Independent senators — and the faux-independent Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Peter Harder — have been sending out numerous press releases and tweets for the past several days about a poll recently conducted at the behest of Senator Donna Dasko.  Its conclusion?  That Canadians love the "new" Senate.  Now, did Canadians understand the "old" Senate?  Nope.  So, if they didn't understand the old one, how can they love the new one?  Senator Dasko may well have polled Canadians as to whether they liked ponies or unicorns, and she probably would have received similar results.

The questions being asked in this poll, according to the posted methodology, had people giving responses on their general impressions on Canadian senators, and whether they had heard of any changes that have been made to the Senate over the past few years.  From there, it asked for positive or negative impressions on changes to the appointment process, including:

• Canadian citizens can now APPLY for Senate positions that come open?
• An independent advisory board reviews and assesses the applications for the Senate that are received?
• New Senators are not active in a political party and sit as independent members in the Senate?
• Taken together, do you think these changes will improve the Senate, make it worse, or will they make no difference?
• And looking ahead, do you think a future government should keep these changes or go back to the previous ways of appointing Senators?

According to the posted results, some 77 percent of respondents want to carry on with the new system of appointments, while three percent wanted the old way of appointment.  Some 70 percent liked the open application process, and 83 percent liked the independent advisory board.  A further 81 percent liked that new senators don't sit with a political party, contrasting with five percent who don't agree with the move toward independence.

Overall, some 59 percent felt the changes will improve the Senate, three percent felt it will make it worse, and 24 percent felt it would make no difference.  Of course, only 37 percent of the respondents actually had a positive impression of the Senate (which was up from 25 percent in a 2016 poll), while 46 percent still hold a negative impression.  It's as though decades of stories about how terrible the institution was have left a lasting impression or something.

Why do these results matter?  In short, because I fully expect the independent senators will use them as justification to carry on agitating for internal reforms and rule changes that may be seen to benefit them, but may do lasting damage to the institution because the vast majority of them don't actually understand the institution, its history, or even its role within Parliament as a whole.  Remember just a few weeks ago that the Independent Senators Group held their retreat and there were a lot of discussion items on their agenda that focused on 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.  In other words, they wanted to sell the public on how they were new and different from the "bad old Senate" without actual regard for the fact that those changes could have material consequences to Parliament.  Waving poll results around to try and push for changes to get public approval is a dangerous game.

It's easy to get people to respond to poll questions on less partisanship because we are conditioned to think that partisanship is a bad thing (when other people are engaged in it, mind you — nobody thinks that they're partisan).  What it fails to capture — and what nearly all of the new Independent senators fail to grasp — is that there is a place for partisanship in the Senate, and that it's actually a very bad thing to completely divorce senators from the parliamentary caucus rooms.  What most people don't realize is that the Senate is the institutional memory of Parliament, and that includes within party caucuses.  The fact that they have institutional independence means that it's easier for them to push back against their leaders over poor plans and ill-conceived ideas because they don't have to worry about not getting their nomination papers signed, and they can offer a check on the power of the leader behind the closed caucus room doors.  This is why Justin Trudeau's decision to expel all of the Liberal senators not only had the effect of centralizing his power, it left his caucus of mostly newbie MPs hobbled in terms of having experienced voices that they could turn to.

Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for Independent senators.  If the chamber were actually functioning at its best, we would see a roughly equal number of Conservatives, Liberals, and Independent cross-benchers that would not only let the Senate retain its institutional memory function, but which would also avoid the problems that came with the duopoly of power.  Not that these new Independent senators see this — they are fixated on a vision of a Senate that is nothing but independents, because they don't understand how the Chamber functions in practice, let alone in theory.

The other reason why this poll bothers me is because a number of those Independent senators plan to use it as political leverage in the upcoming election.  Their press release warned that Andrew Scheer has promised to scrap this new appointment process that apparently everybody loves (and they have polling data to prove it), and Senator Yuen Pau Woo, the "facilitator" of the Independent Senators Group, keeps tweeting that he wants Senate appointments to be an election issue, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this means he is de facto shilling for Justin Trudeau in spite of his vaunted independent status.  Whether that's naiveté or a brand of arrogance in which he doesn't realize the message he's sending remains to be seen, but it's not the Senate's job to poll well.  Its job is to be sober second thought, which means avoiding the electioneering of the Other Place.  Trying to insert senators into the election, good poll numbers or not, is a dangerous game.

The ouster of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from the Liberal caucus has reignited a conversation about just how maverick we think that parties should allow MPs to be.  It's one of those constant struggles in how we conceive of politics in this country we demand that MPs be more independent and that they more closely represent the views of their constituents, and yet we also demand complete loyalty to parties and to leaders and the media will police that loyalty.  Is there a distinction to draw here between MPs who are considered "mavericks" within the fold and those who are considered dissident?  Well, it depends.

