Delays seem to be the word of the day for the fledgling government – delays in getting the refugees here (but that’s happening), delays in getting committees up and running (thanks in no small part to NDP and Bloc wrangling) – though they did finally name the assisted dying committee members today, and it looks like there are now delays in getting the new Independent appointments committee for naming new senators up and running. This means that those promised five new “independent” senators won’t likely be chosen before Parliament comes back, nor will the new government “representative” be chosen from one of those five as intended. That could start being a problem for the government as they start looking to outline their agenda and figure out what they’re going to start sending over to the Senate in terms of legislation. Mind you, it’s not too late for the government to do the right thing and appoint an existing senator to the post (because it makes absolutely no sense to put someone with no Senate experience into the role – it really doesn’t), and then figure out how to keep the relationship as arm’s length as possible while still letting parliament function as it should, with government and opposition sides that help keep debate and accountability going. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, can We The Media please stop this whole “The Senate has traditionally been a partisan dumping ground” line? It’s a gross exaggeration of the truth, and it neglects the fact that a lot of eminently qualified people who weren’t just party hacks were appointed. Yes, some of them chose to behave a bit unfortunately once appointed because they thought they had do (particularly true of the way that Harper’s poor appointment process corrupted a generation of senators), but on the whole? We had some pretty great appointments on both sides for a lot of years. Stephen Harper and his PMO upsetting the balance should not be held up as the norm of the chamber’s history any more than the small number of senators with questionable expenses should be treated as a reflection on the vast majority who didn’t. But by all means, keep repeating the received wisdom (and in some cases mendacious gossip) about the Chamber and its denizens. It’s really helping us live up to our role of educating the public as to what goes on in Parliament.
Tag Archives: The Senate
Roundup: The problem with private members’ bills
I’ve written a lot about the problems with private members’ bills, and in my column this week over at Loonie Politics, it came up again given that the lottery for the Order of Precedence was posted. I wrote about it back in the spring when there were a number of problematic ones that the Senate was possibly going to kill (and in some cases did when the clock ran out on them) for good reason – because they were bad bills. While interviewing Liberal Senator George Baker yesterday for a story I was writing, he offered this, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to include in the piece, but every MP should nevertheless read it and take it to heart:
“Here’s a real problem with these private member’s bills: if there’s a fault in the bill, if there’s a word out of place, if there’s an error in the wording or in the intent of a sentence of paragraph – if it’s a private member’s bill, then the Senate is in a quandary because if they amend the bill, then they will in all likelihood be defeating the bill. If you amend a bill in the Senate, if it’s a private member’s bill, it goes back to the Commons and it goes to the bottom of the list for consideration, and then the private member will come to the Senate committee and say you’re going to pass this bill. We had it happen three times in the past two years. They say you’re going to defeat the bill, so the Senate turned around and passed the bill, given the tradition of not defeating something that’s legitimately passed in the House of Commons, and Senate ignored the necessary amendments and they passed bad legislation.”
Baker is absolutely right in that there is a problem – MPs don’t have them drafted very well, and then don’t do their due diligence because these bills are automatically time-allocated by design. That a number of these bills died on the Order Paper in the Senate one hopes might be an object lesson to MPs that they need to do better, but unfortunately, the lesson too many MPs took is that the “unelected and unaccountable Senate” didn’t just rubber-stamp a bill because it passed the Commons. Except, of course, it’s not their job to rubber stamp, and we’ve had an increasing number of bad bills getting through the cracks based on these emotive arguments, and not a few hissy fits along the way *cough*Reform Act*cough*. And now we have bad laws on the books because of it, apparently content to let the courts handle it instead. It’s sad and a little pathetic, to be perfectly honest. We should be demanding out MPs do better, and when they screw up, they need to take their lumps so that they’ll do better next time. Otherwise they won’t learn – or worse, they will take the wrong lesson, and our system will be worse off.
