The tensions between a party caucus and its leader are rarely evident in modern politics, but in the past few weeks alone, we're seeing increasing example of it bubbling to the surface.  In both provincial and federal politics of late, as we see an increasing number of leaders selected from outside of their party caucuses, and increasingly they are refusing to run for a seat as quickly as possible.  When MPs are made to blindly follow someone who has not been elected along with them, it's inevitable that there will be tensions.

Over the weekend, the Bloc Québécois House Leader, Gabriel Ste-Marie relinquished his post because he has been unable to work with party leader Martine Ouellet, who doesn't have a seat (and who currently sits as an independent member of the Quebec National Assembly).  Ouellet apparently believes that her MPs should be pushing for independence in Ottawa, whereas many of the MPs are more focused on representing Quebec's interests in the House of Commons, and the difference became irreconcilable for Ste-Marie.  Ouellet is also known for not being able to make compromises and concessions, which makes it even more difficult to lead a party when she is absent from Ottawa for much of the time.

Prior to this, the Patrick Brown omnishambles has laid bare tensions within the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus with his ouster and the subsequent exposing of the "rot" within the party's structure.  When Maclean's posted the contents of the conference call that caucus members were on the night that the allegations against Brown were first aired, there was a definite sense of disconnect between those MPPs in the caucus looking to protect the party rather than just the leader's reputation, and they were prepared to be cold-blooded to do so something that is almost unthinkable in the age where caucus members are expected to line up behind the leader and nod vigorously at everything he or she says.  Supporters of Brown have since denigrated the caucus members as being "ungrateful" and "traitors," and castigated them as "elites" who have apparently betrayed the grassroots members who elected Brown, as though those caucus members were not elected in their own right.

There is a famous misquote that commentators like to trot out about Pierre Trudeau allegedly saying that MPs were nobodies fifty yards from the Hill.  (In reality, his quote was about the opposition only having the forum in Parliament to talk, and "When they get home, when they get out of Parliament, when they are 50 yards from Parliament Hill, they are no longer honourable members they are just nobodies.")  Regardless of the veracity of the quote, it has become received wisdom, but when one looks at the dynamics that play out in Parliament under the current power structures, it becomes increasingly clear that MPs are treated far more like "nobodies" while they're on the Hill by their own leader than they are in their home ridings.

Our leadership selection system has upended the proper functioning of our political system.  The elected members of the legislature have ceased becoming the check on the powers exercised by Cabinet, and are instead cheerleading squads for their leaders.  The continued bastardization of the rules of debate have turned the House of Commons into a forum for reading assigned speeches into the void rather than engaging in meaningful debate, and Question Period is about gathering media clips, with the spotlight being on the leaders to do get the best lines every day.  MPs and MPPs are expected to be compliant drones for the leader, and even the media will encourage this particular viewpoint when they start concern trolling that MPs who exert the slightest bit of independence are a sign that the leader could be losing his or her grip on their party.

Mind you, that's if the leaders have a seat, which increasingly they don't.  Leadership contests are increasingly about bringing in an outsider with fresh ideas and a fresh face to mould the party around themselves with witness how in the current Ontario PC leadership race, there is not a single member of caucus among the candidates, and each of them are quickly repudiating the platform put together by the previous leader (which was branded with his face) as though it was something that belonged to him alone rather than the party and its membership.  And while that leadership contest is coming close enough to an election that there is the reasonable possibility that whoever the leader is could win their seat and be in the legislature for the following parliament, that's not always the case.

Ouellet has refused to run for a federal seat despite several opportunities to do so, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh similarly refuses his own run until 2019, leaving Guy Caron to be the party's de facto leader in his absence, and caucus unanimity isn't always on display there either.  Former leadership rival Charlie Angus has tweeted (and deleted) shade directed at Singh on more than one occasion.  And even Conservatives have been grumbling privately about some of the choices made by Andrew Scheer when it comes to how he's running things, particularly some of his strategic choices.

It all boils down to the power imbalance that now exists in parties.  If we want MPs to take back their power, for them to do the jobs of accountability that they are supposed to do, and if we want meaningful work for them, it means we need to start diminishing the power of party leaders once again.  Doing that means returning to a means of selecting them that aren't broken, that don't encourage warlordism and cults of personality.  It means re-empowering MPs (and MPPs) to select and fire their leaders so that it's those elected representatives who have the power.  MPs should be somebodies on the Hill, and they can't be so long as the leaders have assumed all of the power.  It's time to return it to where it belongs.

