Roundup: Peter Harder’s ham-handed problems

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First it was the curious announcement from long-time Liberal Senator (and one-time leader of the provincial Liberal party) Grant Mitchell was stepping away from the senate caucus to sit as an independent. For someone as nakedly partisan as Mitchell, it was a curious move that raised a number of questions for me. Then, later in the evening, news came down that Peter Harder, the “government representative” in the Senate, will be naming a deputy and a whip, and that whip was to be Mitchell. (The deputy was named as Diane Bellemare, who was a Conservative senator who quit that caucus a couple of months ago and became a founding member of the Independent Working Group). In amidst a number of smartass remarks going around the Twitter Machine about how an independent whip was supposed to work, I will offer again the reminder that in the Senate, the job of the whip is more about logistics and administration with things like assigning offices and parking spaces, and with organizing committee assignments and seeing that absences are filled on committees than it is about telling senators how to vote. Likewise, deputy leaders in the Senate are much more equivalent to House Leaders in the Commons, where they help determine scheduling of debates on bills and so on. But given that Justin Trudeau was looking to shake up the way the Senate operates, thus far it has mostly been about rebranding the office of Government Leader in the Senate under a new name and maintaining the “not a minister in name only” fiction that Harper employed when he wanted to put distance between himself and the Senate. Add to that the odd insistence that Peter Harder sit as an independent while taking on this role, which is problematic at best. But if his job is just to represent the government, and to shepherd legislation through the Chamber, then why does Harder need a second person to do the House Leader-equivalent work, or a whip for the independents – particularly when the Independent Working Group has been working on developing a system of administrative representation for those unaligned senators. It smacks to me that Harder, whether with the blessing of Trudeau or not, is trying to impose a top-down organisation for unaligned senators in the chamber rather than letting the bottom-up process that the Working Group is engaged in run its course. While I’m not indulging the conspiracy theories that this is all a crypto-Liberal charade playing out, I do think that Harder is overstepping here by a great degree. Sure, it looks greatly symbolic that he got a Conservative and a Liberal with him to do these tasks, but it does look like he’s trying to impose something on the new independent senators that currently goes against what the Senate rules allow (being of course a caucus organisation that is not tied to an existing federal political party). As with Harder trying to get an inexplicably big staff for the job he says he plans to do (as opposed to the old job of Government Leader), this new move is problematic. It could very well be that Harder doesn’t know what he’s really doing and how the Senate operates, which was always the going to be a problem when Trudeau insisted that his “representative” would come from the first batch of independent appointments. But these ham-handed moves are making that problem all the more glaring. This is an increasingly obvious example of Trudeau not thinking through his Senate plans and ballsing it up as he goes along because he doesn’t understand the institution either, and that is a problem.

Good reads:

  • Mike Duffy returned to his office in the Centre Block yesterday, but said nothing to the media.
  • Tony Clement warned that Rona Ambrose had better not break her vow not to run for the permanent leadership. She responded she has no plans to.
  • A Conservative MP keeps insisting her bill to protect the “pre-born” is not about abortion, even though she’s using pro-life terminology throughout.
  • RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said that people speaking out “too soon” about harassment issues are harming the Force’s reputation.
  • Paulson also told the Senate National Security committee that the RCMP are looking to get access to the Panama Papers to investigate criminal tax evasion.
  • The “Diefenbaby” died yesterday, which leaves one less dynastic heir that the Conservative leadership can draw upon to go against Trudeau.
  • Bill Morneau and Harjit Sajjan will be the two minsters called to Committee of the Whole for this year’s supply cycle.
  • Andrew Coyne gets sarcastic about the complaints the Federal Accountability Act is making it hard to attract good staff to Ottawa.
  • Stephen Gordon calls out the problems of corporate nationalism in Quebec, particularly around Bombardier.
  • Paul Wells weighs in on Pierre Karl Péladeau’s sudden resignation and speaks a lot of truths, and Martin Patriquin looks at the quick entry to and exit from politics.

Odds and ends:

Another former NDP MP has joined the Green Party.

It’s been a year since the NDP formed government in Alberta.

Here’s a look at Prince Harry’s visit to Toronto regarding the Invictus Games.