QUESTION PERIOD — Democratic Institutions
Senate Appointments
May 8, 2019
Senator Harder, back in April 2016, when your Senate government leader’s office budget was $250,000, I asked you to tell us the sponsors of the first six independent senators appointed. You gave me those answers in two days.
Fast forward to when I asked you about the sponsors for the last 16 senators appointed. It took your office, now with a budget of $1.5 million and backed by the full resources of the Trudeau PMO, five months to give me an absolute non-answer.
Why the difference, Senator Harder? Is your trouble with transparency because we now see the 1,700-plus organizations that have sponsored individuals for Senate appointments: big pharma, big banks, radical environmental lobby groups and the Aga Khan Foundation? What exactly are you trying to hide?
I thank you for repeating this question yet again, and I will repeat my answer yet again.
I was happy to inform the honourable senator when asked with regard to myself. It is inappropriate for me to transgress the personal protection of data for others. As I’ve suggested in the past, the honourable senator might want to have conversations with those appointed from distinguished backgrounds. I’m happy to be associated with them.
Senator Harder, as before, it is your job to answer on behalf of the Government in the Senate, and you not only gave me an answer before about yourself but, as I stated, the other six people who were appointed with you.
Senator Harder, yet again the Trudeau government has broken a major election promise. The illusion of an independent and arm’s-length Senate appointment process was once and for all shattered with the PMO’s admission last week that they use the Liberal Party database to vet shortlists for Senate appointments.
Senator Harder, as the head of the Trudeau government’s transition team, it would have been your responsibility to set up the Senate appointment process — one of the first election commitments Prime Minister Trudeau implemented. As a career civil servant, you would have known that accessing an internal Liberal Party database from the Prime Minister’s Office was wrong. Did the Trudeau PMO ignore your advice, or did you fail to give it?
Again, the honourable senator has asked questions with respect to my work before I was appointed, and that is obviously not what Question Period in the Senate is for.
Let me simply say — I’m sorry, can I give the answer?
I will simply say that my work in the transition ended with the installation of the government at the swearing in at Rideau Hall.
The appointments process that was set up consequently and which is still in place is one that has been put in place by the Prime Minister. It is working well. It has appointed, through this independent arm’s-length process, 49 distinguished Canadians who have been nominated and have had their candidacy reviewed. As senators will know, for every appointment, the nominations process provides a list of names, and it is not unusual that those names are then vetted through the appropriate vetting processes.
That is how the public appointments are made, and it is one that has yielded the distinguished nominees who are here.
