Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made some appointments to the Senate, and the punditry has in been in full swing ever since.  Admittedly, I am part of that punditry for I cannot understand what the proposed Senate reforms are supposed to accomplish.  Throughout most of the Canadian Senate’s 149 years of existence, partisanship, which is defined by party affiliation and/or grouping like minded senators together to achieve policy objectives, has not been a problem.  The Senate has functioned much like John A. MacDonald intended – that the chamber be a place of sober second thought that would never use its power to circumvent the expressed democratic will of the people.  That’s what the Senate has mostly always been able to do.

Patronage, on the other hand, is the appointment of people who are affiliated with the Prime Minister, or the political party in power.  The word ‘patronage’ has been used pejoratively in the Canadian context as if to mean that the person being appointed lacks any merit other than knowing the person doing the appointing.  Let’s debunk that myth right away.  Sure, some senators appointed through patronage have been terrible appointments, but the vast majority turn out to be perfectly qualified people who wish to serve the public in parliament.

The arguments that have manifested PM Trudeau’s senate reforms have been grounded in the misbehaviour of certain senators.  Trudeau is disparaging those appointments as being partisan and patronage driven.  However, if you look at Duffy, Wallin, and Brazeau, neither of them had long standing roots in the Conservative, PC, or Reform Parties.  They weren’t classic patronage appointments, nor was their misbehaviour driven by partisanship.  In fact, partisanship and parties don’t tolerate hits to their brand at all, and the expulsions and denunciations of misbehaving senators were led by the parties some of these senators formerly represented.  Let’s correct revisionist history where it needs correcting.  So then, we have to ask: exactly what problem is PM Trudeau wishing to solve by his posturing?

Prime Minister Trudeau has just appointed seven people.  They are eminently qualified much like most of Harper’s appointments.  Would they be any less qualified if they sat as Liberals in the Senate? Absolutely not!  Good people get involved in partisan politics on all sides.  It now seems that we should be discouraging such kind of activity – that the people who have been involved in politics for a long time should somehow be disqualified to sit in the Senate even though they may be eminently qualified to serve the people.  What a terrible message to send.  So much for political freedom in this country.

Now, we have to spend a bit of time talking about whether it is possible to create an independent Senate.  Some have suggested that we make great judicial appointments and that there is a way of making the Senate as highly regarded as our judiciary.  Of course, this position ignores the significant academic debate about patronage in judicial appointments.  Research has shown that an incredibly large amount of judges appointed to the benches in provincial, S. 96 and federal courts have had minor or major partisan ties to their appointing government.  The legal community has been chipping away at this and is trying to limit the ability for governments to make the final selection, but there is research supporting that patronage is a factor in judicial appointments.  More importantly, there have been studies that have shown that the decisions rendered by judges can be traced to their appointing government too, with Conservative appointed judges having a tendency to be restrained in overturning legislation, while Liberal appointed judges have a tendency to be more activist.

Transposing this to the senate, the point to be made is that the new non-partisan senators won’t discontinue their pre-existing ideological thinking prior to entering the chamber; they will, by and large, carry thorough with supporting the government’s policy agenda whether we call them Liberals or not.  It will only serve to make them non-partisan in name only – they’ll be non-partisan partisans.

Understanding all of this will give you some perspective as to why some are aggressively criticizing the PM’s desires for a non-partisan senate.  These reforms will only serve as window dressing.  To make matters even more wonky, the government is going to claim its reforms are responsible for the senate getting its act together.  What will truly be lost is the fact that those patronage appointed, partisan hack senators appointed before Trudeau became prime minister already took the bull by the horns to clean up the chamber.  They called in the Auditor-General to audit senators, put new rules and processes in place to create greater transparency, and have engaged in a communications strategy to better highlight the work the Senate is doing.  This started years ago by Senators who played the partisan game.  Yet, in the end, it’s Trudeau who will be left claiming he fixed all of it through his smokescreen of non-partisanship.  The assault on partisanship will only widen as a result and I hope we are not going to be worse off because of it.