A more "independent" Senate has been the buzzword for the past few years, but after the way the chamber operated throughout the 42nd Parliament, I think we need to start laying out some clear guidelines as to what that actually means and should look like, because currently it's not working. Not only is it not working, but it is likely to become an even bigger problem to move legislation when you have a hung parliament, and a Senate that is unpredictable and for whom its members don't seem to think that rules and norms apply to them. If legislation was delayed unnecessarily in the Senate during a majority parliament, imagine how much more fraught it's going to be now that timelines become much more important, especially as opposition parties get more emboldened as time goes on to bring the government down, and those bills are increasingly likely to die on the Order Paper.
There seems to be some confusion as to just what "independent" means for these new senators, and that confusion has been leading to these problems. Ostensibly, you would think that in a political context, an Independent means that they are not formally affiliated with a particular political party. They don't caucus with them, and they aren't subject to a party whip even though we've already established that as far as the Senate is concerned, that whip was always more of a myth than it was a reality. But because there are now so many Independents in the Senate, they had to coalesce in order to ensure that they were able to deal with some of the administrative processes, whether it comes to committee assignments or allocations of office space things that the caucus whips would nominally deal with as a matter of administration. And it wouldn't do for the Government Leader in the Senate to be handling these matters for the independent senators (as there were moves by Senator Peter Harder to do early in the last parliament, as he attempted to bigfoot the nascent Independent Senators Group on several occasions), particularly as these could be used as carrots and sticks to co-opt these Independents. And so, the ISG was born a means of trying to help the Independents deal with organizational challenges.
It's all well and good to drop someone in the Senate and tell them that they're an Independent, they're not whipped, they're free to make their own choices but reality soon starts to set in. One of those realities is workload if you're all alone and without a caucus, you can't share the workload. If you're really going to be an Independent, then you need to study every piece of legislation and come up with your own recommendations on those bills, whether or not you have any particular expertise in the topic. With a caucus, you have a group of like-minded senators who each have specialized areas of knowledge, and an accumulation of institutional memory, so that they can share their study of bills within the group in weekly caucus meetings, and there is a level of trust that if they say the bill is good, based on their expertise, then their fellow senators in caucus are likely to follow their lead, but they are not obligated to.
The ISG has tried to kludge together some form of this within their quasi-caucus, and it was to be supplemented with a Secretariat who would not only provide their administrative support, but also have a research bureau that would prepare briefings on bills so that it would be easier for each senator to digest, and they could turn to their fellow Independents who had more subject matter expertise to provide their own thoughts and opinions. But the chatter in the Senate building is that the Secretariat hasn't worked out as intended, and when it comes to divvying up the workload, you have too many senators who feel obligated to speak to bills unnecessarily in debate in the Chamber. The dynamic where the sponsor and the critic would each present their case and the bill would be ushered off to committee is being fractured which also drags out the timelines on bills.
And this is where the real problems are happening, because when you have a group of people who are told that they are independent, they are also under the impression that it means they must also be independent organizationally that the negotiations around timelines for legislation that worked for decades doesn't apply to them, because they're independent. The ISG has developed this wrong-headed notion that horse-trading is somehow "partisan" and therefore must be avoided never mind that it's how things get done. When negotiations do occasionally occur, there have been instances where Senator Yuen Pau Woo, the "facilitator" of the ISG would go back to the group and say "We came to this agreement, but you're independent, so…" and then watch as that agreement was not respected. There have been cases where agreements were reached, Independent senators ignored said agreement, and then those tasked with negotiating would lie and say that an agreement had not been reached when it had been. And this is where the Senate is breaking down.
I think we need to impress upon senators that Independent means that they aren't affiliated with a party it does not mean that they are not exempt from the norms of negotiation and respecting what has been agreed to. And in fact, it's utterly dickish to swan around the Senate believing that negotiations don't apply to them when it's to the benefit of everyone that timelines are discussed, negotiated, and what is agreed to is respected. Yes, the Senate rules are there to respect the rights of each individual senator, which is why they can speak to any item of business they choose to, but at some point, there has to be some acknowledgement that you need to all travel in the same direction if there is to be coherence in the legislative process. And until this particular lesson can be absorbed by the Independents and impressed upon them by the ISG, that it's in everyone's interests to respect negotiations, and that serial offenders will be called out then we're going to find the Senate will continue to devolve into a complete Gong Show.
Photo Credit: Senate of Canada