The clock is now ticking for Conservative-turned-Independent Senator Lynn Beyak, as the Senate's ethics committee has recommended that she be suspended for a second time because she had not completed the anti-racism training that was a condition of her return to the Senate, nor were they satisfied with her apology for her previous statements or promotion of racist emails on her Senate website. The calls for Beyak's removal from the Senate are getting louder, but many are going about it in the wrong way, asking people to write their MPs to demand her termination, but removing a senator doesn't work like that. It's a high bar to meet, but it seems that Beyak is determined to actually test the Senate's patience, and her time is running short as avenues for due process get shorter.
It is worth reminding readers that senators have institutional independence, which includes the high bar for removal, because of the nature of the Senate's constitutional powers, which is an absolute veto on any piece of government legislation, with the exception of constitutional amendments (for which they have a six-month suspensive veto only). This is an important parliamentary check on the power of the prime minister, and the extraordinary powers that he or she could wield when they command a majority in the House of Commons. If senators were easily enough fired by a prime minister with a majority, then we would see instances of the Upper Chamber's membership being turned over in cases where senators sought to defy the prime minister for a possible abuse of power, and their replacement with more pliant senators.
Because of their parliamentary privileges, only senators can vote to remove one of their own from Parliament, and why it's foolhardy to demand that MPs do something about it. It's also one of the reasons why the bar for removal of senators is generally at the level of serious criminality, but there are exceptions. The Senate was ready to vote for the removal of now-former Senator Don Meredith after they conclusively proved serious ethical breaches in particular his sexual relationship with an underaged woman before he did the right thing and resigned.
Beyak appears to be on a path for something similar, given that she has been found to have breached ethical guidelines as a result of her conduct, but the Senate has to ensure that they are giving her as much due process as they possibly can in order to avoid setting dangerous precedents for the removal of senators. It's never actually been done largely because senators see the writing on the wall and will resign honourably (and preserve their pensions along the way), but Beyak could soon be the test case. The Senate has been giving her ample opportunities to make proper amends with the anti-racism training and the demand for a proper apology now that the racist letters have been removed from her site but Beyak seems determined to flout even these fairly simple demands.
As more details emerge about what happened during Beyak's time during that anti-racism training, the more it looks like she is determined to martyr herself for this cause. As was reported by the CBC, Beyak appeared at the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres and declared herself to be of Métis ancestry based on the notion that her parents adopted an Indigenous girl which is not how Métis identity works. (Officially, there requires an ancestral connection to the Red River settlement to be considered part of the Métis Nation, though there is a debate around other groups which self-identify as Métis). She also told the trainers that "there is no racism in Northern Ontario," and that when presented with a case study of an Indigenous man turned away from a hotel in her hometown, she came up with novel theories that perhaps he had "dirty hair" or looked "grubby or threatening."
More to the point, Beyak reportedly told the trainers that she felt the training was irrelevant because she felt she would be reinstated to the Senate in any case (granted, the suspension order would lift when parliament was dissolved for the election), and that she wasn't interested in the past because she wanted to focus on current matters such as the proper use of tax dollars and the infrastructure deficit of First Nations. She was quoted as saying "History has nothing to do with racism. It's about what your people are doing to your own people."
Based on these reports from the trainers which Beyak's lawyers are apparently disputing it seems fairly clear that she feels a certain amount of invincibility because of her position and the extreme difficulty of removing a senator from office (and no doubt she plans to fight any removal in court, despite the fact that it clearly falls under parliamentary privilege), which would also mean that she isn't taking the obligations placed on her by the Senate per the ethics committee's recommendations seriously. But it needs to be said that the committee has essentially given Beyak enough rope to hang herself at the end of this road.
The Senate is going to concern itself with due process, because they have (mostly) learned their lessons after the ClusterDuff Affair that short-circuiting due process will only lead to making intolerable situations worse. More than one Senate staffer has remarked to me that there is a reason why Senator Raymond Lavigne went to jail and Senator Mike Duffy did not, and that is because due process was followed with Lavigne where it wasn't with Duffy. They have allotted Beyak with every opportunity to save herself and her Senate seat, and she seems determined to throw it away, possibly to prove some kind of a point. But while the public demands for her removal get louder, I would counsel patience she will run out of rope sooner than later, but it can't be a rushed process. She is the architect of her own undoing, and people shouldn't get in her way.
Photo Credit: The Turtle Island News