Roundup: Harder’s arrogant dismissal

Posted on by

It is probably not without a certain amount of chutzpah that Senator Peter Harder went before the Senate’s modernisation committee yesterday, and not only lectured to them about what the Senate does, but offered his particular thoughts on how the institution should be reformed, and most of all, having the gall to suggest that there was nothing that could be learned from the House of Lords and their integration of crossbenchers. Harder, with his mere couple of months of experience, has taken it upon himself to declare that the Senate should comprise of the government representative (a creature which does not actually appear in convention, statute or logic) and independents who will loosely affiliate on an ad hoc basis – no government, no opposition, no parties, no partisanship.

Give. Me. A. Break.

This declared allergy to partisanship in the upper chamber has reached the point of being utterly ridiculous. Parties exist for a reason. No one is arguing that the current power structure in the Senate needs to be broken apart and for independents to be given more power and resources, but blowing up parties is not the way to go, nor is assiduously screening nominees for any past hint of partisanship because there is nothing inherently wrong with partisanship. If Harder thinks that 105 individuals can sufficiently organise themselves for debates without any kind of structure – that his office doesn’t impose anyway – is lunacy. And it does concern me that Harder is making a bit of a power grab, especially considering that his office is already poised to start offering staffing services for the incoming batch of senators, which is not only unseemly but once again looks to bigfoot the work that the Independent Senators Group has been doing to come up with a bottom-up approach to organising unaligned senators in a manner consistent with the operation of the Chamber while working to give them caucus-like powers for committee assignments and with any luck, research dollars and support. But this isn’t the first time that Harder has attempted to bigfoot this nascent group, and I think that’s a very real problem. His attitude towards the modernisation committee – and in particular his arrogant dismissal of the crossbencher model (which the Independent Senate Group has been looking toward) – is a worrying sign.

Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne not only unhelpfully endorses the Segal-Kirby call for the Senate to limit its veto to a suspensive one (because hey, it’s not like we might need an option to stop a prime minister with a majority from passing really terrible legislation), but goes one step further and proposes that any bill in the Senate that has not been passed in six months is deemed to have passed, so that when they can’t procedurally speed through certain bills that get bottlenecked in committees (like any private member’s bill, many of which are objectively terrible), or when they demand more time and attention, they should just be passed anyway? Seriously? What a way to run a parliament.

Good reads:

  • From the royal tour, the couple were in Whitehorse, but the British media were appalled by the three-star hotel they stayed in.
  • Prince George may also turn out to be a republican slayer, while his parents are working to raise awareness about mental health.
  • Surprising nobody, the premiers are demanding a meeting with the prime minister on health transfers.
  • Jim Carr says that the provisional approval of the Pacific Northwest LNG project doesn’t mean every pipeline gets approved, but each gets judged on their merits.
  • Today’s cheap outrage is over the price of food and beverages on the PM’s plane, never mind that most of it is recovered by the fees charged to journalists on the trip.
  • The NDP’s latest supply day motion is to have a parliamentary committee oversee arms sales, which strikes me as more governing than holding to account.
  • A report suggests that approval delays contribute to cost overruns for First Nations infrastructure projects.
  • The RCMP have quietly stopped using cadets to bolster Hill security ranks following the 2014 shooting.
  • After much complaining, MPs got their special immigration case file hotline restored, and the march to corruption continues.
  • Andrew Scheer formally announced his candidacy with the support of 20 caucus members, while Brad Trost gets nasty with Chris Warkentin and Guy Giorno.

Odds and ends:

Tristin Hopper gives a wonderful exploration of why monarchy works in Britain and Canada.

Cabinet ministers get gifts!

Justin Trudeau met with Emma Watson about He for She as part of the One Young World conference.

 

One thought on “Roundup: Harder’s arrogant dismissal”

Comments are closed.