As the Senate moves into the Great Age of Independence™, Senate Liberal leader James Cowan reached out to talk more about where he’s at in terms of this move. We had a fairly wide-ranging conversation, elements of which are recorded here.

“It’s interesting to see how this thing is evolving now,” Cowan said. “I did have a meeting with [future] Senator Harder – he called when he was appointed. We had a very friendly lunch, but I didn’t get any sense from him as to exactly how he sees the universe unfolding.”

That of course remains a question as to whether anyone can see at this point. Cowan has noted that there have been efforts to reach out to some of the other independent senators in the Chamber, but he remains wedded to the notion that despite still being Liberals, they are independent as far as the Senate goes because they have no affiliation with the party or the Commons caucus.

“We continue to work together because we have a similar view of the world,” said Cowan. “That’s, in my view, a perfectly natural thing for legislators to do. It happens in every legislature and parliament in the world.”

Indeed, parties form out of similar interests and world views, and as a way of sharing both resources and expertise, and once they were thrown out of the national Liberal caucus, the decision was made that they could be more effective working together than apart, but Cowan insists that it doesn’t make them any less independent. After all, there are no whipped votes, and they are not carrying the water of the Liberals in the Commons.

As the Senate moves to adapt to the new reality, Cowan says it’s his goal to make the chamber more effective as a complementary body of legislative review, rather than as a rival to the Commons. The new once-per-week visits by ministers in a new Question Period format in the Senate are an example of how that change is happening, and it is now starting to find its flow.

“Some will be better than others, but I think it’s a good experiment,” said Cowan. “What I would hope would come out of the Senate modernization committee is that somebody comes up with a suggestion like that, then we can try it. If it works, then we can change our rules, but let’s not get bogged down in a review of rules before we know what changes we’d like to make, and we have the freedom to be able to experiment a bit, and it’ll work out.”

They are also in the fortunate position of having some time to think and experiment because the government has been very slow in releasing its legislative agenda.

“If we were deluged with a whole lot of government legislation that tied everybody up, we wouldn’t have the time to discuss much less implement some of these things, but we do,” Cowan said. “All of these things are coming together, and are positive.”

Cowan does grumble a little about some of the dialogue around the growing number of independent senators.

“So much attention gets paid to a group of senators who say that we and only we are independent, and everything has to be changed to accommodate us,” he said. “The Senate will evolve, and we do provide more support to non-affiliated senators than the House of Commons does to non-affiliated members in the House.”

He points to the fact that independent senators get extra resources for research, and they do get committee spots – unlike in the Commons – and they have more opportunities to ask questions in QP. The Senate rules are written in such a way that every senator has an ability to speak to any item of business on the Order Paper every day, which makes it much more inclusive of independents than in the Commons, where independent speaking slots are few and far between.

“We need to come up with a better system to integrate them into our committees, and we’re working on that sort of thing, and I hope within a short time we’ll have something there, but we’re not going to re-do all of our committees because we have some new senators,” Cowan said.

Committees are drawn up after an election or a prorogation, meaning that even though there are a number of new senators coming in, they aren’t guaranteed committee spaces right away. Nevertheless, they can sit in and participate in any committee meeting they wish, as is their right as a senator – they just can’t vote on that committee. But Cowan stresses that this gives the new senators time to get a sense of the place, and of which committees they are interested in, and going forward there will be an effort to accommodate them.

Committee membership is indeed one of the big items being tackled by the chamber and its modernization efforts, where currently, the work of assigning senators to committees has been done by the whips, and there is an agreement as to which party will get which committee chair, as it’s not pre-allocated between government and opposition as in the Commons.

“We say how to do we allocate the spots on the committees, reflecting the relative positions of the caucuses” Cowan said. “Once we’ve done that, we try to balance gender, region and experience, and the interests of the senators who’ve expressed which committees they’d like to sit on, and we try to accommodate them as much as possible – it’s not possible always to give everyone their first choices, but we do as best we can, and then we say what about the non-aligned senators and reach out to them and offer them committee spots.”

The problem there is that are so many to go around, and Senator Wallace is the example, where they offered him a couple of spots, which he opted not to take, while Senator Demers took the one they offered him. It may be a “Liberal” spot, but he’s not directed – only asked that if he’s not able to be there, that he tell them so they can find a replacement.

This is one of those issues that the Independent Working Group will need to tackle – if they have a whip-analogue to do that administrative work, does that mean that they will have someone to coordinate with so that alternates can be found if an independent committee member can’t attend. Cowan asks the question about whether they will submit themselves to that kind of an authority – an important question if the way that committee assignments are handled up is to be reformed. There is also the usual grumbling about which assignments are being offered.

“We will have to develop a way, not that these non-aligned senators get priority but that they get the opportunity to participate,” said Cowan. “That’s not to say that a Liberal or Conservative senator shouldn’t get their first choice with committees but we should because we’re independent – that’s not going to work. You can’t have 40 people on Foreign Affairs committee, and you need to have 12 people on the Fisheries committee. Some people you can say all right, you’d like to be on Foreign Affairs or National Finance, but we also need you to go on Agriculture. We have to divvy the work up here.”

That means that there are waiting lists on popular committees, and that sometimes senators need to told that if they want those spots, they need to also take a spot on a less desirable committee, which means that it can be a package deal.

We ended the conversation there, and in the coming days, I’d like to speak with Senator McCoy, who is the first “facilitator” of the Independent Working Group about some of these issues. Suffice to say, the Senate’s evolution is ongoing, and there remains much up in the air before things start to solidify into a new way of doing things.