I had a sit-down conversation with Senator Elaine McCoy a few days ago to talk about how things are progressing with the third quasi-caucus in the Senate, the new “Independent Working Group,” or “work in progress,” as McCoy calls it. She was elected the “Facilitator” of the group, acting as a kind of caucus leader and whip on what is promised to be a rotational basis, but merely for administrative purposes – not the other partisan roles of the leader or whip, which is convenient since the Working Group is made up of both former Liberal and Conservative senators, along with McCoy, who always sat as a Progressive Conservative outside of Conservative caucus, and without enough members to qualify for party status, the dwindling Progressive Conservative senators were independents for all intents and purposes.

“It’s coming along very well,” said McCoy of the Working Group. “We are designing it as we go. We couldn’t call it a caucus because several of us said that we are definitely not asking a political leader to recognise us, and we’re not gathering together for political purposes if you think of that in the sense of political party purposes. Our rules don’t leave us anywhere to go in calling ourselves a ‘caucus,’ so we’re hoping that that definition will change, and there are some of us who would be happy to call ourselves a caucus.”

The Senate Rules are the current obstacle, as opposed to the Parliament of Canada Act, which means convincing the Senate Rules committee, and the Senate as a whole, to make the change.

As Facilitator, McCoy has come up with a legislation tracker – a spreadsheet for the Working Group members to keep track of where bills are at, so that they can arrange to speak to bills when they come up for debate if they’re interested in the topic.

“One of the rules we have implicitly made – I haven’t got it down in a charter yet – but the rule is that you can come and give us information at our meetings, but you can’t try to solicit votes at our meetings,” McCoy said. “If you want to solicit a vote, you drag people outside of the room and go to it.”

Likewise, when these independent senators decide they want to work on an issue together, they would go to their own offices and form an alliance there, not in the Working Group meetings.

“That was one of our principles – we’ll never have a whip, ever,” McCoy said. But in terms of the administrative aspects of that role, such as arranging offices and parking spaces, the established whips have not yet been open to her participation.

“We had Lord Hope, who is the convenor of the cross-benchers in London at committee by television the other day, to find out how they operate,” said McCoy. “He does sit on all of the ‘domestic’ committees – he sits on their version of Internal Economy, their version of Rules, their version of Selection, and I think their version of Ethics too, so that there’s a way of funnelling information through, but he also said that he has no authority. He has no levers to make them go, and there’s no expectation for peers to come.”

The Lords has a different system of attendance and pay, very much unlike the Canadian Senate. The Lords is very much a part-time job with hundreds of peers to work as they see fit, unlike the 105 senators in Canada, for whom attendance is expected and recorded, and that does affect their pay if they have too many absences. It also means that the Lords have few resources for things like research or staffing.

“On the other hand, he said that if over a period of a couple of years, somebody who has been on a committee hadn’t been going to that committee and there others who really wanted to be on that committee, he would speak to the one who was on the committee and shepherd things that way,” McCoy said. “But he has no power to punish, and has no power to fire.”

The issue of independents on committees has been a topic that was raised to me by Senator Cowan in our previous conversation, and the notion of independent senators on committees taking on the responsibility of ensuring that their seats are filled if they are absent. McCoy said that they are canvassing the issue with the Working Group and other unaffiliated senators over the coming days, in order to come up with a response, particularly now that unaffiliated senators have been offered two seats per committee.

“The simplistic nature of what Cowan and Carignan have offered is not as thoughtful as it could be, and so with sober second thought, hopefully we’ll work though some of the issues that pertain,” McCoy said.

There are currently 18 vacancies on the fifteen standing committees, and in some of them, the Liberals are currently under-represented. “It leaves the question of Selection and Internal Economy open – there are some subtleties there, and the most egregious imbalance at the moment is Internal, where ten out of fifteen are Conservatives,” McCoy said.

The incoming twenty more senators, promised by fall, could also become an issue for committee selection as they arrive.

“In terms of making sure that there’s always somebody at the committee, we already have in our ethics code, the first principle is that attending to parliamentary functions is our first responsibility,” McCoy said. “It was amendment that was first proposed a couple of years ago, and a female senator put her hand up and said ‘yes, but what about my family?’ It’s written like it says that I’m sorry, your firstborn may be at death’s door but you’re expected to be here.”

There are no sanctions on attendance at committee, which is on the list of items to consider at the Modernization Committee, which McCoy sits on, including its steering sub-committee – the first time an independent has been on a steering committee.

McCoy said that in her understanding, much of the way the established caucuses work have a degree of control where senators are told where to go and what to say, while the independents will be more forced to be more responsible for their own actions, including finding replacements for their absences at committees.

McCoy noted that they are getting to know the new senators that were appointed, but considers them very bright and eager, and committed to having a less partisan Senate.

“I’m very pleased with them all, including Harder, frankly,” said McCoy. “He hasn’t quite got it right yet, but he’s very bright and amiable as well. I think this crop of seven are outstanding Canadians, so I am very excited about the future.”