerable place.

I say this, because if it keeps up, and if the prime minister starts seeing that his agenda continues to be slowed because senators can't get their act together, he may start looking for ways to start subverting his promise for a more independent Senate.  I doubt he would outright start appointing partisan Liberals and either welcoming the old Senate Liberals back into the fold (some of whom may not want to come back considering how they were treated by Trudeau when he unceremoniously dumped them from caucus without so much as a word, severing decades of goodwill in some cases), but rather, I suspect that we'll start seeing more direct overtures from Harder to start trying to take a firmer hand.

Make no mistake part of why the backlog on the Order Paper is as bad as it is has to do with the fact that Harder isn't known to negotiate with the caucuses to develop a timetable for legislation that's realistic, and there have been times where agreements had been reached on when debate was to collapse and his deputy, Senator Diane Bellemare, came in and forced the bills to a vote, destroying goodwill that had been created.  That costs them in the long term, but without an attempt to broker timelines on bills, as has always been the case in the Senate, then these kinds of pile-ups can happen.

And why this worries me in the long run is because Harder, in his year-end press release, raised the spectre of a business committee once again, an idea he's tried floating before.  In his estimation, it wouldn't be used to hasten the passage of bills (even though the whole argument in favour of such a committee was that he felt bills were taking too long), but rather that he wants to establish a "framework for sober second thought," as though that was something that could be anticipated before senators even had a chance to read the bills.

The concerns around this are not only that this is Harder's way absolving himself of the responsibility of doing the backroom negotiating in establishing timetables for bills again, making us wonder why he needs the $1.5 million budget and sizeable staff if they're not doing caucus management, legislative groundwork, monitoring committee business, or negotiating timelines in a realistic manner (witness his desire to get a number of bills passed before the Commons rose but giving no time for amendments to be sent back to the Commons), but that it imposes a bureaucratic structure on a political institution, and make no mistake, as independent as they make the Senate, it is still political.  More than that, it would reduce the power of individual senators and place it in the hands of a small clique that will have more powers than the current deputy leaders have with negotiating the Order Paper currently.

And while it's legitimate for the opposition Conservatives to delay and try to thwart the government's agenda, I think it bears pointing out that they're currently making Harder's argument for him, and that when he starts making entreaties to those independent senators who now hold a plurality and say if you don't want these kinds of delays to continue, you should vote for my motion to establish this committee.  And this is one of my biggest concerns going into the New Year, because Harder's agenda to destroy the Westminster character of the Senate is out in the open.  We don't need partisan gamesmanship to give him the ammunition that he seeks.