Roundup: Caution on the veto
The particular bugaboos of electoral reform and the role of the Senate have been colliding increasingly in the past number of days, as there have been threats coming that certain Conservative senators have been threatening to use their majority to vote down any legislation on changes to the electoral system unless there’s a referendum first. And then this particular op-ed in the Citizen by a Université de Montréal law professor urging them to do just that makes me want to just take a moment to talk it all through. First, a few things to keep in mind – the senator who went to the media about this threat was Don Plett, who is, well, singular on some issues. He’s broken ranks before, and is willing to stick to his guns on others, but I wouldn’t ever quote him as the voice of the Conservatives in the Senate, even though he is now the caucus whip. The other thing to keep in mind is that the Senate of Canada, being probably the most powerful Upper Chamber in the democratic world, does indeed have the power of unlimited veto – there is no overriding it if the Senate decides that they want something to die. It’s a power that they very rarely use, particularly when it comes to government bills – it’s kind of like the nuclear deterrent for legislation. No, they’d rather make amendments and send it back, with few exceptions. The reason it’s treated with such caution is that they know they don’t have the democratic mandate to exercise these powers except in rare circumstances. In those rare circumstances, they will do it because it’s their job to have a check on a majority government, and be empowered to speak truth to power, which is why they are afforded the kind of institutional independence that they have. So with this in mind, I will hold up a big caution sign when it comes to encouraging them to overturn any theoretical bill on electoral reform. This all dredges up memories of the Free Trade Agreement, and when the Senate held up that bill from the Mulroney government until it could be put to the people, seeing as this deal was hugely contentious at the time, and it was believed that it was going to be selling out our sovereignty to the Americans. The election was fought on this issue, Mulroney won, and the bill passed, and lo and behold, the sky didn’t fall. But while there was merit in putting that question to the people, it was part of the chain of events that started to polarise the Senate, which prior to 1984, was said to have operated on a much less partisan basis. Tit-for-tat games ramped up the partisanship there, until things became so bad that Mulroney exercised the emergency powers of appealing to the Queen to appoint an additional eight senators in order to get the GST passed. The Senate is currently in a vulnerable spot, and while I wouldn’t ask them not to do their jobs because they are in a period of intense scrutiny and this would get blown completely out of proportion by an ignorant pundit class and MPs with agendas harmful to the independence of the Senate – but it would hurt them. That’s why this discussion needs to be approached extremely cautiously, and rash actions scrupulously avoided at all costs.
Roundup: Barton in charge
The announcement came down yesterday making it all official – Rosemary Barton has now passed the gauntlet of the competition process and has officially been named the permanent host of CBC’s Power & Politics. It’s not as though she didn’t more than prove herself in spades over the course of the election, with six-days-a-week broadcasts, and sharp coverage, but that Chris Alexander interview, where she shut down one of his tantrums and put him in his place – that has become legendary in political circles already. A senior journalist in this town described her as an “accountability interviewer,” and that’s something that’s been desperately needed in this city, where there has been a certain amount of timidity in the kinds of interviews we’ve seen. Not having a Jeremy Paxman of our own, we’d seen many a political show host in this country tiptoe around members of the Harper government for close to a decade because they often threatened (or instituted) boycotts after one hissy fit or another (John Baird being particularly famous for them), but Barton was having none of that – and it went for opposition MPs as well, like her interview with Thomas Mulcair pretty much on the day she was given the interim job when Evan Soloman’s sudden firing happened, and she didn’t put up with Mulcair’s too-cute-by-half routine. In their release, CBC pointed out her history as a reporter, going back to her starting out as a researcher for the French-language RDI while in Winnipeg, and covering politics in Quebec City – the kinds of chops that her predecessor never had, who relied instead on personality than on hard-won experience in covering the beat. And with Barton’s permanent appointment comes the acknowledgement of the changing face of politics in Canada – the fact that she’s not a middle-aged white male is important in an age of younger MPs, and of gender-equal cabinets, that a younger woman is tougher and more competent in the role than her middle-aged male contemporaries. It’s just too bad that this announcement didn’t happen in June on the heels of Solomon’s departure. (And as for Evan Solomon, it was announced that he’s taking over the afternoon broadcast for Ottawa’s CFRA radio station, because all is apparently forgiven for his ethical lapses).
