As the Senate remains suspended for the duration of the pandemic, with periodic returns to pass emergency legislation, there have been strange rumblings coming out of the office of Senator Yuen Pau Woo, the "facilitator" of the Independent Senators Group.  While Woo was attempting to move certain rule changes by dubious means going into the current crisis, actions he has been taking since have been cause for concern, even within members of his own caucus.  Aggressive procedural moves and attempts to push through certain manoeuvres while during the skeletal sittings should be cause for concern for anyone who is keeping an eye on the Upper Chamber, given that the institution is already teetering on the brink.

At the beginning of the current Parliament, Woo started off early by trying to push through massive changes to the Rules of the Senate, along with badgering the government for amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act that are of dubious constitutionality because they are looking to fundamentally alter the Westminster character of the Senate without a constitutional amendment.  While other senators have attempted to forestall some of these motions and have them declared out of order, the Speaker has thus far allowed debate to continue.

Leading up to the point where the Senate wound up suspending for the duration of the pandemic, there continued to be problems with getting the routine functions of the Chamber up and running, such as populating committees, in part because Woo was in a fight over funding and the allocation of seats on those committees.  Recall that Woo has been trying to sideline the remaining Liberal/Progressive senators in the hopes that they cannot make a formal comeback.  As part of this, he pushed through a motion in the Senate that stated that for the duration of the current session, that committee seats were locked into their current caucus alignments in other words, if someone were to leave their current caucus and join another one, that they would not be able to retain their committee seat as they had in the past (and we do know that Woo was incredibly vexed when Senator David Richards left the ISG and retained his committee seat in the previous parliament).  This pattern also continued when Woo spiked the deal around membership of committees that were to be set up to provide oversight over the government's COVID-19 response, and then cried to the media that other parties were the problem when it was him all along.

What happened this last Friday when the Senate was recalled in skeletal format to pass the latest emergency measures bill, was that Woo forced a meeting of the Senate's committee selection committee to meet that same morning but didn't bother telling all of the members of the committee, and when he was called on it on a point of privilege in the Chamber, said that public notice of the meeting was sufficient.  He also said that the meeting was supposed to be about the "consideration of future business" meaning drafting an agenda for future meetings and instead demanded that they populate the Senate's committees immediately, and not only that, to push through the selection of his pick for Speaker Pro Tempore (essentially the Deputy Speaker of the Senate), despite the fact that his pick was not unanimous even within his own caucus, nor was she the one who had been agreed to by the other parties.

What is important to remember here is that under normal circumstances, these kinds of decisions are made by consensus in the Senate, even in the "bad old" partisan days.  By Woo forcing decisions through with majority votes when he has the caucus with the most seats he is poisoning the well.  Even more to the point, he is forcing through decisions that don't need to be made right now, because there is little point to having them.  The Senate's committees have not been given any orders of reference by which to meet, nor do they have legislation to consider.  There is also little point for them to attempt any kind of "virtual" meetings, outside of the two that have been given terms of reference in COVID-19 oversight, because the Senate needs to share these resources with the House of Commons, and they have very nearly maxed out the capacity with their own "virtual" meetings.  It's especially curious that he is trying to push through his pick for Speaker Pro Tempore because he's trying to do it at a time when the whole Senate cannot vote on the pick, which is even more suspicious.

While it's hard to impugn motive, there are grumblings that have emerged from among ISG members.  There are a number of unhappy senators in the caucus, and it seems fairly obvious that by trying to force through the committee assignments, he has a means of trying to ensure that those senators will be discouraged from leaving the ISG lest they lose said committee seats.  As for the push for Speaker Pro Tempore, the prevailing theory has been that his pick, Senator Pierrette Ringuette, is within Woo's leadership "inner circle" in the ISG, whereas Senator Patricia Bovey, who was the agreed-upon candidate among the other caucuses (in part because she filled in for Senator Nicole Eaton, the Speaker Pro Tempore in the previous parliament, when Eaton was away), is in Woo's bad books because she is seen as being "too collaborative" with members of other caucuses.  And for as much as members of the ISG, and Woo in particular, swear that they're not partisan, the open disdain they hold for the Conservatives certainly betrays that assertion.

Indeed, it is starting to look very much like Woo believes that he runs the Senate because the caucus he leads has the most senators within it (though Senator Pierre Dalphond took great exception at the Selection Committee meeting on Friday to the notion that Woo actually leads his caucus).  Woo's push for a chamber comprised solely of independents is breaking down the fabric of the institution, and nothing good can come of that.

Photo Credit: Senate of Canada