OTTAWA—Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau admits he has probably lost some friends and longtime organizers with his decision to cut ties with the party’s senators.

But Trudeau says he’ll find new organizers and that hurt feelings were the price he was willing to pay to show he was serious about fixing the Senate.

“Yes, there are some good organizers who won’t be active anymore,” Trudeau said in an interview with the Star, his first since last week’s surprise declaration of extinction for 32 Liberal senators. “But we’re getting in so many more that it’s not something I think about too much.”

Trudeau said he came to the decision slowly, after talking to constitutional experts and reading suggestions sent to him on Senate reform, including one from Sen. Paul Massicotte, a Quebec businessman who urged the Liberal leader to take partisanship out of the chamber.

“Just because there was no leak on this issue doesn’t mean there wasn’t an awful lot of real thought, deliberation and negotiation,” Trudeau said.

Some of the now-former Liberal senators are grumbling that the abrupt amputation was botched — that Trudeau should have quietly sought their co-operation if he wanted to sever the connection between elected and unelected Liberals in Parliament.

Why, they wonder, didn’t Trudeau wait until the big party convention in Montreal in February, and make this an official policy proposal, open to debate and votes on the floor?

Trudeau, it’s said, was worried about opening the Liberal party up to the spectacle of yet another round of party infighting in public, with senators and their critics battling through the media for weeks ahead of Montreal about existential Liberal dramas.

So over the long holiday break, Trudeau said he came to the view that the move had to be “clean, strong (and) simple.” It wasn’t easy, he added.

“The transition I had to get past was the personal issue — this is going to be really, really tough on people who have served the party for a long time. This is going to be difficult for a lot of longtime Liberals who won’t react to change well,” he said.

“What got me over the hump was thinking about five years from now, 10 years from now, (when we have) a functioning, non-partisan Senate that actually does a great job of evaluating proposed legislation solely on its merits, not on the political angles of polls or election results or seats that can be won.”

Despite his talk of the long term, Trudeau is contending with a short-term political reality, too — a looming, detailed audit on all senators’ expenses by auditor general Michael Ferguson.

That report could be public within days, and critics are suggesting that Trudeau made his move so that he could wash his hands of any potential embarrassments in Liberal senators’ expenses.

As well, the New Democrats have asked the auditor general to probe whether the Liberals were using Senate funds to finance party activities, in a bid to show that Trudeau has been just as guilty as Conservatives in using public funds for partisanship.

Trudeau’s advisers say they have not been given any early warnings about what’s in Ferguson’s audit and Trudeau himself says he’s a realist. He knows his political opponents will still trying to be cast the senators as his problem — just as Liberals and New Democrats continue to cast ousted Conservative senators as the Prime Minister’s responsibility.

“The reality is any fraud charges against Pamela Wallin, any further disgraces against Mike Duffy are still going to be hung on the prime minister’s head, regardless of the fact that they’re independents or no longer in the Conservative caucus,” Trudeau said.

The proof that he’s not worried about the audit, he says, is found in the decision last year to demand that MPs and senators post their expenses online.

“If this was just about damage control for the audit, it would be a pretty poor and transparent way to go about it, as people are saying,” Trudeau said.

“The biggest defence I have against the auditor general’s findings is what I did last spring — my open-Parliament announcement, where senators and Liberal MPs have started posting on the Internet their hospitality and travel expenses.”

Trudeau chose to surprise the senators on Wednesday with his decision, summoning them late on Tuesday night to their own, special meeting. He arrived at their gathering with the startlingly brutal declaration: they were no longer part of the caucus and were on their own.

The stunned senators asked Trudeau’s chief of staff, Cyrus Reporter, to leave, and then huddled for a while — most of them eventually deciding they would continue to operate as an opposition team within the Senate and that they would continue to call themselves Liberals.

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That has given Trudeau’s foes all kinds of fodder for ridicule, and created a situation unique for a political leader. While most politicians struggle to keep support, Trudeau can’t make these Liberals go away — at least not immediately.

Trudeau says he doesn’t feel he needs to do anything more to clarify the situation.

“I have gotten rid of them, in that they are no longer members of the Liberal caucus. They are not part of our political operation. They are independent,” he says.

“They can call themselves what they like, but the only way to be a part of the Liberal Party of Canada caucus is to be elected in the House of Commons. And that’s it.”

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