Roundup: Oversight and transparency
Oh, look – it’s the first Senate bat-signal of the year, this time with an interview with Senator Beth Marhsall on CBC Radio’s The House. The treatment of the interview does raise some of the usual problems when it comes to reporting what’s going on in the Senate – namely, that journalists who don’t follow the institution, or who haven’t actually given a critical reading of the Auditor General’s report mischaracterise it as showing “widespread abuse” when it certainly was not, and a good number of the report’s findings were in fact suspect because they were value judgements of individual auditors, many of whom were perfectly defensible. Marshall, however, thinks that the AG’s suggestion of an independent oversight body is a-okay, despite the fact that it’s a massive affront to parliamentary supremacy. The Senate is a legislative body and not a government department – it has to be able to run its own affairs, otherwise out whole exercise of Responsible Government is for naught, and we should hand power back to the Queen to exercise on our behalf. I can understand why Marshall might think this way – she is, after all, a former provincial Auditor General and would err on the side of the auditor’s recommendations regardless, but the fact that no reporter has ever pushed back against this notion and said “Whoa, parliamentary supremacy is a thing, no?” troubles me greatly. I still think that if an oversight body is to be created that it should follow the Lords model, as proposed by Senator McCoy, whereby you have a body of five, three of whom are Senators, and the other two being outsiders, for example with an auditor and a former judge. You get oversight and dispute resolution, but it also remains in control of the Senate, which is necessary for the exercise of parliamentary supremacy. Marshall’s other “fix” is the need to televise the Senate for transparency’s sake. While it’s a constant complaint, and yes, cameras will be coming within a year or two, the notion that it’s going to be a fix to any perceived woes is farcical. Why? With few exceptions, people don’t tune into the Commons outside of Question Period, despite our demands that we want to see our MPs on camera to know they’re doing their jobs. Cameras, meanwhile, have largely been blamed for why QP has become such a sideshow – they know they’re performing, and most of the flow of questions these days is atrocious because they’re simply trying to get news clips. I’m not sure how cameras will improve the “transparency” of the Senate any more than making the audio stream publicly available did, never mind that committees have been televised for decades. If people really wanted to find out what Senators do, there are more than enough opportunities – but they don’t care. It’s easier to listen to the received wisdom that they’re just napping on the public dime, and the people who could be changing that perception – journalists – are more than content to feed the established narrative instead.
Roundup: Demanding immediate parity
It seems that I couldn’t ignore the siren call of the Senate bat-signal one last time. A group of prominent women want the prime minister to ensure that all 22 current vacancies in the Senate be filled with women in order to quickly achieve gender parity in the upper chamber. Trudeau has already stated that he wants to move the chamber toward gender parity and diverse representation as part of the appointment process (and it does have more women and minorities on a proportional basis than the Commons does), but this would be a bit more strident. It’s not a terrible idea, and one doesn’t really want to get into the “merit” debate because there isn’t a shortage of meritorious women that could fill every one of those seats. That’s not the issue. What I worry about is that it sets up a situation where the demand that it be balanced at all times, so as to start setting gendered seats in each province, and that if there is a retirement or resignation, it becomes imperative that the new holder of that seat be of the gender that is required to maintain balance, despite there being other considerations for some of those seats, such as linguistic minorities, Aboriginals, or other minority communities. Where this would especially be problematic is Quebec, where there are senatorial districts, and it could “lock in” the gender of those districts’ senators, despite the fact that some of those districts were initially established to protect other communities. Meanwhile, David Akin penned an utterly facile column that conflates the Duffy trial with the broader problems of the Senate and somehow comes to the conclusion that constitutional Senate reform is the answer, never mind that he offers no actual vision for what that reform is supposed to accomplish, and he may have missed the memo that elected chambers have spending scandals. All. The. Time. Left unsaid is the fact that the Senate has undergone substantial internal reform and tends largely to be more transparent than the Commons, not that it fits within anyone’s narrative of the “grasping, tawdry circus” of the Senate, when on the whole it is anything but. Seriously, pundit class – reality doesn’t quite reflect your tired received wisdom.
