Reformed Senate as expected
TRUDEAU VOICES NO SECOND THOUGHTS
With a potential impasse brewing in the Senate over his government’s latest budget, it’s tempting to wonder if Justin Trudeau privately regrets his decision to turn the upper house into a more independent, less-partisan chamber.
Not at all, the prime minister insisted in an interview with Global’s West Block on Sunday, it’s working out exactly as he’d hoped.
Just bravado?
Emmett Macfarlane, who advised Trudeau back in 2014 on the kind of Senate reforms that could be achieved without requiring a constitutional amendment, doesn’t think so.
“I don’t think the prime minister could have expected much better than this,” says the University of Waterloo political scientist.
Based on Macfarlane’s advice, Trudeau kicked senators out of the Liberal caucus and, once in power, created an arms-length body to recommend non-partisan individuals for appointment to the upper house.
Since the new regime was instituted, the Senate has passed 25 government bills. On six of those bills — 25 per cent —senators proposed amendments, a big jump over the average four per cent of bills that the prereform Senate used to amend.
Some of the amendments on those six bills were accepted by the House of Commons, some were modified and others were rejected. In every case, senators ultimately bowed to the will of the elected chamber and passed the bills, even if they didn’t get all the changes they wanted.
The record thus far “means that we’re developing a convention of deference to the elected chamber,” says Peter Harder, the government’s representative in the Senate.
“We are a complementary body to the House of Commons. That doesn’t mean we’re a rubber stamp. It means that we do deliberate, we do review, we do make recommendations and sometimes amendments,” he says, adding that the government “takes those amendments seriously” even if it doesn’t always accept them.
While Trudeau may “not perhaps every day, in every way” think the Senate is behaving the way he’d hoped, Harder says it is “generally” working out as he intended.
Macfarlane agrees, saying it’s “absurd to call the Senate’s current behaviour a constitutional crisis,” as some critics have done.
“Not a single piece of legislation has been blocked. Where the House has asserted its will and rejected Senate amendments, the Senate has, thus far, relented and passed the bill.”
The Senate’s proclivity for amending bills does mean it takes longer for legislation to be passed. And that’s contributed to the Trudeau government’s relatively light legislative record — it has enacted half the number of bills that were enacted by the previous Harper government by the halfway point of its mandate.
But Macfarlane says amending bills is “perfectly appropriate” behaviour for a chamber that was created by the fathers of Confederation precisely to provide sober second thought. And if that causes delays, he says that’s not a bad thing if it results in improvements to legislation.