The Independent Senators Group has just met for their winter retreat to discuss their plans for the remaining weeks of this parliament, and while I haven't heard their conclusions just yet, I do know what the planned discussion points were.  Some of the discussions are sensible, and some are downright terrifying.  But one theme that keeps repeating is that they want to show the public that they are modernizing which is an impulse that should be quashed with extreme prejudice.

We'll start with some of the operational concerns that these Independent senators are exploring, such as whether they should treat government and non-government bills differently.  The answer of course is yes, obviously, and we need to go back to some parliamentary fundamentals to remember why.  The role of MPs and Senators isn't to be "lawmakers" it's to hold government to account.  We've become so inundated with these American notions about what our representatives' roles are supposed to be that we sometimes forget that private members' bills and Senate public bills are the exception and not the rule, and that those bills are supposed to be about correcting oversights and accountability rather than about hobby-horses.

There was a discussion around time allocation, and when it would be appropriate to support it.  This is a discussion that they were going to need to have sooner than later, because as the calendar quickly winds down and the Order Paper continues to bulge, the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, may finally realize that he may have to use the tools at his disposal to get the agenda through before the election, and the Independents will have to decide whether or not to support it.  Of course, it would help if they had a better grasp of their roles and wouldn't spend hours on useless Second Reading debate for the sake of being on the record, but what I will warn against is the fact that they are also talking about whether or not to use "programming motions," which is essentially pre-time allocating bills from the start.  This includes their consideration of developing a "management committee for bills" automatically time-allocating business in the Senate takes away from the rights of individual senators to speak to any piece of business on the Order Paper, and it creates perverse incentives that weaken the role of the Chamber overall.

There are concerns that there are committees that are already laden with bills who want to keep on pursuing policy studies amidst their legislative workload.  This is another area where I feel that these new senators need more education in terms of their roles that legislation is supposed to come first, and that their policy hobby-horses come second.  That prime minister Justin Trudeau has appointed a lot of activists into the Chamber means that these tendencies will need to be moderated, but best that they start having that drilled into them now than after the Order Paper crisis that is bearing down on them comes to a head.  That they want to start debating rule changes to committees to prevent the Conservatives from stymying them is also a little worrisome, because that can blow up in their faces really quickly, and create lasting damage to the institution if they're not careful.

In terms of Chamber business, there was a discussion around reducing the length of senators' statements to better accommodate television (and I will remind you that changing the rules to accommodate television in the Senate is a Very Bad Thing), whether they should carry on with their daily Question Period of asking questions to the Government Leader (of course they should just because Harder is a dud, and just because Trudeau made the grievous mistake of not making Harder a Cabinet minister for the role, doesn't mean that rules should permanently change to accommodate that lapse in judgment), much as entrenching the recent practice of Ministerial QP may again be rewarding Trudeau for his mishandling of the Senate.  As for whether the Chamber should sit more than three days a week, we should also remember that this goes hand-in-hand with the problems that we see with the new senators engaging in useless debate when items should be expedited to committee, where the real work happens.  Having the Chamber sit extra days reinforces that more debate is needed and that there is time that needs to be filled.

In terms of how they should conduct themselves as Independent senators, they planned discussions as to whether they should sponsor government legislation as they have been (and they shouldn't, because it's the government's responsibility having Independents sponsor bills co-opts them), and when it's appropriate to reject a government bill something that I fear they will want to codify as some kind of prescriptive formula that will remove judgment from the equation.  There was also a desire to debate whether the ISG should set their own ethical standards that are higher than those in the Senate's code, which made me cringe because this solidifies the holier-than-thou attitude that many of the Independent senators are already taking when it comes to the institution and its pre-existing members.

Which brings me to the biggest recurring problem that I found throughout their planned discussions, which was about making changes in order to be seen to be making changes.  Questions like "What tools can the ISG use to leverage more public attention?" or what procedural changes would be "most compelling" from a public perspective as examples of Senate modernization set off alarm bells for be because it starts to look very much like they are willing to change rules that they don't understand for a public spectacle.  This should be concerning to everyone, because they risk doing untold damage to the Senate for the sake of moral preening.  While I get that they want to set themselves apart from the "bad old days," but unless they understand what went wrong in the Chamber during its most problematic period and frankly they don't appear to then they will only make things worse, not better.  The impulse to fix something that they perceive to be broken because they don't understand it is pervasive in politics, but it's one that we should smack down.  Our institutions are too important to toy with for the sake of vanity.