One of the noticeable talking points that was deployed with the creation of the new Canadian Senators Group earlier this week was the point that the group would also be "whip-free." The problem? That could essentially describe any of the Senate caucuses, because the use of the metaphorical whip in the Senate has largely been illusory, with a couple of exceptions. You wouldn't know it based on the constant statements from the likes of the Leader of the Government in the Senate err, "government representative," Senator Peter Harder, or the fact that every single time a member of the Independent Senators Group stands up to speak in the Chamber, they feel the need to pat themselves on the back for not being whipped. Certain new senators who have taken it upon themselves to "demystify" the Upper Chamber have also been erroneously spreading the notion that the party-affiliated caucuses were whipped and they're not, but we need to remember that this is largely a falsehood that nobody seems to want to correct.
The first thing to remember is that there is virtually no ability for a party leader to actually coerce a senator into doing anything. That's part of the virtue of the institutional independence that the Senate, as constructed, provides. Senators can't be fired, they can't have their salaries docked by their leaders, they don't need to have nomination papers signed, and any other levers involve things like having their Senate leader threatening to take away committee chairmanships, or denying them certain parliamentary travel, but when it's a matter of principle, you'll find that most senators won't care about that. Those levers are slightly more acute when a party is in power, but they are fairly superficial in the broader scheme of things. This matters when the conversation is about whips and what they can and cannot do.
In recent memory, we did see an incoming cohort of Conservative senators being given the heavy hand upon appointment particularly with the mass-appointment during the prorogation crisis of 2008. They were essentially treated as backbenchers, but the power of the whip they were subjected to was not actually there, but they didn't know any better because they didn't have enough proper mentors in their caucus to show them the ropes a problem of Stephen Harper's own making. Recall that he had refused to appoint any Senators who weren't "elected" in provinces (Michael Fortier excepted), and it was on this principle that he allowed so many vacancies to pile up, while his own Senate caucus dwindled and were doing triple-duty on committees. When the panic appointments of late 2008 were made, there weren't enough warm bodies in his Senate caucus to properly mentor and show them the ropes, so they showed them the whip instead.
This matters in how the culture of the Senate was affected for those years, but a truism of the Senate triumphed in the intervening years that Senators get more independent the longer they're there. This was already apparent during the ClusterDuff Affair, when Harper's then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, complained to Harper in emails that the PMO didn't have any levers in the Senate like they did in the House of Commons, and they weren't able to stage manage the whole affair as they would have if it was an issue with a rogue MP. When the Conservatives lost power, and their Senate leadership lost their last remaining levers, and the culture changed even further within their ranks.
These days, the Conservative caucus in the Senate tends to come up with positions by consensus their leadership team in the Senate coming up with strategic plans and bringing them to their caucus to come to an agreement on how to proceed with bills or other business that comes before them, and once they come to a decision, they tend to act on it as a group. My sources in the caucus insist that they haven't had to whip a vote in years which is pretty much the norm for how the Senate has long operated. Recall that in Brian Mulroney's day, his own Senators voted against him on several key issues such as a budget and his abortion bill an obvious sign that there wasn't an operative whip then either.
For the Senate Liberals, I had a conversation with their former leader, Senator James Cowan, who had been the opposition leader under Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Justin Trudeau until the big ouster. According to Cowan, there had not been an operable whip in any of that time, though there were three occasions he could recall that the Commons leadership approached him to express that they would prefer their senators vote in a particular way, which was then brought to the Senate caucus to discuss, and it didn't always go as the Commons leadership had hoped in one case, many of them voted against the measure simply because they felt the Commons leadership was overstepping in even asking them to vote that way. So much for the sting of the whip.
The simple fact is that for most items, senators who caucus together will come to similar positions because they share common values. No one Senator can dissect every single bill and come up with independent decisions on every piece of business before them they rely on those they caucus with to spread the work around and discuss their evaluations with one another, and they trust those with more subject matter expertise on the bills in question that they will follow their lead. This is not a whip it's how you spread the work around. Add to that, even the position of whip in a Senate caucus is less about counting votes than it is about organizing logistics like office space, and ensuring that when someone can't make it to committee that someone is found to substitute for them. But that doesn't fit with the image that those who are pushing for wholesale change of the Chamber have constructed for themselves, so they instead present a false narrative. The whip was never real, so patting yourselves on the back that you're not subjected to it only makes you look foolish.
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