The Senate of Canada building and Senate Chamber in Ottawa.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Mark Carney is appointing his chief strategist to the Senate in one of the Prime Minister’s first moves to fill a growing number of upper chamber vacancies.
Tom Pitfield has been serving as principal secretary to Mr. Carney since the Prime Minister was elected last year and has also played a central role in the government’s artificial intelligence strategy.
The announcement of his appointment, as well as others, is expected on Tuesday, three Liberal sources told The Globe and Mail.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources as they were not authorized to publicly disclose the pending appointments.
There are currently 10 vacancies in the 105-member Senate: one each in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Ontario, and five in Quebec.
Mr. Pitfield is from Montreal, so will likely be appointed to fill a Quebec vacancy.
Mr. Carney is not expected to fill all of the vacancies in this first round of appointments, two of the sources said.
In May, he committed to continuing to use the independent advisory board created by his predecessor, former prime minister Justin Trudeau, to suggest Senate appointments.
The board has three permanent federal members, and there are supposed to be two members on an ad hoc basis from each of the provinces or territories where a vacancy is to be filled.
Currently, all of the provincial and territorial positions are empty, according to the board’s website.
In addition to the new senators being appointed Tuesday, Mr. Carney is expected to announce changes to the way the advisory board operates, two of the sources said.
The board, along with an open application process for Senate posts, was set up by Mr. Trudeau when he became prime minister in 2015.
It followed his decision to remove all the Liberal senators from his party’s caucus in 2014 in response to the public scandal over expense claims by several Senate members .
Though the senators appointed by Mr. Trudeau sit as independents, many have direct ties to the Liberals; his final round of appointments to the Senate included former provincial Liberal ministers.
Mr. Pitfield’s ties to the Liberal Party run deep; his father, Michael Pitfield, was appointed to the Senate by then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
He is personal friends with Justin Trudeau, and in 2014, Mr. Pitfield founded a firm, Data Sciences, that would help the Liberal Party vault ahead of its Conservative rivals when it came to using data to analyze and target voters.
That work saw the Liberals go from third place to victory in the 2015 election campaign, and Mr. Pitfield went on to help the Liberals with their general election campaign last year.