For most of its history, the Senate has been Parliament’s forgotten room. A place for party hacks and loyal fundraisers, it earned a reputation as a chamber of clapping seals rather than a serious check on the House of Commons. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau made efforts to clean up the Senate by stripping out partisanship altogether from the selection process and removing Liberal Senators from his caucus. Prime Minister Mark Carney is now trying to fix what Trudeau left unfinished.
Carney’s recent appointments, including a former top advisor and a sitting Conservative MP, break from Trudeau’s strict non-partisan model. That’s a real shift. Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board was built to keep the Prime Minister’s Office at arm’s length from the chamber.
Carney’s picks suggest he wants competence and political range in the room, not just the absence of a party label. It’s a sensible correction. Non-partisanship never meant non-political, and pretending otherwise made the board’s choices harder to explain to Canadians who could see the pattern anyway.
But changing who gets appointed doesn’t change who does the appointing. That’s still the Prime Minister, filtered through an advisory board he sets the terms for. The Senate exists to represent the provinces and to give voice to groups the House of Commons often overlooks.
No one understands a province’s interests better than the government that runs it. If Carney wants to make the Senate work the way it was designed to, the next move isn’t another round of appointments. It’s giving premiers a formal role in choosing who represents their province in Ottawa.
This is not as radical as it sounds. Provinces already nominate candidates for other federal processes, and in Alberta they even hold elections for Senate positions. A structured role for premiers, even an advisory one with the Prime Minister retaining final say, would connect the chamber to the regions it’s supposed to speak for. Right now, that connection runs entirely through the Prime Minister’s Office judgment about what each province needs. Premiers know their own provinces. Ottawa doesn’t always.
The Trudeau era deserves credit here. It made the Senate look more like the country, with better representation of women, Indigenous senators, and other historically underrepresented groups. That progress is real and worth preserving. But provincial representation and demographic representation are different problems and fixing one didn’t fix the other. A senator from Alberta chosen entirely by a board in Ottawa isn’t the same as a senator Alberta had a hand in choosing.
Term limits deserve the same scrutiny as mandatory retirement. Senators currently age out at 75, a rule that sounds like a natural check but produces strange results. A senator appointed in their thirties can serve more than 40 years, longer than most Canadians spend in the workforce.
That’s not what “sober second thought” was meant to look like. A fixed term, long enough to insulate senators from short-term political pressure but short enough to keep the chamber turning over, would do more to guarantee independence than an age cutoff ever has.
None of this happens without political will Carney hasn’t yet shown he has. Appointing a Conservative MP and a former advisor is a signal, not a structure.
It costs a prime minister nothing to make interesting individual choices. It costs something real to hand part of that power to premiers, some of whom would use it to pick fights as often as they’d use it to pick senators.
Carney has started retooling a chamber that spent decades as an afterthought. Whether he finishes the job or leaves the next prime minister to inherit the same unfinished argument, is the real test of how serious this reform actually is.
Daniel Perry is the Director of Federal Affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators, leading national advocacy and engagement efforts. With experience in consulting and roles at the Senate of Canada, Queen’s Park, and the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, Daniel has helped political leaders and clients across various sectors achieve their public policy goals. A frequent media contributor and seasoned campaigner, Daniel holds a Master of Political Management from Carleton University.
