Despite the news being a day-old yesterday, the departure of Senator David Adams Richards from the Independent Senators Group got a bunch of tongue wagging, and even more wannabe comedians making lame jokes about Senate independence. Richards stated repeatedly over the past two days that he wasn’t pressured to vote or do anything by the ISG, but wanted to be “truly independent,” though I’m not sure he quite understands what he’s signing up for. Amidst this, the memo written by Senator Gold to his ISG colleagues about his conflict with just how independent they can be without defeating government bills also hit the news (despite the fact that I wrote about this in my weekend column), which got even more wannabe commentators to start opining about who is really independent in the Senate without having a clue about what is going on. (I will credit Althia Raj as being the only person who did have a clue yesterday, so there’s that).

So, to recap, the Independent Senators Group don’t whip votes or force attendance but organize for the purposes of logistics and to advance the cause of Senate modernization. Logistics include things like allocating office space, and also things like committee assignments, because of the way the Senate operations work, spots are divided up between caucuses, and the ISG is granted their share of committee seats. Any senators outside of the three caucus groups have a much tougher time of getting those committee seats. This is something that Richards is going to face if indeed he wants to do committee work. If he doesn’t, well, that’s going to be an issue because much of the value of the Senate comes from their committee work, which is superior to committee work coming out of the Commons by leaps and bounds.

As for the struggle for how independent Senators should be, part of the problem is that they’re getting a lot of bad and conflicting information, much of it coming from the Government Leader in the Senate – err, “government representative,” Senator Peter Harder, who is deliberately misconstruing both the history of the Senate, the intent of the Founding Fathers, and how the Senate has operated for 150 years. Part of this stems from the fact that he refuses to do his actual job – he won’t negotiate timelines with the caucuses because he thinks that horse-trading is “partisan,” and he wants to ensure that government bills can’t get defeated by means of a Salisbury Convention so that he doesn’t have to do the work of counting votes to ensure that he can get those bills passed. And the Independent Senators are caught in the middle of this, too new to understand what is going on, and getting a lot of bad advice from people who are trying to force their own ideas of what the Senate should look like, and they’re afraid of accidentally defeating a government bill and having public opinion turn against them as being anti-democratic, and the like. So there are serious issues being contemplated, and the commentary coming from the pundit class right now, who think they’re being clever but who actually don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about, helps no one. And if people want to grab a clue, I have a collection of columns on the topic they can read up on.

Good reads:

• As you heard in QP yesterday, the government gave a Summer Jobs Grant to the Dogwood Initiative for a pipeline protester, and Conservatives freaked out.
• Patty Hajdu walked back on comments about misogyny after the van attack in Toronto after the PM stated that it was too soon to come to any conclusions.
• Don’t count on CSIS or JTF-2 to start looking into InCel forums online, given that they don’t qualify under the definition of terrorism.
• The Americans’ proposed sunset clause for NAFTA has become a major sticking point in negotiations, and Chrystia Freeland refuses to concede the point.
• MPs on the human resources committee have made several amendments to the bill designed to protect federally-regulated employees from harassment.
• Senators are looking to amend the bill to expunge the records of former LGBT offences to include those charged under bawdy house laws during bathhouse raids.
• Liberals are insisting that the Senate bill to ban junk food advertising won’t affect sponsorship of youth sports.
• Catherine McKenna announced plans to help coal mining communities transition as places like Alberta shutter their coal-fired electricity generation.
• A CSE release about the SS7 vulnerability in mobile phones was partially redacted by Innovation, Science and Economic Development for some reason.
• Here are some more details about hurdles the Enbridge Line 3 replacement pipeline will face.
• The former PBO and his senior staff think the job posting for the next PBO is offers too low of a salary bracket to hire proper talent.
• MPs defend their accepting foreign travel junkets, saying transparency is more important. (I remind you that giving them a travel budget is even better).
• There are questions about ballooning security costs on Parliament Hill, while they can’t seem to manage labour relations with security personnel.
• The Clerk of the Privy Council wants to tackle bullying in the civil service. Will he also tackle how public service unions protect harassers and ignore contractors?
• Senator Tkachuk went after Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz in committee, accusing him of being a Liberal shill.
• Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe sent a reference question on the constitutionality of a federal carbon tax to the province’s Court of Appeal. Good luck with that.
• Liberal MP Nicola Di Iorio has decided to resign his seat this summer to focus on family issues. You may remember him from the “stripper pole” comments last year.
• Conservatives are demanding a vote on the upcoming Mali mission, because apparently they don’t understand how Responsible Government works.
• Chantal Hébert says that the deathwatch on Andrew Scheer’s leadership is already underway, and he may not get a second shot at an election.
• Andrew Coyne wonders why the Liberals are making such a tack to the left and abandoning the median voter.
• Colby Cosh narrows his gaze at the controversy over the University of Alberta giving an honorary degree to David Suzuki.

Odds and ends:

Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, was interviewed on stage by Paul Wells last night.

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