Conservatives boot senator for dining with PM
Greene describes caucus meeting as ‘bizarro world’
• He ate breakfast Tuesday morning as a Conservative senator and got ready for dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the same evening as an independent.
After Sen. Stephen Greene, a Nova Scotia senator who was once Preston Manning’s chief of staff, accepted an invitation to dine with Trudeau and other senators who have sponsored government legislation in the Senate, the CPC’s leadership in the upper chamber gave Greene an ultimatum: back out of the dinner or leave caucus.
A “rather stunned” Greene decided he’d rather have the freedom to accept a prime minister’s invitation than stay in caucus.
Greene, who sponsored a bill to enact a taxation agreement with Israel and Taiwan, was summoned to a meeting in the office of Conservative Senate leader Larry Smith and given the choice. In a statement Tuesday, Greene called the meeting an “ambush.” He further described the meeting to the National Post as “all silliness, beyond belief ” and “bizarro world.”
Conservative Sen. David Wells, however, said, “that is false.”
“To sponsor government legislation (as he has) and to strategize with the prime minister on circumventing the role of the opposition in the Senate is outside the boundaries of our caucus. He knew this and he knew ahead of time the consequence of his actions,” Wells said. “He was given the choice and chose to leave caucus.”
Not all Conservatives feel this way, Greene insisted, saying others approached him Tuesday with sympathy.
But Smith justified the ousting in a statement late Tuesday afternoon.
“He has made a decision that goes against our values,” Smith said. “We believe in the critical role of opposition in parliament and Stephen Greene’s actions (show) that he supports Trudeau in his desire to effectively remove this critical role. His actions have consistently been to support the government in this ill-conceived reform. We cannot agree with that view.”
Greene said he could have played a partisan role at the dinner. He was the only Conservative invited, because he was the only one who sponsored a bill. (An “innocuous” one, he said.)
“Of course, I would report out of that meeting whatever happened and what he talked about,” he said.
Greene said he has no plans to join other independent senators, most of whom were appointed by Trudeau, in their Independent Senators Group caucus. For now, the Nova Scotia senator wants to be called an “independent reform senator” — something he said he and his staff “made up” Tuesday.
Trudeau’s dinner could be seen as an effort to work constructively with a Senate that has become more independent and thus more likely to slow down or alter government legislation.
The Liberal government has found itself bending to the Senate’s will more often than the previous Conservative government did.