The reputations of House of Commons committees have not exactly been burnished over the past week, as witnesses testifying on sensitive subjects are complaining of being subjected to rude treatment by MPs, and other committees are dealing with filibusters that are lasting weeks, thanks to the current hybrid format in which they are operating.  These committees are supposed to be where the real work happens on Parliament Hill, and where the bulk of meaningful action happens, as opposed to the dull recitation of scripts into the record that happens in the main Chamber for most of the day.  Now, they are mostly three-ring circuses where MPs are preening for the cameras, and unacceptable behaviours are exacerbated because nobody has to look each other in the eye.

One of the stories that exemplifies this current state of affairs came out last week, where victims of sexual assault were testifying before two different committees – one of them about the activities of PornHub, the other around sexual misconduct in the military.  In both cases, these witnesses re-traumatized themselves for the sake of being on the record in Canada’s parliament, and they were met with MPs being rude, talking over them, not following up, and being engaged in procedural tactics, while these women had no ability to fend for themselves in the face of it.  And once the story came out and MPs felt called out (as they should be), they said they needed to discuss rule-changes to better accommodate these kinds of witnesses and ensuring MPs take a more trauma-informed approach to hearing from witnesses – but in the course of this, they also rationalized their own behaviours and blamed the rigidity of committee rules for it.

And yes, the rules are part of the problem – the most precious commodity in any parliament is time, and there is only so much of it to go around, and MPs want their precious minutes jealously guarded on committees, and they will demand every second of them, even if those demands cut into everyone else’s time.  That single-minded focus can make MPs on these committees bulldoze witnesses in order to maximize those precious seven minutes or less – that is, if they actually want to hear what the witnesses have to say.  The other problem that goes hand-in-hand with the rigidity of the clock is the competing interest of partisan point-scoring, which is where most of their dickish behaviour tends to come in.  That means that many MPs will spend their committee time either a) trying to call out a witness’ politics so that they can be praised or discounted; b) trying to get them to agree with a statement that will either support their party’s position or cast aspersions on another party’s; or c) spend six-and-a-half of their seven minutes sermonizing, and then asking a rhetorical question at the end for the witness to not really answer.

Much of that has been exacerbated in the current context, because we are in a hung parliament and opposition MPs hold the majority on committees, and can largely get their own way.  That’s why so many committees are now being bogged down in interminable studies on “scandals” that have long since played themselves out, or trying to find new avenues into existing ones that stretch the mandate of that committee to its limits.  And because there is so little legislation actually moving in the House of Commons (thanks again to procedural delay tactics that the Conservatives have largely been engaged in), it means there is little legislative work for these committees, which allows them to spend more of their time on these “investigations.”  Add to that, the farce that is the Health committee’s study of the pandemic responses, having requested more documents than they could ever possibly examine over the course of this parliament – and gobbling up the resources of the Commons’ law clerk to do the redactions that the public service should be doing – is showcasing how the system is being abused out or that same partisan dickishness.

This is also partly why the Procedure and House Affairs committee has devolved itself into a Liberal-led filibuster for the past forty-some sitting hours (which are broken up into small chunks because of the limits of hybrid meetings) because the Liberals are trying to push back against a massive overreach by opposition parties when it comes to the study of the government’s prorogation report (itself a stupid notion).  While I fully agree that the prime minister should testify, given that it’s his prerogative to call for a prorogation, the opposition members on the committee also not only wanted to hear from his chief of staff (which is problematic because calling staffers to committees violates the constitutional norms of ministerial responsibility), but also from the Kielburger brothers and the couple in charge of Speaker’s Spotlight, as though they have anything meaningfully to contribute to the prime minister’s personal decision to invoke his prerogative.

None of this is to say that the Liberals are blameless.  They have screwed up as a government enough times that they deserve some accountability for it, and more ministers should be falling on their swords for what has been going on (starting with Harjit Sajjan) – but little of these circuses that are happening in these committees is actual accountability.  It’s performance art, intended for point-scoring and generating clips for the nightly news and their social media channels, and the work that they should be doing is falling to the wayside.  Bills are languishing on the Order Paper, and the fact that it took five months to pass a bill that contains additional pandemic supports for people is an indictment of this current state of affairs.

It used to be that committees were the place where MPs could be less partisan and get work done.  That has largely fallen to the wayside, as the hybrid sittings exacerbate the ability of MPs to act like dicks to one another, because they no longer have to be in the same room as one another.  It’s bad for our democracy, and we should be demanding better of those we elected.

