Senators are about to turn the table on themselves and study the consequences of their own actions on social media. It’s a needed exercise as more and more politicians seek to whip up public outrage online and end up putting their colleagues in danger in real life.
What’s unfortunate is that it’s not in the Senate where the behaviour is most egregious. It's in the House of Commons where chasing views and a larger reach on social media is incentivizing MPs to be more extreme in their rhetoric and less collegial in person.
But it’s being called out in the upper chamber because earnest independent senators are unwilling to shrug off bad behaviour that partisans accept as part of the game.
Senate proceedings are usually dry and boring. Speeches are more educational than their counterparts in the House of Commons. Questions to cabinet ministers are more probing. Committee work is customarily done in a respectful manner. Because the vast majority of senators take seriously their roles as members of the chamber of sober second thought, there are usually few fireworks.
That changed last month, however, when Independent Sen. Bernadette Clement and her colleague, Sen. Raymonde Saint-Germain, the facilitator of the Independent Senators Group (ISG), were berated and yelled at by the Conservative leader in the Senate, Don Plett, after Clement moved to adjourn debate on a controversial bill. The move postponed the debate to the next sitting of the Senate, a routine motion that frequently occurs in the upper house. But the Conservatives lambasted it as a delay tactic. According to Saint-Germain, Conservative Sen. Michael MacDonald shouted that the ISG — a group of senators that have no partisan affiliation and often disagree with one another — were “fascists,” and threats were made by the Tories that committees chaired by ISG members would see their work blocked in retaliation. It was an extreme reaction, one that’s completely inappropriate in a workplace, and unbecoming of individuals who hold the title of “honourable” in front of their names.
The Nov. 9 incident may never have become national news were it not for Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer tweeting a picture of Clement and another senator, Chantal Petitclerc, the seconder of the adjournment motion, urging followers to call “these Trudeau senators” to ask them “why they shut down debate on giving farmers a carbon tax carveout.”
The tweet was styled like a wanted poster and included the senators’ office emails and phone numbers. It was retweeted by Conservative senators Leo Housakos and Denise Batters, and elicited threatening calls and emails to Clement and Petitclerc’s offices. Clement told the Star’s “It’s Political” podcast that she felt the poster was designed to anger people based on a false premise.
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“We weren’t shutting down debate,” she said. “I was doing what I do regularly which is to adjourn debate, to allow for my colleagues to speak at another time … This wasn’t meant to delay. I had not been in contact with anybody from this government, any minister … I mean this was just me standing up.”
One of those angry calls included a threat that led Clement to leave her home in Cornwall, about 100 kilometres outside of Ottawa, to return to the capital to meet with security. The Senate was told local police are also involved.
Clement wanted her colleagues to know the impact of their actions, especially on people like her, women, Black women, women of colour, women who live with intersectionality. “Maybe we need to be more careful about how we speak to each other in (the) chamber and also how we speak to each other online,” she told the Star.
Saint-Germain wanted the speaker — the neutral arbiter of the chamber — to rule that a member's privilege had been breached, and to clamp down on further behaviour, fearing where it might all lead.
“The physical and verbal threats, bullying and harassment experienced by members of our group and members of other (Senate) groups that day by Conservatives senators could have the intended consequences of curtailing the business of senators out of fear,” she said.
Senators might be afraid of moving motions or speaking out, of doing their jobs, because of the threatening behaviour of a small group of partisan Conservatives, who continue to have a disproportionate amount of power in the Senate because they caucus with the Conservative MPs, she said.
(Since 2014, there are no longer any Liberal senators. They now caucus with different ideological groups, such as the Progressive Senate Group or the Canadian Senators Group, or the ISG.)
While Plett apologized for yelling and disrespecting his colleagues, he told the chamber that being the target of protests was “part of a daily routine of a senator.”
“Violence in public discourse … can be a cancer on our democratic life. For sure, something must be done about it, but there is no simple solution to this,” he said.
A senate committee is now charged with finding out what solutions there could be: what obligations senators should abide by in the performance of their duties, or if their code of conduct needs updating.
Let’s hope it leads to behavioural change in both houses.
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