To start off with, we need to go back to the fact that the original sin here is the bastardized leadership selection system that we've adopted in Canada.  By placing the selection of leaders into the hands of the party membership, away from the caucus, it gave those leaders a sense of "democratic legitimacy" that meant that they no longer had to be accountable to their MPs, and this false sense of legitimacy grew into entitlement and eventually parties began hollowing themselves out and turning into personality cults centred around the leaders.  Because leaders could win without the support of caucus, MPs (or their provincial equivalents) were made fully aware of just how much they mattered to the leader essentially not at all which in turn had a pretty deleterious effect on how MPs felt that they could assert themselves, which is to say, there was little latitude to do so, the longer this system has existed.

The thing about "maverick" MPs that we need to remember is that by and large, they tend to be longer-term MPs that come from fairly safe ridings it insulates them from disapproval by the party leadership.  This has especially been proven true in the UK, where they have the added impetus of knowing that they'll never make it into Cabinet (particularly if their party forms government), so they have the latitude to break ranks more often.  That's trickier in Canada because our House of Commons has fewer seats, there are more opportunities for Cabinet or parliamentary secretary roles, so the incentive to be a "team player" is much greater unless you're from a region where the party has a lot of seats and you're not a desirable demographic for a Cabinet seat based on representation.  It's partially why it's allowed MPs like Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Wayne Long to be a bit more outspoken, and to his credit, Justin Trudeau hasn't moved to shut them down.

In the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, however, we also have to remember that neither was a long-time Liberal before the election Wilson-Raybould in particular keeps talking about how she wasn't into partisan politics before she was approached to run for office and that means that they came into the job with a different set of expectations than other, longer-term supporters.  We can't deny that there are a lot of MPs in the Liberal caucus right now who are essentially instant Liberals, in part because of the rise of Trudeau.  Wilson-Raybould remarked in an interview last week that she no longer understands the Liberal Party, but I'm not sure that she really quite understood it to begin with especially given that the party has so contorted itself around Trudeau's messianic rise to power (particularly if you look at how they reshaped the entire party's constitution to suit Trudeau's vision).  There may be some core values that remain intact, but it seems clear that Wilson-Raybould has not quite understood the dynamics at play within the party.  Likewise, with Jane Philpott, there seems to be a certain level of naiveté to her understanding of how politics works, which explains why she was so stunned when Trudeau ultimately decided to oust her (though I do think this is a big loss for both the caucus and for Canadian politics in general, given just how competent she was as a Cabinet minister).

With this in mind, there does seem to be some confusion in Canada by parties (and by the media that covers them) about the difference between Cabinet solidarity and caucus solidarity.  Cabinet solidarity exists because the government meaning Cabinet exists or falls as a whole and not on the basis of individuals.  The principle goes hand-in-hand with Cabinet confidence, which means that they have the ability to hash out their differences in frank discussion behind closed doors, but afterward, they present as a united front, and if a member of Cabinet can't abide by that, then they are obligated to resign as Philpott did.  This ordinarily should not be cause for expulsion from the caucus, but in Philpott's case, the calculation around her ouster was likely around that damning interview with Maclean's and the revelation by other reporters that she was shopping around stories with a media strategy in mind.

The confusion around imagined notions of caucus solidarity stem from a similar place there is caucus confidence so that they can have full and frank discussions amongst themselves, and that they can do so within the safety of the room knowing that it won't become fodder for the opposition, which is one reason why cellphones and BlackBerries are not allowed in the room, and why MPs aren't allowed to take notes.  This is also why Wilson-Raybould's decision to secretly record her conversation with Michael Wernick struck a nerve with her fellow MPs because there was a sense that their frank discussions could be next.  This, however, shouldn't preclude MPs from breaking ranks as they're not in Cabinet.  Of course, we haven't had a good track record of parties that allow dissent either the Conservatives under Stephen Harper were largely on message lockdown and they were tightly scripted, whereas the NDP has a culture whereby they must always act in solidarity, or else sanctions are imposed on dissenters, so the internal policing of independent thought is at least as strong as the external policing by media.

So could Wilson-Raybould or Philpott be considered mavericks, or were they dissidents?  I'm not sure that they quite qualified as mavericks, given that there wasn't a sense of "reasonable people can have disagreements" that comes with most MPs who break ranks, and when you couple that with the fact that they didn't have strong party roots, it doesn't fit the mould.  The fact that the media strategy and the breaking of trust with the recording seemed less about honest disagreement than it did about other objectives, which is likely why they were branded dissidents.  But it's important that we know the difference between them, lest we treat all mavericks as apostates.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics