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About 2,700 people applied to be a senator over the summer. Then, an independent advisory board recommended a shortlist of five for each vacancy.

We might be dealing with a bit of selection bias

“He’s tried to appoint liberals that don’t look like Liberals,” said Claude Carignan, leader of the Senate’s Conservative caucus. “You have to have diversity, and actually that’s not the case.” The new process “creates a list of people from the elites and bureaucrats.”

But Emmett Macfarlane, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo who was consulted by the government, defended it.

“It’s certainly hard to question the merit of the people who’ve been appointed … so far,” he said. The record is “fairly strong” so far on eliminating the “patronage aspect” of appointments.

While appointees aren’t “90 per cent Liberal Party hacks, … I do think it could be more diverse,” he added. “There’s a healthy skepticism that the vast majority of people are in that Laurentian elite model, or even small-l liberal model of thinking, and the work of the advisory committee might be to think outside of the box.”

That could mean, say, appointing a farmer from southwestern Ontario, he said. The government hasn’t published any details about applicants

“We might be dealing with a bit of selection bias, in that a conservative-minded person might think the Senate should be abolished or elected, and they might never presume to apply for it,” Macfarlane said.

He said putting in an application — not one of his recommendations — “almost should be a disqualifier … I’m not sure we want a Senate that’s filled with people of a certain sort of ambition who are looking for this plum job.”