There were lots of interesting topics to write about this week but I feel somewhat obligated to explain what Justin Trudeau did on Wednesday afternoon. For those of you who did not hear, the leader of the federal Liberal party announced that he was expelling all of the Liberal Senators from the Liberal caucus. They will now to sit as independents in the Senate. This announcement came out of nowhere and even the Senators themselves looked startled.
I must admit that I listened to Justin Trudeau's interview on CBC's The National on Wednesday evening with real curiosity. Politically the Senators removal from caucus might seem like a terrific idea. The move appeared to suggest that the problem with the upper chamber is that it is driven by partisan politics. In fact, this is often what we are led to believe. Ned Franks, a well-respected scholar has argued that: "the ineffective and largely idle 'Imaginary Senate' caricatured in the media and much political discussion is quite different from the 'Actual Senate'."
By "freeing" his party members from the grips of the party caucus, Trudeau looked brave. He appeared to be throwing down the gauntlet to Stephen Harper: "You too should release your members from their party affiliation. This will solve the problems of the Senate." It's hard to argue against this unless, of course, you don't accept the premise that partisanship is the central problem of the Senate scandal. The current problem the Senate is facing concerns issues of individual ethics and character and is not symptomatic of the body itself. The Upper Chamber is designed to allow for members to review legislation and to consider complex social problems outside of the pressure of elected politics. So when I got into my office on Thursday morning I started to dig around to see if I could find some research that would give me some better information about the outcomes of Senate votes.
As it turns out there is no easy way to get that information but I did find a paper entitled "Assessing Senate Reform Through Bill C19: The Effects of Limited Terms for Senators" that was written by Andrew Heard at Simon Fraser University in 2008. The paper is six years old and in fact the data in the paper is a bit older than that but at that time Heard argued that: "A more rounded picture of the Senate emerges from a review of its legislative role, the policy reports of its committees, and the frequency with which many senators vote differently from their caucus leaders. The relative independence of the Senate emerges as an essential characteristic that pervades much of its work. Collective independence is seen in the chamber's moves to substantively amend, reject, or informally bury government legislation that has already passed the House of the Commons. This collective independence may depend on several factors: if different parties control the two houses; if members of the government caucus in the Senate break ranks and support opposition motions to amend or reject bills from the House of Commons; and, theoretically at least, if the governing party's Senate caucus decide to take a different collective position than that desired by the party leadership or their Commons caucus mates. It has been noted that the Senate is most active in times of large government majorities in the House of Commons, regardless of the partisan balance in the Senate. In the end, the collective independence of the Senate depends upon the individual independence of its members, particularly in the governing party, to decide to vote against either their party leaders' positions or those endorsed by a majority in the House."
Trudeau's actions seem to suggest that the Upper Chamber has completely lost the ability to function in this way but we would only know this if a study like Heard's is repeated for the period covering the 39th, 40th and 41st Parliament. But... I could not help but note that when Liberal Sen. James Cowan reacted to the announcement his words laid bare the real facts. He said that most of his colleagues already acted independently and so "I think not a lot will change." I guess we'll see... or we won't see depending on how the political spin helps us to understand anything about the workings of the "Actual Senate."
