Do Senate Voting Patterns Follow Partisan Politics?
The data suggests that for at least some voting blocs they certainly do
In his Substack, Paul Wells recently quoted Senator Peter Harder - a Trudeau appointee - saying:
"No Trudeau- or Chrétien-appointed senators have political affiliation with any caucus in the House of Commons"
That definitely caught my attention, because it’s a claim that we can probably verify using parliamentary data. In fact, I’ve already done something similar with voting patterns from the House of Commons.
To find out, I pulled Senate voting numbers for the entire 1st Session of the 44th Parliament. I then grouped all 95 current senators according to the prime minister who appointed them. At this point there are 70 Trudeau, 20 Harper, and 5 Chretien appointees. Senators who have since left the Chamber also cast some votes through the Session but, for consistency, I excluded them.
I then identified all the votes where any of those three “blocs” voted together unanimously. Such unanimous voting would strongly suggest that members share political orientations and goals. I should note that, because there are so many of them (70), I counted Trudeau-appointed votes as "unanimous" even if there were as many as 3 dissenters. Every large crowd has at least a few rabble rousers, right?
So far in the Session, there have been 113 votes. Of those, Harper appointees voted unanimously just 14 times - although one of those (“Adjournment of the Senate”) matched a chamber-wide unanimous vote. This suggests that Prime Minister Harper selected (or got stuck with) independent thinkers.
The Chretien bloc, on the other hand, voted together 71 times (63% of all votes), and the Trudeau bloc saw eye-to-eye 60 times (53%). Full Liberal unanimity happened for 49 votes (43%).
I didn't correlate Senate bills votes with House bills - which could help further identify any “caucus affiliations”. But I did notice that unanimous "Yea" votes among Liberal-appointed senators outnumbered "Nay" votes by nearly 3:1. That would seem to be a strong indicator of affiliation with the government (i.e., Liberal) side of the house.
Simply put, the numbers suggest that, at least on the Liberal side, partisan voting is both common and a powerful force in Senate. I’m not sure what was driving Senator Harder’s thinking during that interview.
I should add that there is another semi-official grouping of senators. While I ignored those groups for this analysis, nevertheless (with their current membership numbers in parentheses) they are:
Independent Senators Group (43)
Canadian Senators Group (18)
Progressive Senate Group (14)
Conservative Party of Canada (12)
Non-affiliated (9)