OTTAWA — As a modernization committee debates the future of the Senate with no conclusion in sight, the leader of the Senate Liberals argued Wednesday that senators shouldn’t be discouraged from banding together along partisan lines.
“We are being encouraged to transform the Senate by eliminating the usual features of the Westminster parliamentary model,” said Sen. Joseph Day, who leads a group of senators that aligns itself with the Liberal Party but does not represent the government or sit with Liberal MPs in a caucus.
Freedom of assembly is a Charter right, Day said, and should prevent any attempts to reform the Senate in a way that forbids partisan organization. And if the government has a representative in the chamber to present its legislation — Sen. Peter Harder, sworn-in in March — then Day argued the official opposition should be represented officially as well.
Not everyone agrees with that idea. Some, including Harder, are aiming for a Senate with no political party caucuses, made up of independents.
But as the committee met Wednesday, Day argued Harder’s motives seem unclear.
“He is speaking on behalf of the government and encouraging us to model ourselves in the image the government is creating for us,” Day said. “If we agree to go down that road, whose interests will we be serving?”
He argued the vision articulated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he was in opposition could in fact make it harder for the Senate to act as a check on power because senators may not be organized enough to present arguments against a bill.
But Day doesn’t want to see the Senate infected by the hyper-partisanship of the House of Commons either, and argued that Conservative senators should sever their caucus ties with their Commons counterparts.
The committee is meeting during a time of upheaval in the Senate; Trudeau’s Liberals in the House have severed official ties with their former caucus mates in the Senate, and 21 recently-named independent senators, along with seven appointed in March, upset a status quo where almost all senators were either Conservative or Liberal — and either in government or in opposition, depending on who held the balance of power in the House of Commons.
There was some debate among committee members over what the formal role of the opposition in the Senate should be. Some senators, like Conservative Sen. Stephen Greene, think Harder and two others who act as government representatives (they call themselves the G3) should be matched by a trio of official opposition representatives (“the O3,” suggested Liberal Sen. Art Eggleton).
Still, Sen. Diane Bellemare, one of the G3, replied that this is a period of transition for the Senate and that it is the public who want to see a more nonpartisan Senate, or at least one that doesn’t need political parties to function.
The co-ordinator of the independents’ group, Sen. Elaine McCoy, said that senators “can’t rely simply on the official opposition for all of us to do our jobs as scrutineers.”
As the longest-serving senator, Anne Cools, pointed out, none of this has been debated on the Senate floor itself, only in committee. And heading into December, senators remain nowhere near agreement on what the Senate should look like, though the chamber’s makeup has already changed dramatically.
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