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/679460774213857280
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/679461199080075264
Roundup: Unrest without modernization
Oh, look – it’s the Senate bat-signal, shining one last time for me this year. Here we go: Senators Greene and Massicotte, who have been trying to organise some internal reforms to the Chamber, are warning that if modernisations don’t happen within the caucuses that they may see more defections from frustrated Senators, and swelling the ranks of Independents – particularly relevant with more senators on the way chosen by this new process (though nothing says that all of these new senators will sit as Independents, or that they won’t opt to sit in one of the two existing caucuses). Many of the reforms that the two are proposing are pretty modest – electing chairs and vice-chairs of standing committees, replacing Question Period with “Issues Period,” electing caucus officers, televising Senate proceedings; larger communications budgets to promote the Senate and its work (particularly committee reports); and electing the Speaker. Some of these are already in the works, like televising/webcasting procedures, which will happen in a year or two, once they get the technology sorted. Similarly, work to reform Senate Communications has been ongoing, and will continue, and I’m sure no one will argue that more money would help. Some of them – electing caucus officers – already happens in the Senate Liberal caucus, and sounds like is starting to happen in the Conservative ranks. The issue of committee membership is a topic that is currently being debated, and no doubt work will be undertaken on this in the Senate Rules committee, where it will start getting hammered out because the growing number of Independents does make this a priority issue for them. Some of the ideas, however, are more problematic, such as electing the Senate Speaker. Why? Because the Senate Speaker is actually the titular Head of Parliament; it makes sense for this to be a government appointee as a result, and because of this titular position, it comes with diplomatic and protocol responsibilities. Having the Senate elect their own that could be in opposition to the government of the day would be a serious problem, which few people seem to be grasping. As for “Issues Period,” I find it to be the weakest suggestion, particularly as asking questions of committee chairs a) is already possible, and b) doesn’t happen often because there’s not a lot to ask of them. As I explained in my piece in the National Post last week, Senate Question Period is about holding government to account, and with there being no Conservative Atlantic Canadian MPs in the Commons, it gives those Atlantic senators an opportunity to play that role. Or rather, it would if they had someone to hold account. In the absence of that, the Senate loses out on one of its functions, which will become a problem, and it’s something that “Issues Period” won’t solve.
Roundup: Tiresome cheap shots
Oh, look – there’s the Senate bat-signal and oh, it’s because a couple of pundits have decided to be completely tiresome about it. I see. Up first is CBC’s Terry Milewski, who has once again decided to use Mike Duffy to paint the whole of the Senate with his disreputable brush. Never mind that the vast majority of senators don’t abuse the system, or that they have made vast improvements on financial controls and transparency (and remain far more transparent than the House of Commons in most respects), apparently the whole system is an unfixable morass because Duffy. Um, okay. And to cap it off, Milewski tries to make some wrong-headed point about representation in the Senate, ignoring that representation is along regional and not provincial lines, and no, Newfoundland is not part of the Maritimes and is a region unto itself, but hey, conflating its seats is fun and deliberately misleading! Apparently nobody has taken a basic civics or Canadian history course, because the whole point of why the Senate was constructed the way it was, was precisely because it wasn’t supposed to be representation-by-population. The Commons is, and the Senate had to rebalance the representation to keep Ontario from swamping the minority provinces. Oh, but those are “bizarre” and “absurd imbalances” apparently, because Milewski has decided that ignorance is the effective bully tactic. It’s a series of cheap shots that should be beneath the journalistic establishment, but alas no, it’s become par for the course these days. And then there’s Andrew Coyne, who decided to deliberately over-complicate the situation in the Senate in order to misconstrue what’s happening and sow confusion to make a point, that it’s not the kind of reforms that he would prefer (never mind that he’s never quite articulated why it’s preferable to have an elected Senate that would compete with the Commons, or to remove the Senate’s veto powers when they’re necessary to thwart a majority prime minister who is overstepping his or her bounds, other than the saying “democracy!” while hand-waving). But clearly, some clear-eyed critical thinking about our parliamentary institutions is a lot to ask, particularly when there are cheap points to be scored.
