Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at an event in Gatineau, Que., on Wednesday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney has taken control of the House of Commons thanks to three Liberal byelection victories that, along with five floor-crossings, elevated his party into a majority.
Unfettered in Parliament’s lower house, the Carney government’s only possible obstacle to total legislative freedom will be a Senate that, in name anyway, doesn’t have a properly obedient government caucus.
The Senate instead consists of a Conservative caucus of 12 members and a “government representatives office” with five members. The rest is made up of three “groups” of unaffiliated and, in theory, independent senators.
Nominally, then, there is no traditional government caucus that will dutifully carry Mr. Carney’s agenda through the Senate and into the law books.
This seems to concern Mr. Carney. Last month, The Globe and Mail reported discussions within the government about naming Mr. Carney’s principal secretary, Tom Pitfield, to the Senate, making him government leader and putting him in cabinet, all in the name of expediting legislation.
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A government spokesman said no such plan is being hatched. Any such move, however, would solve the wrong problem. The issue isn’t how the Senate is managed, but rather the fiction that it is independent of the Liberal government in the first place.
Mr. Carney should instead reinstate the Senate Liberal caucus that his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, abolished in 2014.
He should do so in the name of transparency and accountability, because the Senate as it stands is almost entirely a creature of the Liberal Party, filled with appointees who can be relied upon to support a Liberal government agenda.
The notion that the Senate might thwart Mr. Carney is laughable. Other than the Conservative caucus, most of whose members were appointed by former prime minister Stephen Harper (and which will lose a body now that Larry Smith is 75, the mandatory retirement age), the Senate is packed with Trudeau appointees who list noticeably to the Liberal, progressive side.
There is the Independent Senators Group, which has 41 members that were all appointed by Mr. Trudeau, except for the one appointed by the former Liberal PM Jean Chrétien. There is the Progressive Senate Group, whose 17 members were all appointed by Mr. Trudeau. And there is the Canadian Senators Group, which has 19 members, 15 of which were appointed by Mr. Trudeau.
In all, 81 of the current Senate’s 97 members (there are eight vacancies) were appointed by Mr. Trudeau.
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Mr. Trudeau came to power in 2015 after evicting Liberal senators from the national caucus to distance himself from the upper chamber’s endless personal-expenses scandals.
He immediately set up the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, which took applications and recommendations from the public and then suggested names to Mr. Trudeau to fill vacancies on a non-partisan basis.
It seemed to work at first: two of Mr. Trudeau’s earliest appointments are members of the Conservative Caucus.
But as time passed and the Liberals were reduced to minority governments, more of Mr. Trudeau’s appointees began having overt connections to the Liberal Party, or to provincial Liberal parties.
Over the same period, the unaffiliated senators voted to give their leaders the same powers as the leaders of traditional government and opposition caucuses. These group leaders can defer votes on legislation, sit in on committees to question witnesses and speak without a time limit.
And what recourse do Canadians have if they are unhappy with the actions of these groupings of senators? Before Mr. Trudeau’s changes, there was some measure of accountability. When Liberal Leader John Turner asked Liberal senators to block the free-trade agreement in 1988, he was the one who had to defend that move to voters.
It is power without accountability, given to people who answer to no voters and, thanks to Mr. Trudeau, to no party. Mr. Carney has, rightly, rolled back many of his predecessor’s ill considered decisions. He should add the de-Liberalization of liberal senators to the list.
The only way the Senate can be made to answer to the public is by having the government shoulder the responsibility for its actions, and the only way to do that is to reinstate a Liberal caucus.