A Conservative senator from Quebec whose policy views don’t always line up with those of his party was to be officially unveiled Wednesday as the new Speaker of the Senate.
Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin will take over the post with an official announcement from the prime minister. He will take his seat at the front of the Senate chamber Thursday, when the upper chamber sits.
It’s expected that a committee of senators will select Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos as the new deputy speaker, given that Senate sources say he has regularly been at the internal planning meetings usually attended by the Speaker or the Speaker’s deputy.
Nolin, a lawyer by trade who was a key organizer in Quebec for former prime minister Brian Mulroney, has been deputy speaker for one year.
He is known to be fiercely independent, and disagrees with his party’s view on harsh criminal penalties for marijuana possession. Nolin is a longtime advocate of decriminalization and was chairman of a Senate committee that in 2002 called for the legalization of marijuana.
Despite those differences, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had decided before the summer to give the speakership to Nolin. The two first spoke about the possibility in May.
Unlike in the House of Commons, the prime minister personally appoints the Speaker of the Senate.
For more than a year, Nolin has battled a rare form of cancer. Over the summer, he told the Citizen that chemotherapy treatments have helped, as has his Senate work.
“If I was staying home and reading, I would be dead by now,” he said in July. “That’s the kind of discussion I had a long time ago with my doctors: ‘Keep me working and I’ll be fine.’ And I was right.”
Nolin takes over from the well-liked Noël Kinsella, who resigned Wednesday, two days ahead of his mandatory retirement date.
“The Senate bids farewell to a noble and fair Speaker,” said government Senate leader Claude Carignan. “He will leave an indelible mark on this country’s history.”
Nolin takes over as Speaker and unofficial spokesman for the red chamber just as the details of a spending scandal are set to flare anew. Sen. Mike Duffy’s criminal trial over his spending will start in early April, with pre-trial hearings for Sen. Patrick Brazeau and former Liberal senator Mac Harb to follow in June and August, respectively.
On Tuesday, Auditor General Michael Ferguson told reporters that his office is aiming to release a sweeping probe of Senate spending by the end of March.
“We’ve gone through most of the process of gathering information about the expenses of the senators, but now we are putting that all together to determine exactly what it’s telling us,” Ferguson said.