This week, democratic institutions minister Karina Gould announced changes to the appointment process for new senators, intended to make it easier to apply for a Senate seat.  Those changes include creating a new year-round process so that Canadians can apply for a Senate seat at any time; that applications will be kept on file for two years, so that they can be considered at any point during that time; and adding the ability for organizations and individuals to nominate someone.

On the face of it, most of these are changes that are not bad ones.  It's probably a good idea that you're giving applicants the opportunity to apply in advance of upcoming vacancies, and it's probably not a bad idea to create a limited bank of potential candidates so that when future vacancies do happen, the system can be a bit more responsive and possibly even proactive when it comes to filling those seats in a more expeditious manner because let's face it, the process to date has been anything but expeditious.  The fact that we still have twelve vacancies left to fill, and that the process as it stands has only managed a handful of appointments over the past year is clearly an indication that this particular system is not working properly.

But as much as these changes may be necessary, they're not really addressing the fundamental problem with the way that this appointment process has been running, which is the fact that it still relies on people putting themselves forward, rather than the advisory board going out looking for candidates who are qualified, fit the needs of the Chamber at the time, and more importantly, are seeking out candidates who wouldn't normally consider themselves for such a position.  And that's one of the key factors that I keep going back to, and which Emmett Macfarlane, the University of Waterloo political science professor who was consulted on the design of this appointment process, had advocated at the time.  Relying on self-nomination is a poor way to run an appointment process for a position like the Senate, particularly because it's a body with institutional independence that makes it very hard to discipline or remove its members when they do wrong.  If you build your appointment process toward people who feel that they ought to be the Senate because they deserve it in other words, people who have an inflated sense of self rather than it being an honour that is bestowed upon them unexpectedly, I worry that you're attracting people more likely to feel entitled to their entitlements.  There are egos in the room, and certainly, we are starting to get hints of that entitlement with some of the newer appointees.

What would be a better way of going about it?  Well, for starters, the government should have gone with a process like Macfarlane had suggested, and which should more properly have been modelled on how the Vice-Regal Appointments Committee operated during the Harper years (which, probably not surprisingly, was disbanded by Trudeau despite it being a good process that worked extremely well).  Superficially it looks similar, with a federal component of three members and two ad-hoc members from each province or territory with an upcoming vacancy, and each would draw up a shortlist for the PM to choose from, but the most important difference was the fact that they went out into the community to find candidates, and to speak to community leaders about who would be a good recommendation.  It was not dependent on people submitting their resumes for consideration.  It was also far more proactive in terms of working toward upcoming vacancies.  This is really what Trudeau should have been looking to emulate when it came to looking for new senators (and what he should have kept in place for vice-regal appointments, a process which is once again a complete black box).

I should also note that an improvement to the process would have allowed for appointments to be made not only to the independent crossbenchers, but to allow for senators with partisan loyalties to be appointed in order to help maintain a balance within the chamber that is currently in danger of being lost entirely.  Currently the process asks for disclosure of past political activities but says that these will not disqualify applicants though given the number of times that they keep repeating that this is for a more independent Senate, there does seem to be an implication that this may indeed be something that would be screened out.  And it's too bad, because if we want the Senate to operate most effectively, we would have roughly equal numbers of Liberal, Conservative and Independent senators.  This can easily be accommodated by the kind of process that has been put into place (or better yet, like the way it should have been run).

Meanwhile, it will probably be some time before even this "improved" process can get underway because, well, there is nobody to advise on these appointments.  Currently, all of the advisory positions  both the two federal seats and the two seats for each province and territory are vacant.  The only person who is in this process remains the advisory board chair, Huguette Labelle.  Given the pace at which this government operates, it could be months before those advisory positions are filled and can start evaluating applications as they come in, which will slow down the deeded appointments even more.  The fact that there are still so many vacancies is not doing this government any favours when it comes to questions of their competence.

I would also add that I got a tip that Gould also sent a version of the press release to Liberal MPs with the additional line "I hope that as representatives of your communities, you will inform your constituents and stakeholders about these changes to the Senate appointments process."  For a process that is supposed to remain arm's length of the government and indeed of partisanship (as much as I may disagree with that) this is poor optics to say the least.  But there's that question of competence again…

Over the past couple of weeks, Question Period has been dominated by the plaintive wails of the Conservatives that demand that the federal government stand up to defend Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline against the predations of BC's NDP government.  It's not enough that the government has approved the pipeline and declared it to be in the national interest apparently, they must bring the full force of federal power to bear against it, before it suffers the same fate that the aborted Northern Gateway and Energy East pipelines did.

