It feels like a while since I’ve had to go to bat for the existence of the Senate, so Robyn Urback’s column in the National Post yesterday was pretty much the bat-signal shining in the sky. To wit, Urback somewhat lazily trades on the established tropes of the Senate, and takes what was a joke on the part of Senator Nancy Ruth about airplane food (cold camembert and broken crackers was a joke, people! Senators are allowed to have a dry sense of humour, last I checked) to clutch her pearls about how terribly elitist and entitled our senators allegedly are (when really, the vast majority are very much not).

Urback’s big complaint however is that despite Justin Trudeau’s promises of change to the institution, giving it more independence is apparently all a sham. There are a few problems with this hypothesis, however, and most can pretty much be chalked up to the run-of-the-mill ignorance of the institution, its history, and its proper function in our parliamentary system. Her complaints that the rules that allowed Senator Mike Duffy to claim all of those expenses is wrong, because rules have tightened since, and the fact that he can still claim for his Ottawa residence is the reality that comes with what we are asking of Senators. The problem with Duffy is that he never should have been appointed as a senator for PEI, and he was shameless enough to claim the expenses for his Ottawa residence without actually making a legitimate point of having an actual full-time residence on the island and a small condo or apartment in Ottawa for when the Senate was in session. Complaints that the Senate Liberals are simply declared to be independents while still remaining partisans ignores the substance of how they have behaved in the time since Trudeau made the declaration, and the fact that they have been kicking the government just as hard, if not harder, than the Conservatives in the Senate since Trudeau came to power. This is not an insignificant thing. But then there is Urback’s ultimate complaint, revolving around a canard about who senators are accountable to.

https://twitter.com/scott_gilmore/status/778683110376431618

The Senate was never made to be accountable to parties or party leaders. The whole point of the institution, and the very reason it was constructed with the institutional independence that it has (non-renewable appointments to age 75 with extremely difficult conditions for removal) is so that the Senate can act on a check for a prime minister with a majority government, and they have numerous times since confederation. It needs to have the ability to tell truth to power without fear of reprisal, and that includes the power to kill bad bills – because they do get through the Commons more often than you’d like to think. They have never been accountable to a party or leader, and that’s a good thing. Sure, they can act in lockstep with a party out of sentimentality (or ignorance, if you look at the batches appointed post-2008), but this was never a formal check on their powers, nor should it be. If Urback or anyone else can tell me how you get an effective check on a majority prime minister any other way, I’m all ears, but the chamber has a purpose in the way it was constructed. Getting the vapours over a more formal independence is ignorant of the 149 years of history of the chamber and its operations.

Where Urback does have a point is in noting that the independent appointments board made their recommendations on the short-list without having conducted any interviews or face-to-face meetings. That is a problem that undermines the whole point of the appointment process, because it leaves the final vetting up to the PMO. One hopes that this will be corrected in the new permanent process that is being undertaken now, but there are still worrying signs about how that is being conducted. Self-nominations and people getting letters of recommendation seems like a poor way to get quality people who aren’t driven by ego and status, and we can hope that this isn’t all they’re replying on.

https://twitter.com/inklesspw/status/778418872185675776

Good reads:

• Justin Trudeau was back in the House and before the press, and laid out a few markers on topics like health care fees, pipelines, and climate change.
• Trudeau did insist that he won’t water down our “extremely high standards” for human rights in any extradition treaty with China.
• Today in cheap outrage, we continue to rail about the moving expenses that were within the rules, and now taxi spending that was in line with previous years.
• BC communities along the Kinder Morgan pipeline route are grousing that “social licence” doesn’t mean giving them a veto.
• The government is still deciding what to do with the amendments the Senate sent back to the Commons on the RCMP unionization bill back in June.
• The government looks to be willing to scrap the “safe country of origin” list for refugee claimants, as the new system isn’t working as it was intended to.
• General Vance is pushing back against the narrative that we would be doing peace operations missions solely to get a UN seat.
• Elections Canada’s latest report talks about the problems they experienced by a surprise early election call that signalled an extra-long writ period.
• The National Research Council lost a quarter of its scientists under the Conservatives.
• Here’s the tale of a town in Newfoundland trying to get paid out to relocate while some refuse, and how it’s reflective of the whole province’s problems.
• Brad Trost compared Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum with residential schools. No, seriously.
• Kady O’Malley recaps the latest batch of Order Paper Question releases.
• Andrew Coyne says that carbon pricing will never be politically saleable in a country that freaks out when the price of gas goes up by a nickel.
• Paul Wells takes note of the poor week the Liberals seem to be having on a number of fronts.

Odds and ends:

The former Chief Statistician has been invited to committee to talk about the gong show called Shared Services Canada.

The single-event sports betting bill was defeated. Aww.

Lisa Raitt has revealed that her husband has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.