‘Rebellious’ senators do the right thing
AConservative senator told me some months ago that a number of his colleagues on the government side were upset at being treated like a rubber stamp by the Prime Minister’s Office and were discussing how they could display their independence.
I didn’t take seriously the prospects of the Senate’s dozy denizens rising up and overthrowing the caregivers of their cozy twilight home.
The math would require 20 Tories to join the 35 Liberals and vote against legislation sponsored by one of their own MPs.
remarkably, that’s what happened Wednesday, when 20 Conservatives (most appointed by Stephen Harper) voted in favour of, or abstained from, voting on an amendment to a Tory bill on union transparency that had already been passed by their colleagues in the House of Commons.
The Prime Minister’s Office was caught with its breeks round its collective ankles by the result — it has been telling anyone who cared to listen that passage of the bill was assured. Technically, it was a private member’s bill — the brainchild of
Amendment ‘doesn’t slightly modify the bill so it works better — it guts it’
B.C. Conservative russ Hiebert — but it had the full backing of the PMO.
The bill, which would have forced unions to file financial statements revealing political expenses over $5,000 and disclose salaries over $100,000, will be sent back to the House in the next parliamentary session.
even Hugh Segal, the Conservative senator who proposed raising the public disclosure level to $150,000 for union expenses and $440,000 for salaries (and only for unions with more than 50,000 members), did not think he had sufficient backing to send the bill back to the House.
His amendment was motivated by privacy concerns that union workers who received more than $5,000 of medical coverage paid for by health insurance companies would see their names disclosed.
Mr. Herbert says this concern is misplaced and these issues were dealt with by amendments in the House that meant privacy over benefit claims would be protected.
Mr. Segal said the notion that senators used the amendment as a means of sending a message to the PMO was reading too much into it. “I didn’t get any sense of that.” He disputed the suggestion by some Conservative caucus members that the senators were being disloyal by sending the bill back to the House. “Most of us consider ourselves loyal Conservatives. Sometimes the most loyal thing you can do is protect the Prime Minister from bad legislation,” he said.
This is not the first time the Senate has thrown back legislation since the Conservatives came to power. Mr. Segal cited the controversial film tax credit act in 2008 that died in committee in the Senate. “This is not the first time and it shouldn’t be the last. But it should be infrequent,” he said.
yet that intervention was under a Liberal-dominated Senate. We will not see its like again until late 2021, assuming Justin Trudeau wins the 2015 election (and the one after that) and stacks the red Chamber with partisans. Let’s not get into what the NdP may or may not do, given their plan to “roll up the red carpet” and abolish the upper Chamber (though they may be having sober second thoughts about that, in the wake of Wednesday’s vote).
In theory, the Senate is equal to the House of Commons — legislation must pass through both chambers to become law. But all senators recognize the primacy of the House. In this case, they have merely used their traditional powers of revision to send back legislation that, according to the testimony they heard, should be rewritten.
Mr. Hiebert disputes that, saying Mr. Segal’s amendment “doesn’t slightly modify the bill so it works better — it guts it.”
Which makes it all the more curious why so many Tories voted for the amendment. Few of the dissidents quibbled with the substance of the bill — the laudable goal of requiring unions to demonstrate public transparency in order to benefit from tax exemptions. Labour unions are publicly supported institutions — they operate tax-free and their dues are tax deductible, so they should be transparent.
In this light, Mr. Segal’s amendment was too extreme — why unions larger than 50,000 members? Why a $444,000 salary disclosure level? And why increase the political expense disclosure level to $150,000? But while I disapprove of what he proposed, unlike many of his parliamentary colleagues, I defend his right to propose it — and that of senators to support it.
Small children visiting Parliament Hill have been overheard wondering what the Senate’s for. This week, it has shown exactly why it exists: to examine and revise legislation it believes to be flawed. Conservative MPs are outraged that unelected senators — the source of many of their recent tribulations — have shown a lack of “deference” to the House.
As one MP noted: “Far from the Senate upholding a constitutional responsibility or doing its job, the reason why they voted overwhelmingly to defeat this bill is because the Conservative caucus in the Senate is ‘wet,’ certainly more so than the House of Commons caucus. Indeed, Senator Segal is such an acceptable conservative to mainstream Liberals that he was appointed to his post by Prime Minister Paul Martin.’’
But Conservative MPs are upset because they mistake their own special interest for the national interest. Canadian democracy would be best served by appointing better qualified, more independent senators prepared to revise badly written or conceived legislation, whatever its provenance.