Hon. Leo Housakos (Acting Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, I wasn’t going to participate in the debate, but I have to say I got motivated by the intervention of Senator Woo. Of course, colleagues might even be shocked and surprised today that we are actually in agreement in one of those rare situations. Who knows? It might be a trend, Senator Woo.

Colleagues, I want to share a few thoughts on this particular issue. As I said, I usually don’t like engaging on the Senate floor on issues that have to do with structure, operations and rules. That’s not what we’re here to do. We came here to debate the public discourse of the day, talk about motions, inquiries and studies and provide sober second thought on legislation, to have the courage to put forward thoughtful private members’ bills that speak on behalf of groups that don’t have the opportunity to be heard on the other side for a variety of reasons.

I have to say I’m one of those who came here a number of years back. When I came here as a young rookie parliamentarian appointed by Prime Minister Harper, I came to this place and I got an opportunity to sit back and learn from some of the titans of the parliamentary process: senator Pierre Claude-Nolin, God rest his soul; people like senator Hugh Segal; senator Lowell Murray; senator Jim Cowan; senator Serge Joyal; and Senator George Furey, who still is with us and ably serving in the chair as Speaker. Let me tell you, when I got here, there were deep, thoughtful debates about public policy. Yes, we disagreed. There were Conservatives on one side — back then, we were on that side. There was the Liberal opposition on this side. It was a little partisan, but not as partisan as some of the independents profess and talk about the good old battle days. We didn’t spend that much time on navel-gazing; we didn’t spend that much time complaining about the operations and the nuts and bolts.

The Westminster model is designed the way it’s designed — with groups. Usually, they’re political groups around the world. You have the government side, the opposition side and there are a number of independents in a variety of parliaments. When I came here, we had some independent senators as well. We accommodated them out of goodwill.

The reason we have groups in all the Westminster parliaments is to eliminate the bottleneck that is happening right now in this chamber. I have seen this on a number of occasions since 2016. One has to ask the question: What are we spending all these hours trying to solve? Because I can tell you in 2015, that terrible bad old way of doing things in the Senate, very partisan, made up the Liberals and the Conservatives, when the government at the time forced upon this institution a structural change through political discourse, through an election, what has created this less partisan Senate was an election campaign, the Prime Minister going to the electorate saying: “I want to create a less partisan Senate, and I want to make it more independent.”

We respected the democratic will at the time because that’s how the tradition of this place was. Those who were the first arrivals appointed by Prime Minister Trudeau will remember both the Liberal and Conservative caucuses went out of their way to accommodate, to find committee spaces for those senators, and to change the rules to the best of our ability to accommodate them to create new groups. And that was just done out of goodwill, nothing more and nothing less.

Unfortunately, you all know my opinion on this, these changes have been imposed on us by Prime Minister Trudeau without strategic thought or a path forward, but we have tried to find that path forward to the best of our ability. And I will tell you that this is still a place of Parliament, and I remind everybody of that. It’s a place of democracy. We have had an issue for 154 years and ongoing. We don’t get elected every four years. We are not accountable to the electorate every four or five years. We have such a privilege of tenure. Independence of tenure is more important than professed independence, saying, “I’m not affiliated. I’m not a member of a party.” You’re here until the age of 75. That’s the most amazing privilege anybody could have. And this institution, before this new independent Senate, had an ongoing problem of accountability and transparency with the public. Just because you say you are independent today, all of a sudden, has not resolved that problem. We still have the issue that we’re not always compatible with democratic outcomes.

In the last two elections, the Conservative Party of Canada received the plurality of votes from the Canadian public.