https://twitter.com/emmmacfarlane/status/676603993049690112
Roundup: The Senate steps up
In their very first piece of legislation passed, the House of Commons ballsed it up. Quite badly, in fact. In rushing through a supply bill, they didn’t include a necessary schedule for where the money that was being authorised would be spent, which is a pretty big deal. And so, when it reached the Senate, this was caught and the bill had to be sent back before the Senate could deal with it and pass it so that it could get Royal Assent and everyone could go home for the holidays. The Senate, however, was not amused. This is not the first time that defective bills have made it to the Senate, be it when they sent an earlier unamended version down the hall, or when their due diligence wasn’t done and they had to make some kind of excuses to get the Senate to pass it anyway with the promise of adding a clause in a future bill to retroactively fix it. And the patience of the Senate is wearing thin. In the words of Speaker Furey:
“While it is not our place to look into the functioning of the House of Commons, I am appalled that we received a defective bill. If it is the wish of the house, I would be prepared to write to my counterpart in the House of Commons to seek his assurance that this will not happen again.”
Liberal Senator Terry Mercer was even less forgiving and deservedly so:
“It galls me, Mr. Speaker, that they talk about an administrative error. That’s passing the error off onto the staff. I’m sorry; the Members of Parliament voted on this; it is their fault and they alone take the blame… To give us this BS about administrative error, passing the buck off to someone in the administration of the House of Commons, doesn’t wash with me, and it shouldn’t wash with anybody, and it shouldn’t wash with Canadians. I want this to be notice to the Minister of Finance and to our colleagues in the other place that this place will not put up with this anymore.”
Senator Fraser suggested that the Commons needs to examine their system and perhaps even apologise to the Senate, while other Senators noted that this is government legislation and not a private member’s bill, and that perhaps the Senate should not always be as patient and perhaps rise without granting Royal Assent in the future. Part of the root of this is that that the Senate, yet again, did its job while the Commons didn’t. In their haste to get this passed so that MPs can leave, MPs spent a grand total of fifteen minutes on the Supply bill, including Committee of the Whole. That’s right – fifteen minutes to examine and authorise the spending of money by the government. The Senate Finance Committee held three days of pre-study on the bill so that they would know what the issues were, and lo and behold, when the bill arrived in defective form, they could spot it immediately. And as noted before, this keeps happening with increasing frequency. And yet, when we send MPs to Ottawa to “be our representatives,” we seem to forget that they have a job to do – to scrutinize bills, and most especially spending, and they’re not doing it. They leave it to others to do, be it the Auditor General, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or the Senate – all while bitching and moaning about how terrible the Senate is even though the Senate is actually doing their jobs when MPs aren’t. And the next time I hear someone give me the line about how the Senate has no function in a modern democracy, I can give them yet another object lesson about how the Commons is the real dysfunctional chamber in our democracy. I’ll repeat Speaker Furey’s admonition – it’s appalling. Shape up, MPs. You’re embarrassing yourselves.
Roundup: Winds of change in the Senate
Interesting things are afoot in the Senate, with a number of new motions and bills introduced that could change the way it operates in the future, as well as debates on operations. It’s been pretty fascinating so far, and so far we’ve had:
- Senator Housakos’ point of privilege on the lack of a Leader of the Government in the Senate;
- Senator Carignan’s motion to call ministers to answer questions in the Chamber;
- Senator Mercer tabling a bill that would amend the constitution to allow Senators to elect their own Speaker (and yes, this is the easiest amending formula);
- Senator Wallace leading a debate on committee memberships and how they’re determined.
It’s all very interesting, and there has been some spectacular pushback on the facile notion by some senators that only partisan senators can be effective. There will have to be a great number of rule changes that will have to be debated by the Senate, and in particular the Rules, Procedures and Rights of Parliament committee, whenever it is formally struck (which should be very shortly). Some of those changes will have to be the determination of funding for the Senate Liberal caucus as they are not the government caucus, nor are they the opposition caucus (no matter that they currently sit on the government side, more out of convention than anything). Part of the discussions that were had in response to Senator Housakos’ point of privilege are that Question Period did not enter into the Senate until 1979 (ETA: This is disputed. Senate rules dating to 1969 include it, as does a 1916 edition of Bourinot. Thanks for the corrections), and that independent Senators have chaired committees in the past. These are all matters that will remain up for discussion, but the process of internal change in that Chamber is already upon them.