SenateWatch: A Trip Down Reappointment Memory Lane! (WARNING: Contains Canadian History)

Amid all the fuss and fury over yesterday's Senate appointments -- or, more accurately, the reappointment of two recently former senators who resigned from the Red Chamber to stand as candidates in the last election, only to be found wanting by the voters, and an even more recently former Quebec cabinet minister who was similarly defeated at the polls -- there was one question that kept coming up: Has this ever happened before?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes, but not for more than a century, which is why Canadians -- even Canadian political history junkies -- can be forgiven for not instantly recalling the senators who, for various and sundry reasons, gave up their Senate seats, only to be subsequently reappointed to the Red Chamber -- in some cases, within days.

All five were appointed by Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, and their names, in order of initial appointment, were James Cox Aikins, James Skead, George Howlan, John-Rodrigue Masson and John Carling.

These are their stories.     
 
Two of the five -- James Cox Aikins and James Skead -- were first appointed - by Royal Proclamation, no less - to the Senate during the very first Parliament in 1867 -- and one of them -- Aikins -- was one of Canada's very first Senate reformers. During the Confederation debates, he introduced a motion that would provide for Senate elections in Ontario and Quebec, only to be ruled out of order by the Speaker. As the Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes, however, "his objections did not, in the end, lead him to refuse an appointment to the Senate in May 1867."

Nor, it seems, did his desire for an elected Upper House drive him to refuse a second appointment -- a reappointment, in fact -- after he resigned his Senate seat in 1882 to take up the post of Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba. In fact, Aikins only took the job after eliciting a firm commitment from then-PM Sir John A. MacDonald that his seat -- or a seat, at any rate -- would be waiting for him in the event that he returned to Ottawa:

At first Aikins did not want the job, "for the reason," he later explained, "that when that term of office expired I would be out in the cold and a nobody." Though Macdonald promised him the first Senate vacancy when he "tired" of the position, Aikins doubted the prime minister's commitment and remained intransigent until his friend Mackenzie Bowell* guaranteed Macdonald's good faith. In late May Aikins resigned from the government and the Senate. Appointed to the lieutenant governorship in September, he accepted the job with resignation: "I go to the far off land as a figure head," he wrote Bowell. The announcement of his appointment provoked the Globe to charge that he had been "sacrificed to the Licensed Victuallers." When Macdonald pressed him to write a public letter denying the rumour, Aikins refused, saying that "you never confided to me the reason for the change in the personnel of your Govt."

Aikins was right to be sceptical, it seems. Although he left Manitoba in 1888, his promised return to the Red Chamber was delayed until 1896 due to competing political obligations, not to mention the death of his putative patron:

Aikins's return to the Senate was complicated by Macdonald's death in 1891. The new prime minister, John Joseph Caldwell Abbott*, had his own obligations to satisfy, and some of his Ontario people had no sympathy for Aikins's claim. A cabinet crisis ensued over the issue in October 1892, when Mackenzie Bowell, bound by his pledge to assure Macdonald's promise, tendered his resignation as minister of militia and defence. To retain cabinet unity, Abbott humbly asked Aikins to intercede. "My dear friend," Aikins wrote to Bowell, "don't do anything for me to prejudice your position in the matter. . . . Keep quiet until Sir John [Sparrow David Thompson*] returns if he ever does as the head of the govt." In December Aikins willingly stepped aside, again, to let Thompson appoint Bowell to the Senate. Bowell, who became prime minister after Thompson died, made good on Macdonald's pledge, and Aikins was recalled to the Senate on 7 Jan. 1896. He resided comfortably there until his death in 1904 at his home in Toronto

His First Parliamentary colleague James Skead - a Scottish-born lumber baron who, like Aikins, was appointed to the Senate by Royal Proclamation in 1867 -- resigned in 1881 due to "financial difficulties" -- including a considerable chunk of cash owed to the federal government for "slidage fees" -- but was reappointed later that same year by that notorious soft touch MacDonald, and resumed his duties as a vessel of sober second thought until his death in 1884.

Proceeding chronologically, the next name on the list of Senate reappointments is that of Prince Edward Islander George Howlan, who holds the Canadian parliamentary record as far as that particular revolving door, having been named to the Chamber by MacDonald on three separate occasions between 1873 and 1891, although even the otherwise omniscient biographical dictionary is uncharacteristically vague on why, exactly, Howlan first resigned his seat on December 27, 1880, only to be reappointed a week later on January 5, 1881.

Undaunted -- or, indeed, perhaps encouraged by the seeming indulgence of the PM in such matters -- Howlan resigned once again in 1891 to run for a seat in the House of Commons, but, as biographer Boyde Beck puts it, "went down decisively at the polls," only to be swiftly re-reappointed to the Senate within weeks. Three years later, he resigned from the Senate again -- yes, really -- this time, to take his dream job: Lieutenant-Governor of Prince Edward Island. Howlan's term expired in 1899, and he died in Charlottetown two years later; if he hadn't, he may well have made his way back to the Upper House for a fourth term.

Meanwhile, Louis-Francois-Rodrigue Masson, a lawyer by trade, was - like the previous three - a MacDonald Conservative by ideological inclination, and was appointed to the Senate in 1882, only to be "pressed" by his friend -- including the aforementioned MacDonald, whose name weaves like a golden thread throughout this - and really any Canadian - historic slicey-dicery -- to take up the cause of the Conservative Party in his home province of Quebec. Although Masson resisted the lure of provincial leadership, he eventually accepted the Lieutenant-Governor post, which required him to stand down from the Senate in 1884, but was reappointed in 1890, courtesy of MacDonald (of course), and remained a member of the Upper House until 1903, when his seat was vacated due to his absence from the Chamber for two consecutive sessions, which was likely due to illness, as he passed away a few months later.

Finally, we come to Sir John Carling, who, until yesterday afternoon, was the last senator to be reappointed to the Red Chamber - a somewhat dubious title that, like yesterday's Senate returnees, was brought on, at least initially, by the apparent dismissal of his abilities by the electorate.

After holding his London, Ontario seat for more than two decades -- with the exception of a brief stint in the hinterland between 1874 and 1878 -- Carling went down to defeat in 1891, and was named to the Senate soon afterwards. Within a year, he tendered his resignation to contest a byelection in his former riding, which he won handily, and served as Minister of Agriculture after MacDonald's death, but ultimately fell out of favour with MacDonald's eventual successor, Sir John Thompson. He was dropped from cabinet and sent back to the Senate in 1896 - a posting that he almost certainly didn't see as a reward, but an oubliette.