O'toole challenger gets cold shoulder
Batters banned from all Senate committees
• Conservative Sen. Denise Batters has been excluded from all Senate committees after challenging Erin O'toole's leadership.
O'toole booted the Saskatchewan senator out of the Conservative national caucus last month after she launched a petition aimed at forcing a referendum on his leadership within six months — rather than wait for a scheduled confidence vote at the party's convention in August 2023.
Conservative senators have chosen to keep Batters in their fold, notwithstanding O'toole's warning that anyone backing her petition would be kicked out of caucus.
Now, however, she has been conspicuously left out of any committee assignments in the upper house.
Sen. Leo Housakos, acting leader of the Conservative Senate caucus, hasn't responded to a request to explain Batters' exclusion.
Batters declined to comment.
Until now, Batters has been a prominent presence on various Senate committees, particularly the legal and constitutional affairs committee, of which she had been a member since her appointment to the Senate in 2013 by former prime minister Stephen Harper.
During the last session of Parliament, she was deputy chair of that committee, where she mounted strenuous opposition to legislation expanding access to medical assistance in dying.
She was also a member of the committee on rules, procedures and rights of Parliament, on which she had also sat for eight years.
Prior to that, Batters served as deputy chair of the Senate's internal economy, budgets and administration committee, the governing body of the upper house, and as joint chair of the scrutiny of regulations committee.
Batters' online petition has garnered more than 6,300 signatures so far.
Conservative party president Rob Batherson has asserted the petition is invalid. The party's constitution spells out the various ways in which a leadership contest can be triggered and makes no provision for a contest to be initiated by petition or referendum, he has said.
However, the constitution also specifies that a referendum on any matter can be launched if five per cent of Conservative members in at least five provinces sign a petition calling for one.