The new, more independent Senate will quickly become a “failed experiment” without a radical, immediate overhaul of the rules for the Red Chamber, two well-respected ex-senators are warning.

Hugh Segal and Michael Kirby have written what could well become a how-to manual for a Senate still in the midst of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to disentangle it from partisan politics.

The paper is being released today by the Public Policy Forum and comes just as Trudeau is poised to appoint another batch of independents to the Senate — candidates selected through a new application process launched in the summer. Such a new infusion of independent senators — up to 20 — would leave the old-school, partisan senators outnumbered.

Kirby and Segal warn that Trudeau’s Senate reform project is only part of the way to mission-accomplished right now, and that it can’t succeed unless the rules are totally rewritten to make an independent Senate a workable institution.

“Members will need to move with haste to alter the existing rules,” they write. “Otherwise, an independent Senate will become a failed experiment.”

Segal and Kirby have drawn up a sweeping list of suggested rule changes, most of which could be pulled off by the Senate or Parliament alone. If implemented, these new terms of engagement would radically transform how the Senate works — on its own, with the Prime Minister’s Office and with the elected folks in the House of Commons:

A reorganization of senators away from political parties and into regional caucuses, each to be headed by a “convenor” and “deputy convenor.” These regional chiefs would be “responsible as a group for the allocation of membership on standing Senate committees, speaking lists in the chamber, allocation of offices, committee travel and any other such issues.”

A complete makeover of question period in the Senate, shifting its focus to: the “questioning of committee chairs; questioning of the Government Representative in the Senate on plans for government legislation; the new practice of weekly questioning of invited government ministers, as designated by the Senate.”

For cases of conflict or a standoff with the House of Commons, Segal and Kirby would like to revive the tradition of “conferences” between the two chambers of Parliament. They also recommend that the Senate do away with its absolute veto in favour of a “suspensive” one that would only allow the chamber to hold up legislation for six months.

They also argue it’s time to drop the requirement for senators to be over 30 years of age or own $4,000 worth of property in the region they represent. “While in most cases, we prefer a Senate of experience across a wide spectrum of knowledge and pursuits, we see no need for official age discrimination,” they write.

Segal and Kirby worry that Trudeau’s going overboard in his bid to do away with partisan politics, to the point where people who have done civic duty within parties will be automatically rejected for service. Segal and Kirby worry that Trudeau’s going overboard in his bid to do away with partisan politics, to the point where people who have done civic duty within parties will be automatically rejected for service.

The status quo is not an option, they say. Without changes like this, Segal and Kirby argue the Senate will remain trapped in a set of outmoded rules written for a partisan structure that no longer exists — or soon won’t exist.

“As the first trickle of independent senators grows toward a plurality and ultimately a majority, it is essential to get the right pieces in place sooner rather than later,” says the paper, which is titled, A House Undivided: Making Senate Independence Work.

Segal and Kirby are both distinguished Senate veterans who chose to step down long before their terms were up. Segal, a Conservative appointed by former prime minister Paul Martin, is now the master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Kirby, a Liberal, did significant work in the Senate on health issues and moved on after leaving the chamber to become the inaugural chair of the Canadian Mental Health Commission.

This isn’t their first collaboration on a writing project, either. Back in the 1980s, Kirby and Segal were two-thirds of a much-watched political panel on Canada AM. (The third member was Gerald Caplan, now a commentator for the Globe and Mail online and CBC’s Power and Politics program.) The trio wrote a book after the 1988 election — with the rather unimaginative title Election — on a campaign that featured high drama over free trade and leadership turmoil within the Liberal party under John Turner.

In A House Undivided, Segal and Kirby are generally supportive of what Trudeau is trying to accomplish in the Senate. Their paper is laced with laments over how the beleaguered institution came to become an “echo chamber” for the Commons in recent years, bending far too much to the will of the PMO.

Though Segal sat in the Conservative caucus of former prime minister Stephen Harper, it sometimes seemed like an uneasy fit for a Red Tory veteran of Bill Davis’s Queen’s Park and Brian Mulroney’s PMO. For instance, Segal disagreed strongly with the old Conservative government on anti-union legislation in 2013.

Segal left the Senate in 2014, while the chamber was caught up in controversy over Mike Duffy and spending expenses. Few people were surprised to see him leave a chamber that had become dysfunctional.

The former senators do have one small objection to Trudeau’s reform ideas: They worry that he’s going overboard in the bid to do away with partisan politics, to the point where people who have done civic duty within parties will be automatically rejected for service.

“It is not the intention of this report to suggest that a partisan background is necessarily bad, only that a partisan Senate is bad. Both authors served as partisans during their political careers and both sat in partisan caucuses as senators and both are distressed by how partisanship, which always existed, has grown out of control in the Senate,” they write.

“That does not mean that those who have served in partisan capacities should be excluded from consideration within the appointment process. It would be irony of the highest order if the only Canadians not in the running for appointment as a senator were those who happened to choose active forms of civic engagement within our competitive political system.”

Backers of Trudeau’s efforts to make the Senate more independent have been saying that the fix under way — while not perfect — will address much of what was seen to be wrong with the old Senate. The Segal-Kirby paper is the first comprehensive effort to tackle what could go wrong in the new Senate. For that reason alone, the suggestions could — and should — be taken seriously, sooner rather than later.

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