Canada's Trudeau boots unelected senators from Liberal caucus

By Randall Palmer OTTAWA (Reuters) - Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, fighting to unseat Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the 2015 election, expelled all his party's members in the scandal-plagued Senate from the Liberal caucus on Wednesday. The reputation of Canada's Senate, the unelected upper chamber of its Parliament, is in tatters after controversial expense claims by four senators - three Conservative appointees and one Liberal appointee. Opponents of Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, said his motive was to insulate his party from the seething expense scandal. But the Liberal leader said he was moving to fix what he called a broken Senate. "Paired with patronage, the pervasive issue of partisanship and control in the Senate is a deeply negative force. We need immediate action to address this," Trudeau told reporters in front of the House of Commons, whose members are elected. Until now, the National Liberal Caucus, which meets to discuss policy and strategy every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, has included Liberal members of both the House and the Senate. The senators will no longer be included, though the senators themselves said they would remain Liberal and "not a lot will change." Government Auditor General Michael Ferguson is examining all senators' expenses. There is fear in both the Liberal and Conservative parties that more scandals could emerge. "Mr Trudeau has announced a smokescreen to distance himself from the auditor general's report," said Conservative Pierre Poilievre, a junior minister in charge of democratic reform. Unlike in the United States, the Canadian Senate tends to operate in the background, producing reports and examining bills. But by convention, it usually rubber-stamps legislation sent from the House of Commons. The expense scandal dominated Canadian political news in 2013, with allegations of wrongdoing reaching right into the prime minister's office and putting Harper on the defensive. It has been a factor in the Liberal Party keeping a comfortable lead in public opinion polls. After Trudeau spoke, a contrast emerged between his views and the Liberal appointees in the Senate. "The 32 former Liberal senators are now independent of the National Liberal Caucus," Trudeau said. "There are no more Liberal senators ... The only way to be part of the Liberal caucus is to put there by the people of Canada." However, the Liberal appointees in the Senate said they would still sit as Liberals and form a Senate Liberal caucus. "I'm not a former Liberal. I'm a Liberal, and I'm a Liberal senator," said James Cowan, who has been serving as Liberal leader in the Senate. "Not a lot will change," he said, adding that they already had some independence. Trudeau acknowledged that Canadians had big concerns about Senate expenses but said his move was not about that. "This is about changing the nature of the Senate away from being a place of partisanship and patronage and improving its capacity to serve Canadians in a way they expect to be served," Trudeau told reporters, challenging the Conservatives to expel senators from their caucus too. The official opposition in the House of Commons, the New Democratic Party, immediately pointed out that Trudeau had voted against an NDP motion just last October which called for an end to senators' participation in party caucus meetings. Trudeau said he recognized that he was losing almost half of his caucus, which up until today had 36 members of Parliament and 32 senators. Experienced Liberal political operatives in the Senate include David Smith, who chaired the Liberals' winning election campaigns in 1993, 1997 and 2000. The next general election is scheduled for October 19, 2015, unless Harper, who has been prime minister since 2006, decides to call an earlier vote. (Additional reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson, Grant McCool and James Dalgleish)