Hopes that the Senate's committees would soon be getting underway in the new session of parliament seem to be diminishing as unfinished business from the previous session continues to drag along, exposing some of the problems with the "new" "independent" upper chamber. Some of you may recall that the bulk of committees never even formed in the previous session, brief though it was, because of pushback against a motion that the Independent Senators Group leader, Senator Yuen Pau Woo, pushed through the Chamber regarding the composition of those committees a move ended in a meltdown of the selection committee and the defection of several senators to other caucuses. Rather than take the loss and show a willingness to cooperate, Woo is doubling down, and the cycle is repeating itself.
The motion that Woo favours would insist that, should a senator decide to leave their current caucus, their committee seat would stay with their old caucus and not be carried with them as they go. The real motivation behind it was an attempt to screw over the declining Senate Liberal caucus, who had fallen below the number needed for official recognition, with the calculus that if they changed the rules in such a way, then it would discourage senators from leaving the ISG to join the Liberals and revitalize them. The Liberals soon rebranded as the Progressives, and soon enough, ISG senators started filtering over to them, restoring their official status and ability to keep committee seats on their own terms rather than negotiating them as "non-affiliated senators." While the motion that went through in the previous session died on prorogation, Woo has since attempted to reintroduce it in the agreement around reconstituting committees, and the Progressives are not having it.
Under the Senate rules that have existed for the better part of 150 years, the directive has been that once the selection committee places a senator in a committee seat, that seat is theirs until the end of the session, regardless of whether they remained in caucus or not. It's also important to remember that there was a certain amount of fluidity to senate committee make-up, given that senators retired, others were appointed, and the numbers in the chamber fluctuate to a greater extent than in the Commons. Part of why this rule exists is to protect the independence of a senator so that they can't actually be cajoled or intimidated by their own caucus or whip. These are the same rules that ensure that every senator can speak to any order of business on every single sitting day it's there to ensure that their institutional independence filters down to a greater degree than in the Commons. This makes it all the more ironic that the leader of the so-called Independent Senators Group is hell-bent on demanding rules that would actually make senators less independent.
In trying to defend the motion, Woo's deputy, Senator Raymond Saint-Germaine said that allowing senators to be the "owner" of his or her committee seat "will lead to anarchy," adding "this is the way it works and this is a democracy." Err, except that it was how it worked for 150 years, and there wasn't "anarchy." Nor was there "anarchy" in protecting the rights of senators to their independence, and to allow continuity of their work on committees which generally act in a relatively non-partisan matter regardless of whom they are affiliated with. And for a caucus like the ISG that proclaims their independence and absolute intolerance to partisanship, they are acting in a hyper-partisan manner in jealously demanding that the seats belong to the caucus and not the senator.
The matter hasn't been helped by the fact that one of the other Senate caucuses, the Canadian Senators Group, has declared that one of their "founding principles" is that seats belong to the group and not the individual, and if someone leaves they leave their committee seat behind, and that anyone who would ask to join them while keeping their committee seat would be treated with suspicion, with the caucus leader, Senator Scott Tannas, considering it a "matter of honour" because of how committee proportions are negotiated. Mind you, such "founding principles" are not exactly enforceable, and like the ISG, it misconstrues the history of the Senate rules and why they exist the way they do.
There is another underlying dynamic to this mess, which is just how much the ISG senators knew about this motion when they initially voted for it in the previous session, and how much they understand about it now. Senator Pierre Dalphond, who has been at the centre of much of this drama, says that when he was with the ISG, they weren't informed of what this motion meant the last time, and I have heard that other senators who since defected to the Progressives, like Dalphond, have cited their distaste for how this issue was handled as being one of the reasons why they left the ISG.
The broader point remains that many of the newer senators still don't understand their role, or the fact that the rules exist in the way they do in order to safeguard their independence and that they should be fighting to hold onto those rights rather than let their caucus leader sign them away for small-p political ends. And it's not just with this it's also around things like the agitation for a "business committee," which would weaken their ability to speak to any issue on the Order Paper at the time of their choosing, as is currently their right. One suspects that this fundamental ignorance of the Senate itself is partly why the ISG has become so bureaucratized, and why they manage their senators in the way they do while insisting that they don't actually manage them. But until these newer senators start to wake up and realize that their fundamental independence is at stake, then I fear that we will keep having this same discussion, to satisfy a leader who demands a cudgel to keep the senators in his caucus from defecting.
Photo Credit: Senate Of Canada
