Two leadership attributes are evident in Justin Trudeau’s gambit on reforming the Senate.
First, he’s not afraid of thinking big. And second, his inner circle is a close-knit group that can keep a secret.
Trudeau and his entourage were working on his Senate move over the entire holiday break, and not a hint of it leaked before his surprise announcement last week that 32 senators were no longer members of the Liberal caucus. They were just as stunned as the entire political class, including the media.
In the short term, Trudeau has achieved a pre-emptive takeout of the auditor-general’s upcoming interim report on Senate expenses. Trudeau has inoculated himself and the Liberal brand against any damaging revelations in the AG’s report. The AG and his staff have been asking senators about everything from cab slips to cellphone bills.
But Trudeau won’t have to throw anyone out of his caucus; he has already done that by expelling all Liberal senators.
The Trudeau team clearly understands the first rule of damage control — get the bad news out, take the hit and move on, as it did last year by proactively disclosing Trudeau’s speaking fees, including at universities and schools, while he was a sitting MP and the party’s youth and higher-education critic. Again last month, his office disclosed he had mistakenly charged for minor travel expenses related to several paid appearances, and wrote a cheque to cover it. Trudeau called it “an honest mistake.” End of story.
But that’s just tactics. In larger strategic terms, Trudeau has seized the moment on an issue where he was previously squeezed between the Tories and the NDP.
Since his Reform/Canadian Alliance days, Senate reform has been one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s signature issues. He has long advocated for an elected Senate, and has referred the matter to the Supreme Court, which will find that he needs a constitutional amendment to do so.
As for the NDP, it has for more than half a century held for the abolition of the Senate, though it couldn’t do that without a constitutional amendment, either. But Tom Mulcair’s position is simply that as prime minister, he wouldn’t appoint senators.
Which, in a way, is also Trudeau’s position. He wouldn’t appoint any senators, but would have them appointed.
The problem for Trudeau or Mulcair, should either become prime minister after the October 2015 election, is that neither could get a bill passed by a Conservative-controlled Senate. And the Governor General signs legislation only when it’s passed by both Houses of Parliament.
There are 105 seats in the Senate, and the Conservatives hold 57 of them, with 32 Liberals (they are still sitting as Liberals), seven independents and nine vacancies. Seven more Senate seats will open up between now and the fixed-date election, six of them this year, as these senators reach the mandatory retirement age of 75. At some point, Harper will have to decide whether to fill them or not.
The second problem with Trudeau’s proposal is legitimacy. This is not like the Order of Canada, where the chief justice of the Supreme Court is the chair of the advisory council.
The Senate is supposedly the House of the Provinces (so styled by Trudeau’s father in one of his many constitutional proposals). There’s actually a solution available to this problem, and it’s the Meech Lake formula under which senators were either elected, as in Alberta, or named from lists provided by provincial legislatures, as in Quebec.
Trudeau’s proposal runs into another problem — his party’s own constitution. He can look it up under Chapter 13 - Caucus, which states: “In this Constitution, the ‘Caucus’ means those members of the party who are members of the House of Commons or the Senate of Canada.” As for conventions like the one to be held in Montreal the week after next, “each member of the caucus” is an automatic delegate.
There’s no doubt Trudeau has struck a chord with his proposal, as the Senate is broken and needs fixing. But the devil is in the details.
L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy magazine.
