Does the prime minister know what he’s done to the Senate?

THIS IS A MAN TRYING HIS DAMNEDEST TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE. — COLBY COSH

On Friday the prime minister promised that his government will amend the Parliament of Canada Act to allow his “reformed” Senate to organize itself a little better.

The existing procedures of the Senate contemplate the presence of government and opposition blocs in the chamber, but the latest round of Senate appointments, announced in October, has given the “Independent Senators Group” an absolute majority of the membership. I wonder if you, the intelligent, sophisticated news consumer, had noticed this.

I have to admit it had escaped me. The “arm’s-length advisory body” that now chooses senators, always alighting on dependably liberal ones, unexpectedly plucked my friend Paula Simons out of the newsroom at our sister newspaper, the Edmonton Journal. This was somewhat distracting, partly for the headache it will cause the rest of us. Newspaper columnists already get perpetual catcalls about angling for future government jobs.

I am not really fit for such a job, but if someone were to point out what a rich harvest that the provincial government and Ottawa have reaped from the local journalism corps in recent years, I am not sure what I could offer in rebuttal.

I trust that the handful of people who follow my byline closely know how little interest I have in being liked by any particular politician or party. My formal position remains that most politicians are dimbulbs or perverts, and I am willing to have this tattooed on my body if it will enhance my credibility one per cent.

But I also know the Hon. Paula didn’t really give a damn about popularity either. She just took an exciting job opportunity when one presented itself, rather than waiting around to be superannuated after some shift of boardroom personalities or corporate identity. Even if I told you I could pass the test of self-denial that she “failed,” I could not convincingly bind the older, weaker version of myself that might exist in the year 2028. We all grow softer and more sympathetic to the dimbulbs and perverts with the passing years anyway. (Aw, they’re trying their best!)

Paula is intelligent and wonderful and will do a fine job, for whatever the job is worth. But the message being sent by her appointment is deafening even for those of us who are determined to ignore it. Part of what we surviving newspaper people are supposed to take away from this lone data point is that we are now getting a better class of senator than we did before, in the bad old days before Trudeauvian reform. Sen. Simons enjoys a deserved first-class reputation in our world even among those who don’t know her personally.

Her rapture was certainly not a “patronage” appointment — not a payback for any explicit favour that Paula Simons ever did anyone.

And this is the goal of Trudeau’s weird Senate reforms: they are fundamentally optical, a long-term attempt to dodge responsibility for the behaviour and character of the Senate. As prime minister, his creation of a tailored algorithm for allegedly automatic selection of senators is meant mostly to assure us that he does not hand-pick them like a fruit grower.

But the essential, constitutional responsibility remains with him. He still intends to exclusively obtain senators who are congenial ideologically, as he not only admitted but insisted on Friday, and although he is sure “we have also appointed people who’ve donated to the NDP or donated to the Conservative party,” a) just try finding one, and b) notice in the meantime that he is still saying “we appointed.” This is a man trying his damnedest to square the circle.

Or perhaps he is King Lear, trying to relinquish power and retain the prestige that inheres in it. The separation of the independent senators from day-to-day control and guidance by the government has diminished the prime minister’s power to control the pace at which legislation is created, and offers a hypothetical spectacle of irresolvable conflict between houses of Parliament. One must assume that eventually those independent senators, exercising their collective brainpower, will figure out what “independent” means. The word is incompatible with a subservience maintained out of politeness.

The Senate was created as a venue of “sober second thought,” as we are often reminded in accounts of the transformed version of the Senate. Hardly anyone explicitly observes that this was designed to be undemocratic sober second thought, engaged in by persons who cannot be dislodged from their positions by popular disapproval. It is a package deal.

Our Supreme Court, in rejecting Conservative reforms that would alter the character of the upper house in a supposedly unconstitutional way, allowed for Liberal reforms that have arguably created another unelected branch of Canadian government alongside the Court itself. Are we sure this is what we want? And are you sure you will still think so when the Senate does something you believe to be unforgivably stupid? I’m asking for a prime minister.