Roundup: Threats from the Senate

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There are a couple of issues arising out of the Senate right now, both of which deserve a bit of exploration. The first is over the selection of the party’s interim leader – the party president has indicated that the Commons caucus would make the selection (per the provisions in Michael Chong’s lamentable Reform Act). Senator David Wells says that no, the party constitution says that an interim leader would be chosen by the Parliamentary caucus, which would include senators. Why is this important? Because right now, the party has no East Coast MPs, nor any from the GTA or Montreal, whereas they have Senators from those regions who can provide some of that input. (In fact, it’s yet another reason for why the Senate is valuable – for years, it used to mean that the only Albertans in the Liberal caucus were from the Senate, until of course Trudeau’s Great Expulsion). And as Wells points out, this is an issue in the party’s own constitution, which makes the party president’s position that much more untenable. The other issue is certain Conservative senators trying to flex their muscles and saying that they’re under no obligation to pass Liberal legislation, much as in 2006, Liberal senators were giving the Conservatives a hard time with some of their bills. This whole thing is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, this is likely someone talking out of their ass (and I have my suspicions as to who it is). With Harper no longer leader, and no longer PM, any leverage that he had with the Senate has pretty much evaporated. Newer senators no longer have someone to feel beholden to, and there is no longer the emotional blackmail of “You want to support the PM, don’t you?” Those non-existent levers of power that the PMO was trying to exercise (per Nigel Wright’s complaints) no longer have anything to back them up when it comes to threat or reward. And then there’s the matter of 2006 that these oh-so-brave “senior senators” are referencing, particularly the Accountability Act. The problem was that it was a bad bill that had all kinds of problems and loopholes, but they didn’t get fixed on the Commons side? Why? Because the Liberals of that era were so cowed by their election loss that they left the fight up to the Senate rather than take the blowback themselves, while Pat Martin was the Conservatives’ accomplice, giddily rubber-stamping the whole affair in order to punish the Liberals some more. So the Liberals in the Senate did the battling for the needed amendments, most of which they actually got. I’m going to be optimistic and say that the legislation coming from this crop of Liberals is likely to be of higher calibre because they’re not opposed to listening to civil service advice for kneejerk reasons. On top of it all, there has to be enough shreds of self-awareness in the Conservative senate caucus to know that if they start playing games, they’ll damage themselves and the Chamber’s reputation as Trudeau tries to rehabilitate it, and everyone will lose as a result. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t take these threats too seriously.

https://twitter.com/cmathen/status/657348537873735682

Good reads:

  • Diane Finley has let it be known she’s interested in being the interim Conservative leader.
  • Michelle Rempel tweets out her contemplating the Conservative leadership question. Jen Gerson delves into the issue with her further.
  • For those of you keeping track, Brad Wall, Christie Clark, Bernard Lord, Jean Charest and Mark Mulroney (for now) have all stated they are not interested in a leadership bid.
  • Thomas Mulcair has pretty much gone into hiding since Monday.
  • Kady O’Malley pokes into the comments that the Conservative party finds itself cash poor.
  • Gilles Duceppe has resigned as Bloc leader…again.
  • The premiers had a teleconference, and most will be joining Trudeau at the climate summit in Paris.
  • Good news, everyone! It should be no problem to reinstate the long-form census for the 2016 cycle!
  • Here’s a look at some of the new MPs we’re getting, contrasted with a few of the returning ones.
  • Tima Kurdi is asking the new government to try and intervene in the case of her brother (father of the dead Syrian boy Alan Kurdi).
  • Here is a decent long read about the Liberals’ resurrection over the course of the campaign.
  • Brent Rathgeber makes his last blog post, more or less at peace with the outcome of the election.
  • Michael Den Tandt finds Jason Kenney’s lament for a “sunnier” Conservative narrative to be hilarious.
  • Jen Gerson wants us to stop talking about how good-looking Trudeau is, and criticise his substance instead.

Odds and ends:

Here’s a look at the Mothers of Confederation.

Here’s a look at the cultural appropriateness of Trudeau’s Haida-inspired tattoo (hint: He went about it the right way).

Our dropping out of the F-35 programme could increase the prices for other countries. *sad trombone*