When the Senate voted this month to change some of its rules, Conservative members decried it as a Liberal plot to undermine what they fully expect will be a Conservative government after the next election.
Their theory was a tad conspiratorial. Look! The elites are already rigging the system against Pierre Poilievre!
But overblown rhetoric aside, the Conservatives have grounds to raise the issue. The Senate has changed dramatically since 2015. Few Canadians likely realize the degree to which it has become a creation of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies, and how that might impact a future Conservative government.
Mr. Trudeau began refashioning the Senate in 2014, when he booted every Liberal senator out of the Liberal caucus, turning them into independents. He said his goal was to create a “non-partisan” Senate, composed, in his words, “merely of thoughtful individuals representing the varied values, perspectives and identities of this great country.”
After the 2015 election, the Trudeau government created an advisory board that recommends candidates to the Prime Minister when there is a Senate vacancy to fill. Mr. Trudeau has since named 81 senators, 70 of whom are still sitting. There are currently 96 sitting senators in total.
The Trudeau government is represented in Senate by a three-member team whose job is to shepherd legislation through the unelected body, but which has no power to direct votes. There is no Liberal caucus, so all those new senators, starting in 2017, set about changing the rules so that they could sit in formally recognized groups.
The largest is the Independent Senators Group, followed by the Canadian Senators Group and the Progressive Senators Group. There are 10 “non-affiliated” Senators. The Conservative caucus is still there, stuck at 13 members.
In the latest rule change – rammed through in a government motion, and adopted because time allocation was used to end debate – the independent senators have granted their group leaders the same powers as the head of the Conservative caucus, such as the right to defer votes on legislation, to sit in on committees to question witnesses, and to speak without a time limit.
Individual senators could already delay legislation for months, a power that nominally independent members used to freeze a Conservative Senate bill on a foreign-agent registry. But now they will have an even bigger arsenal.
The Trudeau government finally has the Senate it set out to get, filled with the right people, playing by its rules. It’s not without its merits, at least on paper. But politics is messy, and it is reasonable for the Canadians to wonder what happens if the Conservatives take power in the next election.
By then, the Conservative Senate caucus will likely have lost more members to mandatory retirement. It will be a tiny rump, up against three larger groups armed with powers that used to belong only to the government and opposition caucuses.
Those groups will have the ability to delay and block government legislation in multiple new ways. But they will be unaccountable to voters, because of their ostensible separation from any political party.
In 1988, the Liberal majority in the Senate refused to pass the Progressive Conservative government’s free trade bill. Brian Mulroney fought back by calling an election, and his party trounced the Liberals. The Liberals paid a price for their outrageous overstep.
In the Trudeau Senate, that democratic accountability is gone. If a future Poilievre majority government tables a bill to end the carbon tax, or pushes through unpopular cuts to spending in an effort to reduce the deficit, a high-minded, unelected Senate that believes in its own branding could potentially scupper the agenda of a duly elected government – and do so without a shred of accountability.
Whatever the merits of the new, nominally non-partisan Senate might be, it does not give senators the right to supersede the will of the House of Commons. Governments have the democratic right to pass bills, even flawed ones. The Senate can do their best to fix those flaws, but in the end it must cede to the body that actually answers to voters.
If and when the time comes, the independent senators must live up to Mr. Trudeau’s billing. And they should remember that their job is to pass government legislation, not to defeat it.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that 70 of the 81 senators Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has named since the advisory board's creation are still sitting.