Out of caucus for dinner with PM
ULTIMATUM ... INSULTING AND ABSURD. — SENATOR STEPHEN GREENE
On Tuesday at high noon, I was kicked out of the Conservative Senate caucus. All I did to warrant this treatment was attend a dinner with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with about twenty other individuals. I’ve since received an outpouring of emails, texts, tweets and calls — mostly from Canadians I’ve never met before. Like me, many of my supporters have been bewildered by the circumstances that led to it.
The background to all of this begins in November 2016, when I— a then- Conservative Senator — sponsored Bill S- 4, proposed legislation t hat would implement a tax treaty between Canada and the Israeli and Taiwanese governments. There is nothing special about this bill. Canada has similar tax treaties in place with approximately 90 other countries. The purpose of such legislation is to prevent double taxation for, say, a Canadian working in Israel or Taiwan and vice versa. We even have one of these treaties with Namibia.
When Senate Government Representative Peter Harder asked me to sponsor the bill in the Senate, I was initially skeptical. But I recognized the value of the bill, and I’d sponsored at least three similar tax bills for the Harper government. While there was some grumbling from the Conservative leadership that I was doing this (because Harder is seen as quite liberal), the bill passed in the Senate unanimously.
A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Trudeau to attend a dinner for all of the senators who had sponsored bills. It seemed to me that I should accept as a matter of course. In fact, I would accept any such invitation from any Canadian prime minister, regardless of his or her politics. I suspect most Canadians would too.
So imagine my surprise when I was at the buffet table in our weekly caucus meeting and was commanded by a staff er to see the caucus leader immediately before the meeting started. To my shock, I was presented with an ultimatum: if I attended the dinner with Trudeau, I would have to leave caucus, despite being a Conservative of 45 years. It seems that my having dinner with the Liberal prime minister was more than the Conservative caucus could stomach.
How did this sorry state of affairs come about?
Trudeau put t he Senate on a new path when his party cut ties with Liberal Senators in 2014, and subsequently established a process for selecting independent senators after becoming prime minister in 2016. The Senate — which enjoyed a formalized governmentand-opposition structure for almost 150 years — now has no government party, and a majority of its senators are no longer members of a political caucus or tied to one in the House of Commons. In fact, there is now only one political caucus in the Senate — and that’s the Conservative caucus.
The upshot of this brave new world is that caucuses — while still important for reasons of structure and organization — are becoming less important to the tenor of debate. It also means that senators have to work harder, because the Senate as a whole has a responsibility to act as a check — or be the opposition, if you will — to the partisan excesses of a government that has a majority in the House of Commons. The work of individual senators has in a sense become more meaningful.
In this world of heightened individual independence and declining caucus importance, the ultimatum that was put to me seemed particularly insulting and absurd. I argued strenuously that I had every right to attend Trudeau’s dinner without compromising my place in caucus. I even offered to report back on everything I learned. It was all to no avail. By accepting the prime minister’s invitation, I was committing some sort of unforgivable transgression.
This attitude, for me, is consistent with a type of partisanship that may be appropriate for the House of Commons, where a failure of party discipline can lead to the collapse of a government. But it has never been appropriate for the Senate, and is even less so now.
In my view, we in the Senate are building the kind of upper house that Sir John A. Macdonald, George Brown and George- Etienne Cartier had envisioned for Canada. In its 2014 Senate Reference, the Supreme Court of Canada also reinforced and reiterated its constitutional view of an independent Senate.
The modern Senate’s role is not to hold the government to account. That’s the role of the House of Commons. Whenever the Senate takes on that responsibility, or copies the processes and procedures of the House, the Senate becomes redundant and Canadians can quite rightly ask themselves: What is the value of the Senate?
The Senate’s true role is to bring sober second thought to government legislation, by using its excellent committees to review, scrutinize, improve, and ultimately pass or disallow legislation. Only by focusing on those tasks will we earn the trust of Canadians and, hopefully, their confidence that the Senate is a vital institution of Canadian democracy.
The petty politics on display this week over my decision to dine with the prime minister suggests some senators have lost sight of the Senate’s fundamental aim.
IF I ATTENDED DINNER WITH TRUDEAU, I WOULD HAVE TO LEAVE CAUCUS.