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.

After nearly two weeks of drips and self-inflicted damage by the Liberals after the allegations of political interference by the PMO in then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould's handling of files related to SNC-Lavalin, we still haven't heard from Wilson-Raybould herself on what all transpired.  She did resign from Cabinet without giving a reason why, and in the time since, we also saw the resignation of the prime minister's principal secretary, Gerald Butts, who denied the allegations of interference but appears instead to be looking to defend his name while shielding the PMO from the ongoing drama.  But is there significance to Wilson-Raybould's ongoing silence that the media seems to be missing?

Let's remember for a minute that the claim that Wilson-Raybould can't speak because of solicitor-client privilege came from Wilson-Raybould herself, not from Justin Trudeau.  If it appears that he was flat-footed on this, it's because he probably was, but he said he respected her view that she was bound by it, but he had instructed his current Attorney General, David Lametti, to see if they can waive said privilege in light of other ongoing court cases.  Let me reiterate that he never said that she can't speak and yet this is the narrative that has developed.  And he made a number of statements about the situation that has many legal commentators saying that he has essentially waived that privilege.  Wilson-Raybould has lawyered up in the figure of former Supreme Court of Canada puisne justice Thomas Cromwell, in order to get advice on what she can and can't say, but I am forced to wonder if this is more about a silence that appears more tactical than it is forced.

Why do I think this is tactical?  Because it's allowed the media and the opposition to fill in the blanks following the anonymous allegations made in the Globe and Mail that have been vigorously denied, but because the Liberals are inept at both issues management and communications, they've managed to step all over their message repeatedly.  We don't know if these allegations are true nobody has corroborated the anonymous source almost two weeks later.  What the media has done, however, is draw a number of connections in this story that are dubious, and yet are now being treated as gospel.  Some of those are around the chain of events with the deferred prosecution agreements and their relationship to SNC-Lavalin.

Long before this story broke, I interviewed a number of white-collar crime specialists when the DPA provisions were put into the omnibus budget bill.  While the narrative has become that these provisions were "snuck" into the bill as a direct result of intense lobbying by SNC-Lavalin (all of which has been reported and above-board, it should be noted), these provisions were debated at the time, including in both Commons and Senate committees.  Notably, Wilson-Raybould refused to appear before the committees to discuss the provisions.  Before the provisions were put into the bill, there were extensive consultations on them, and in talking to those white-collar crime specialists, I've had it confirmed that these are discussions that have been going on at least a decade, and their inclusion in the bill meant that Canada was catching up to comparable jurisdictions like the US and UK.  No one could say that these were solely about benefitting SNC-Lavalin and yet, the narrative of the pundit class has decided that this is what happened.

It's also worth noting that if Wilson-Raybould was being pressured over the SNC-Lavalin file, that operatives in the PMO wanted her to instruct the Director of Public Prosecutions to give SNC-Lavalin a DPA (that they may not actually qualify for, if you hew closely to what the law says), then Wilson-Raybould would have been obligated to resign as Attorney-General at the time out of principle.  This is a well-worn legal principle known as the Shawcross Doctrine, which governs what kinds of discussions that an Attorney General can have with Cabinet regarding issues, and draws a bright line that would trigger a resignation.  Wilson-Raybould only resigned months after any of these conversations around SNC-Lavalin are said to have taken place, and it will be incumbent upon her to explain why she didn't follow the Shawcross Doctrine if she was indeed pressured.

Amidst all of this, we need to also remember that there has been a lot of talk about why Wilson-Raybould was demoted to Veterans Affairs minister, and none of it suddenly happened in the days following the Globe story or even the demotion itself.  While Trudeau has stated that had Scott Brison not resigned that she would still be Attorney General today, there remains a record that can't be ignored.  This includes intransigence on the assisted dying bill that is leading to renewed court challenges, and tabling the mandatory alcohol screening bill that is also likely unconstitutional but will have severe impacts on minorities including Indigenous people.  The fact that her inability to fill judicial vacancies in a timely manner is causing a crisis in our court system, particularly for civil cases because criminal trials are being put to the front of the queue in order to keep them from "timing out" according to the Supreme Court's Jordan decision and part of this can be traced back to the fact that it took her over eight months to appoint a judicial affairs advisor after she was first made AG in 2015.  There's the churn in her office that was indicative of an inability to manage it effectively something the legal community was well aware of and spoke of on a not-for-attribution basis regularly in my dealings with them.  Add to that, she has consistently refused to appear before committees in both the Commons and the Senate, to the point where the Senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee was refusing to pass bills until she appeared, citing "no minister, no bill." (Her successor, Lametti, has since agreed to appear).

These are not the signs of a minister that was doing the job without problems.  That Trudeau said that she would still be in had Brison not created a need to shuffle likely means that they felt the problems were manageable, at least until the election, but in the time since the Globe story, the narrative around Wilson-Raybould has changed to that of a hero who stood up to the centre, and spoke "truth to power."  Her continued silence only serves to solidify that narrative, while the media continues to fill in the blanks that said silence creates.  We don't know what happened, and yet one version of events is becoming the definitive version.  We can only speculate as to Wilson-Raybould's motivation behind her silence, but it leaves the feeling that we're being played.