RED CHAMBER RENOVATION

Post-partisan Senate in works

After spending the last seven months investigating how to rejig the rules governing the Red Chamber to take into account the rising number of independents in their midst, the special committee on Senate modernization is set to table its first report — which, according to the chair, includes 22 recommendations — next week.

At least one independent senator is voicing concern that it may not go far enough.

Speaking at a committee meeting earlier this week, Sen. Frances Lankin — one of the seven senators appointed to the chamber on the advice of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year — noted that, after reading a draft of the report, she “sees progress but ... very slow progress.”

Lankin made the comments as Sen. Peter Harder, the independent senator who also serves as the government’s designated representative to the Senate, was wrapping up his first appearance before the committee.

During his opening remarks, Harder likened the modernization process to “a Rubik’s cube that we will solve together” before making his pitch for all senators to be treated equally, whether affiliated with a party or otherwise, particularly in the divvying up of committee seats and research funds.

But his suggestion that the committee give serious consideration to moving beyond the “paradigm” of party caucuses to explore other models, particularly the regional breakdown model most recently put forward by former senators Hugh Segal and Michael Kirby, seemed to receive a chilly reception.

The assembled senators challenged Harder on everything from the prospect of “horse-trading” on pet issues to the risk of over-representation for Atlantic Canada, which has 30 Senate seats under current constitutional divisions.

Signs of a post-partisan Senate don’t begin and end with the committee’s modernization report.

The independent senators’ working group formed earlier this year now includes all but a handful of non-aligned senators, as well as most of the other independents.

Now styled as the Independent Senators Group, its members have designated Elaine McCoy to continue as “facilitator” until June, and have elected three additional senators to their “Chamber coordination team,” including Lankin, Don Meredith and Pierrette Ringuette.

Like Harder, the ISG is keen to see a “rebalancing ” of the current committee structure to “reflect proportional standings in the Senate,” as well as other rule changes that, it says, would ensure the same rights and status for senators aligned with a “parliamentary group” as for those who sit in a recognized caucus.

Ringuette has already reintroduced a motion to set up yet another special committee — this time, to focus on “Senate structural transformation,” as well as “reducing the role of political parties,” including, but not limited to, “establishing regional caucuses.”

Meanwhile, at least one senator still sitting in a partyaffiliated caucus seems to be warming to the idea of what he describes as the “brave new reality” facing the upper chamber.

In an essay sent to colleagues earlier this week, Sen. Stephen Greene, a Conservative appointed on the advice of Stephen Harper in 2009, predicts that the era of Westminster-style operations in the Senate is coming to an end — and by the sounds of it, he’s pretty much OK with it, noting “... in many ways the Westminster system, dominated by party government, has ruined the Senate and corrupted the ideals expressed by the Fathers of Confederation.”

The “revolutionary idea of casting off the Westminster system in the Senate of Canada cannot, and should not, be stopped,” he writes.

He closes by calling on all senators, “acting as equals,” to “put aside their partisan leanings with a view to working together to improve legislation and advance good public policy.”

Before that can happen, though, Greene and his fellow senators — Conservative, Senate Liberal, independent and other — will have to put aside those same partisan leanings to figure out new rules of engagement within a chamber no longer divided along comfortingly familiar, if restrictive, party lines.

Change is scary. But as Lankin pointed out, while these cross-aisle negotiations may feel chaotic, “sometimes good things can come out of chaos.”