QUESTION PERIOD — Democratic Institutions
Senate Appointments
May 2, 2019
Senator Harder, I have asked you three times which organizations nominated the most recently appointed senators and which provinces declined to name Senate advisory appointment panellists. Your delayed so-called answer took more than five months and provided no answer at all.
The Trudeau government refused to answer, citing the Privacy Act and confidentiality as an excuse. Sounds like more fake Trudeau transparency and now we’re seeing why. The last report of the Senate advisory committee outlined the 1,700 plus organizations that have sponsored candidates for Senate appointments under the Trudeau government process. They include Bayer, the Aga Khan Foundation, the David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada and multiple big banks. Some of these organizations have obvious agendas. Canadians should be able to know which groups have nominated 16 senators, now legislating in this chamber, who could be in a potential conflict of interest.
Senator Harder, why won’t you tell us?
I thank the honourable senator for her question. The answer that has been provided is, in fact, respective of the Privacy Act. If the honourable senator is interested as to whether there is a conflict of interest, surely that is a matter for our Ethics Officer.
I can assure you that the senators who have been appointed are individuals of distinction. They are appointed through, as I’ve said several times in this chamber, an arm’s-length process.
When the honourable senator asked me which organization proposed my nomination, I was very forthcoming as an individual. Perhaps you should get to know some of the senators and ask them.
Senator Harder, you are here to answer for the Government of Canada and its new Senate appointment process. The Trudeau government calls its Senate appointment process independent and, as you just said again, arm’s-length. We’ve already seen that it isn’t. The Province of Saskatchewan declined to participate in naming independent panellists as did the previous B.C. and Manitoba governments. That means those boards were filled 100 per cent by the PMO. The Quebec Senate appointment advisory board has sat vacant for the last 18 months yet two senators from Quebec have been appointed. The last two reports of the Senate appointment advisory board failed to give any explanation.
Now it’s your turn to explain, Senator Harder. That Quebec provincial panel was empty, so who recommended those two senators?
Again, it is difficult for me to speak on behalf of an arm’s-length process. What I can say is that the choice to participate or not to participate in making nominations to the committee that is provincially based is entirely the decision of the governments that have been invited to submit to providing those individuals. If provinces and premiers choose not to, it is important, obviously, from the view of the government, to have representation from that province in particular consider the nominations that are forthcoming. That is what the government has done. That is the arm’s-length process that is led by distinguished Canadian Huguette Labelle, and it is one that she and the process itself are transparent in providing information on.