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The government has introduced a bill in the Senate that would entrench in legislation some of the changes that have been made to how the Chamber operates and that's not necessarily a good thing.  Certain Senate caucus leaders have been agitating for these changes to the Parliament of Canada Act for years now, and prime minister Justin Trudeau has finally obliged them, but as with so many things this government does for the sake of looking good and progressive, they haven't taken any of the unintended consequences into consideration and there are a lot of potential unintended consequences with this bill that could impact how the Senate operates for a generation.

In large part, the bill reflects the 2018 briefing note by the Senate Law Clerk, that was included in the thirteenth report of the Senate's modernization committee.  The changes in this bill will both entrench the ridiculous nomenclature that has grown up around the different leadership roles, such as the farcical and half-pregnant "Government Representative in the Senate," and encourage its propagation.  There was a reason why there was a Government Leader in the Senate, and why that Leader was a member of Cabinet, because it reflected the Senate's role in holding government to account, and having a direct line of accountability to Cabinet was important.  By allowing for this "Government Representative" nonsense to continue, they are devaluing the role that the Senate should be playing within our parliamentary system, and tries to enforce a viewpoint that marginalizes them away from being a co-equal chamber to a diminished status of a kind of council of elders, or a glorified debating society.

It also seeks to put all Senate caucus on an equal footing, not just the government and opposition.  Traditionally the Senate has been a duopoloy, with a few independents along the way, and that did create its own problems.  There is also a good reason why the government and opposition in the Senate had broadly similar powers, which ensured that one couldn't overpower the other in spite of an imbalance of numbers, and many times, if there is a new government, there is a real imbalance in numbers in the Senate especially if a government has been in power for a while and been active in making appointments along the way.

This equal footing for all caucuses applies to both allowances for leaders, meaning that the leadership teams of the Independent Senators Group, the Canadian Senators Group and the Progressives will all now get salaries equivalent to government and opposition leaders something that the leader of the ISG in particular has spent years agitating over (while insisting that it wasn't about the money).  More than that, they will also now have sign-off authority on the appointment of officers of parliament, such as a new Auditor General or Privacy Commissioner, as well as powers related to the Emergencies Act.  Granted, up until this point, they have largely been consulted by the government as part of the appointment processes for those officers of parliament, but this has the potential to be a fairly significant change in the longer term.

Why this has the potential to backfire is that this creates the incentive to create yet more caucus groups within the Senate, especially as the ISG continues to be so unwieldly in its current state.  There could be another two or three groups that could split off and carve out their own groups that meet the requisite nine senators to achieve official status, and under these changes, they will have greater allowances, and now greater powers to sign-off including participation in groups like the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians.  Joint committees will continue to grow until senators are in danger of outnumbering MPs because of the proliferation of caucus groups.  And because they are intended to be co-equal in power with government and opposition, they will set up for even more power struggles between leaders than are already happening, as evidenced by the fact that it took a year-and-a-half to get all of the Senate's committees up and running as a result of those struggles.

I will grant you that this could have been worse.  There have been calls by certain members of the Senate who think that there shouldn't be an official opposition, and that that it should be solely a chamber of independents, minus the government team and the Speaker, meaning a hundred "loose fish" to be individually co-opted by a government, and with no organizational ability to push back against problematic legislation by a government with a majority in the House of Commons.  Not that they think of these things most of these senators are still new and ideologically aligned with the government that appointed them, unaware of how much things change when another government with a very different ideology comes to power and wants to push though legislation that they find unpalatable.  Their tunes will change really fast then, but in the interim, it's a hypothetical that they refuse to even contemplate, which is a problem.

Generally, the "new" Senate has been getting a lot of praise by those who have only been seeing the surface-level activities, and insisted that the "non-partisan" changes have been great for the institution.  They have not, and there are some real problems with the way the Senate is now operating, which many people refuse to see because they are enamoured with the idea of it being a non-partisan body, when it really isn't, nor should it be.  The government, similarly enamoured with the optics of it being "non-partisan," is also studiously ignoring the problems, and bringing forward this bill to entrench the changes shows that they once again are more concerned with appearances over substance.  At some point, one of Trudeau's successors will rue the changes that have been made and legislated, but until then Trudeau can ignore the mess he made and keep patting himself on the back.

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