First of all, it bears reminding that BC's actions to date have involved putting out a press release.  It shouldn't need to be stated that the federal government can't take BC to court over a press release, and yet here we are.  They've stated the intention to hold consultations on bitumen, but there is nothing concrete that the government can actually do anything about.  At this point, it's all talk, regardless of the fact that Alberta took the somewhat proactive step to ban imports of BC wine in retaliation.  Demands that they do something at this point remains hugely overblown.

Let us also not forget that the narrative around the other two pipeline plans being abandoned are too cute by half.  For one, it ignores the fact that the Conservative government was found by the Supreme Court of Canada to have dropped the ball on their duty to consult Indigenous people along Northern Gateway route, and had they made just a little more effort, they may have won the necessary approvals and won that court challenge.  But they didn't.  With Energy East, the resurrection of the Keystone XL pipeline was the bigger death knell of that project as it was further along, more cost effective for the proponent, and it made far more economic sense for them to shift their contracts to the Keystone XL project than in Energy East.  While they may have cited the "uncertainty" of the National Energy Board deciding to look at upstream emissions as part of their evaluation, it didn't change the very clear signals from the government that it was ultimately a cabinet decision (thanks to rule changes pushed through by the previous Conservative government), and that was not one of the criteria by which they would be basing their decision.

As for Trans Mountain, we are at a stage of the project where the federal government involving itself directly would be hugely inappropriate because the NEB is a quasi-judicial body whose rulings have approximately the same weight as that of the Federal Court.  If Kinder Morgan felt that the project was being unduly threatened by the provincial or municipal governments in BC, they can apply to the NEB to make an order that will give them the access they need, and they have already successfully done so with some of the roadblocks that Burnaby was attempting to put into place.  Having the federal government insert itself into this process before Kinder Morgan makes any further applications would have the same effect as the government trying to bigfoot the courts on a decision that they are supposed to render, ignoring the separation of powers and the whole purpose for why we have these quasi-judicial bodies in the first place.

Add to all of these demands came a bill tabled by Conservative-turned-Independent Alberta Senator Doug Black last week, which would legislatively declare that the Trans Mountain pipeline is in the national interest and that any works related to it are "not frustrated or delayed."  But aside from the general useless nature of a bill whose only sole clause is to reiterate something that the government has already declared, one wonders if this doesn't just frustrate the work of the NEB in carrying out their duties as the regulator and creates even more confusion into a situation where a clear delineation of responsibilities already exists.  In addition, the fact that the Conservatives in the House of Commons were demanding that the government table a timeline for when the pipeline could begin construction, as though that were a decision that was in their hands they don't control the NEB, nor do they control Kinder Morgan (unless the Conservatives are planning to nationalize that particular company "in the national interest") is all absurd theatre.

At this point, we need to ask ourselves whether these demands, which are entirely performative for the sake of their voters at home, are actually helping the cause, or if they're ultimately hurting it?  Why this question matters is because the Prime Minister last week went to the National Observer, an outlet that is not exactly friendly with the government, and laid it out clearly that the approval of the Trans Mountain expansion was part of a bigger whole, a necessary trade-off that allowed Alberta to sign onto the government's national climate framework and get the needed buy-in that they can show the rest of the country that if Alberta is willing to take these steps, hard emissions cap and all, that they can make it work across the board.  But if the Conservatives demand that the government use the full weight of their federal powers to push this pipeline through, as inappropriate as some of those measures might be, how can they then turn around and call it unconstitutional for the government to act within its same clear powers to institute a national carbon price?  You can't demand that the government use those powers in one circumstance and then turn around and declare them invalid in another, without looking like complete hypocrites.  But if they want this pipeline to happen, they might need to concede that the whole package needs to go through along with it, and that may be the tougher pill to swallow.  Harming the political trade-off, however, could mean no pipeline in the end, and the demise could very well be the fault of those whose bully tactics blew up in their faces.

On Tuesday evening, Independent Senator Marc Gold gave a speech in the Chamber about the proposal put forward by Government Leader in the Senate err, "government representative" Senator Peter Harder around his proposals for "sober second thinking."  Gold saw Harder's contribution to the debate around Senate modernization as "constructive" and he welcomed it and gave a speech which was described as "demolishing myths" around the need for a formalized opposition in the Senate.  It may not surprise you that I was not impressed by his speech, not convinced in the slightest.

The first point that should be made is that every time someone digs into the history of the Senate and finds calls for it to be without partisanship, they are usually ignoring some of the context around the time, the composition of the chamber, and what their aims and objectives were.  For example, citing one-time Senator Earnest Manning that the Senate should be entirely non-partisan likely stemmed from the fact that he was a former Social Credit premier, and became the first and only Socred senator in Canada's history.  That he didn't fit into the Liberal-Conservative dynamic of the chamber likely contributed to his beliefs that said duopoly structure should be eliminated.  Not that you'd hear those citing him giving such context.

