Is the Senate a Truly Independent Chamber?

Prime Minister Trudeau just announced the selection of two new senators. Once again, the choices were reported to have made on the advice of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments. And once again, accusations of political bias were quickly voiced.

I think there’s a way to assess the claims.

Just a couple of months ago I wrote about Senate voting patterns. In soft contrast to a claim made to Paul Wells by Senator Peter Harder (a Trudeau appointee), Trudeau appointees do, more often than not, seem to vote together as a virtual caucus.

But I should be able to use the same basic methodology to understand how often Trudeau-appointed senators follow the government line on bills from the House. I downloaded voting data from the 1st session of the 44th Parliament.

Instead of collecting data from all the votes through the session, I limited myself to only those Senate Government Bills and House Government Bills (both of which are official initiatives of the government itself) that led to Royal assent. For technical reasons, I actually only looked at data for the final Senate votes on 38 of those bills.

This was an important choice, because it lets us see how senators vote specifically when their sponsor’s legislative agenda is on the line. If Trudeau selected only political hacks who were eager to demonstrate their loyalty, then we should expect Liberal appointees to vote with the party close to 100 percent of the time.

Instead, we get this:

The two senators who voted with the government 100 percent of the time are actually so new to the Senate that they’ve yet to vote on more than a few bills. Those results are probably not relevant to us. But the overall average for partisan voting among Trudeau senators was 78.5 percent. There’s clearly political preference here, but it’s hardly slavish hackery. And I only sampled final readings of bills. The rates for earlier readings were even lower.

(By contrast, appointees of Prime Minister Stephen Harper voted against Liberal government legislation 63 percent of the time.)

I think the fact that the prime minister isn’t getting even close to 100 percent cooperation from his appointees tells us everything we need to know about the selection process. Of course it’s partisan. It would be flat-out political malpractice for a sitting prime minister to not choose allies. I honestly don’t understand the point behind the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments. But that’s not the same thing as saying that there isn’t still genuine and open debate - at least from time to time.

Could the Senate be redesigned to better achieve its ideal as a “chamber of sober second thought”? Perhaps it might help to give William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous claim a try:

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard College.

But for now this is the system we have. If we’re not happy with these new appointments, we should ask ourselves whether it was our most recent vote that made those choices possible.

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