My second point is that Gold and others make the fundamental error of looking at the Senate in isolation, rather than in full bicameral perspective.  There should be an interplay between the members of both chambers, and normally that would happen within the party caucuses.  The senate is the corporate memory of parliament, and within the caucus room, it provides a check on party leadership, while at the same time having the institutional independence so as not to be whipped or ordered about by those same party leaders.  This, of course, has varied over the past few years, which is a separate problem from the one that Gold is trying to address, but we can't just consider the Senate without considering how it should be interacting with the House of Commons at the same time.

A big part of the arguments that Harder has repeatedly put forward, and which Gold picked up on, was the fact that there is a great deal of variability within Westminster systems, so there is no one model that Canada must follow in order to maintain that character.  The problem here is again contextual.  While each country may have a Westminster model, their upper chambers (if they have them New Zealand, of course, being an example where they got rid of theirs and it didn't solve the problems that they thought it would) differ because of circumstance.  While you can point to Australia having expertise with the Estimates and operating in a way that requires building coalitions with smaller parties due to its elected-by-proportional-representation make-up, or that the House of Lords has specific competencies that it has developed, that too has to do with its own history and dynamics.  The Canadian Senate is one built on a foundation of dual federalism both territorial federalism, and linguistic/cultural federalism, which is unique among other Westminster models.  It's also large enough that it can't operate in a consensus manner like, for example, the Nunavut legislature, which is another oft-cited example of a Westminster body without partisanship.  Not every element is transferrable, no matter how much you may think it is.

And then we get to the heart of the issue.  Senators like Hader and Gold confuse formal opposition with partisanship, in part because the Conservatives in the Chamber have been pushing that viewpoint.  While the current Conservative viewpoint has tended to ensure a dynamic whereby the Senate acts as either a rubber stamp when they are in power, or a source of needless obstruction when they're not (thanks in large part to the problematic dynamic that the Harper Conservatives infected the chamber with in treating their swath of newly appointed senators like backbenchers to be ordered about), that's not how the chamber should be organized either.  But even without partisan labels, there should at the very least be a philosophical underpinning to a structured opposition in order to provide a necessary challenge function to the government.

That challenge function is key to sober second thought, and it's not something I'm seeing in the arguments put forward by Harder and Gold.  Sure, they talk about putting forward a diversity of perspectives when examining legislation, which they think can be achieved by means of "a set of standing rules that would provide a structured road map for the passage of a bill through the Senate."  The means by which they plan to set that roadmap is a business committee, which I also have very big problems with because it creates a powerful clique that diminishes the power of individual senators.  But without any organization or grouping that can provide that challenge function, who can and will call the government out, sober second thought is more difficult because it's diffuse.  It's especially more difficult if one expects that only the current crop of independent senators will perform it going forward because there is a not unjustified criticism that they largely share the government's basic philosophical underpinnings.

Doing away with structured opposition creates some 100 loose fish who become vulnerable to being swayed in one way or the other on any given issue, particularly if the Government Leader seeks to co-opt them on an issue-by-issue basis.  Not having an organizing principle means that the senate would have to rely on individual incentives to guide debates, whether they're organized by a business committee or not, and that can be a problem.  It's especially going to be a problem if you extend this same principle so that only interested parties sit on committees, rather than spreading out the expertise a little, because you also run the risk of groupthink.  We've seen that happen, on the fisheries committee, and especially on the national security and defence committee, which became a lobby group for the defence industry.  Having some structured opposition can provide a focus for the activities of the chamber as a whole, so that the business of Parliament can be seen for the forest rather than the trees of individual issues.

Just because Gold thinks that the principles of Responsible Government belong only in the House of Commons, which is the confidence chamber, it doesn't diminish the fact that the primary purpose of Parliament is to hold government to account, no matter which chamber does it.  The Senate is not supposed to be a debating society or a council of elders.  It is not supposed to merely advise on legislation that passes before it.  That's a narrow interpretation of the functions that ignores its role in the broader parliamentary ecosystem.  And eliminating the role of structured opposition to spite the Conservative partisans will only lead to bigger problems down the road, like every single attempt to "modernize" the rules of Parliament has ever done, time and again.  Heed the lessons of history rather than cherry picking them to suit your agenda. Once you break the Senate, it will be difficult to put it back together again.

(Also, a note to the Conservatives in the chamber: Tone down the partisan gamesmanship and apocalyptic rhetoric.  You're only giving ammunition to Harder and Gold.  Think of the bigger picture).