As Prime Minister Mark Carney outlines his plans to overhaul appointments to the Upper Chamber, a new analysis shows nearly 25 per cent of senators missed any given vote since the 2025 election.

iPolitics analyzed the results of all 36 standing votes held in the Senate since the start of the 45th Parliament last May, and found that, on average, 72 votes or abstentions were recorded.

There are 105 seats in the Senate, though 10 are currently vacant, according to the official Senate website. Senators must resign after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75.

While those vacancies happened over the course of the past year, iPolitics used 95 seats as the benchmark for its entire analysis, and found that, on average, 24 per cent of senators weren’t voting.

Some of the most glaring examples of absenteeism came on crucial government bills. Only 60 senators participated in the third-reading vote for Bill C-9, the government’s contentious anti-hate bill.

That number rose to 75 for the vote on the committee report for C-9, which included an amendment to criminalize residential school denialism. Senators defeated the report and the amendments 41 to 32, with three abstentions.

Meanwhile, only 71 senators voted on Bill S-2, which makes changes to the Indian Act but was amended by the Senate to end the second-generation cutoff, against the wishes of the government.

In the House, the average absentee rate across all 173 votes this Parliament came in at 3.8 per cent, and fell to 1.8 per cent when including paired votes, MPs who have a standing agreement to sit out to match the absence of an opposing parliamentarian. This rate is based on the full chamber of 343 MPs, even though several vacancies occurred over the past year.

Franco Terrazzano, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said he didn’t understand why so many senators were missing votes when they don’t have the same obligations as their counterparts in the House.

“What else do these senators have to do? They don’t have constituents. They’re not going to their constituents’ barbecues, flipping burgers during the summer,” he said.

“Voting on legislation is a key part of being a senator, and all these senators can’t be bothered to show up and raise their hands.”

While senators represent provinces and territories, they don’t run the risk of losing an election if they fail to act on the priorities of residents. Only Quebec has defined borders for Senate seats, while the rest are chosen to represent a province or territory at large.

Others caution that this is an oversimplification.

Alex Marland, a professor at Acadia University and the Jarislowsky Chair In Trust and Political Leadership, said focusing on the topline numbers might be misleading as it could obscure problematic cases of senators who are never present and doesn’t reflect the more substantive work seen during debates or on committees.

“A lot of them [votes] can just be simply procedural. You could miss a battery of votes on one particular day, but there could be an even more important consequential vote that you’re there for. So, just looking at the sheer quantity isn’t really as good a comparison point,” he said in an interview.

Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University, said the numbers suggest there’s a “real divide” amongst senators, as many of those in the Upper Chamber she’s spoken with rarely, if ever, miss a vote.

She suspected the same group of senators are regularly skipping votes, and doesn’t believe that “absenteeism is becoming normalized.”

“It strikes me that there’s a disconnect then because some of them wouldn’t miss a vote if it was the end of the world, and there’s such a seriousness in the Senate in terms of how they do their legislative work. And to think that some of them aren’t doing it, I would not think this is a whole institution problem,” she said.

Leadership of the Senate groups say they’re attuned to concerns around missed votes.

Sen. Lucie Moncion, the facilitator of the Independent Senators Group, said there are many “parliamentary business reasons” for an absence and her members “regularly discuss how to best balance our responsibilities when parliamentary work extends beyond time spent in the Chamber.”

Sen. Flordeliz Osler, who heads up the Canadian Senators Group, said in a statement that “voting statistics on their own do not tell the full story” of the work senators perform inside and outside the Chamber.

“The Canadian Senators Group believes that every vote in the Senate is important, and senators should make every reasonable effort to participate in the work of the Chamber,” the statement read.

“That said, senators’ responsibilities extend well beyond votes in the Chamber and include committee work, legislative review, stakeholder engagement, travel on parliamentary business, and other parliamentary duties that can occasionally prevent participation in a particular vote.”

There’s one major logistical difference when it comes to voting between the House and Senate. Unlike the Senate, MPs not in the Chamber can vote electronically using an smartphone app.

Remote voting was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to respond to social distancing guidelines, but wasn’t eliminated when the public health restrictions ended.

In the last Parliament before the pandemic, the average total across 1,379 votes came in at 241 — out of a Commons made up of 338 MPs. That number bumped up to nearly 244 when included paired votes.

Marland said extending remote voting to the Upper Chamber might improve attendance rates, but there’s no guarantee it would lead to more productivity and could encourage fewer senators to bother to show up in Ottawa for in-person meetings that are crucial to building relationships.

“If we simply use voting as some sort of metric of work, then you can have an MP who’s rarely ever coming to Ottawa — which there have been some — and voting from their couch, and somehow they’re doing more work than a senator who is in stationed in Ottawa and actively engaging in things.”

Turnbull said the lack of remote voting couldn’t justify the poor attendance record for senators.

“If they’re not there [in the Chamber], why not? They don’t have to go and and do constituency work in the same way that MPs do,” she explained.

“Senators do travel for things, but not to the point that it would lead to significant absenteeism on anybody’s part.”

In a statement to iPolitics, Conservative Senate Leader Leo Housakos said the Upper Chamber shouldn’t revisit adopting remote voting and senators should “organize their outside commitments around the work of this institution.”

 “This is not a part-time job or a side gig, despite what some members have publicly suggested,” he said.

“There are, of course, legitimate reasons for absences, such as illness or public business. But outside of those, if attending three days a week, in particular for votes, for 26 weeks a year (or even less) is considered too onerous because of other outside commitments, then perhaps this is not the right place for them.”

On remote voting, Osler said there needs to be a “broader discussion among all Senate groups about whether such a tool is appropriate for the Senate and under what circumstances it should be used.”

“While technology can improve accessibility in certain situations, the Senate has traditionally placed significant value on in-person debate, deliberation, and collegial engagement,” she said.

“Any proposal would need to carefully balance those considerations.”

There’s also a sharp difference in the calendar between the two chambers.

Since the start of this Parliament, the House has sat for 139 days. MPs are scheduled to sit for another 45 days this fall.

The Senate has sat for 85 days since Parliament started in May 2025. Senators don’t sit on Fridays or most Mondays.

Most sitting days in the Senate start around 2 p.m. and last, on average, from two to five hours. The Senate sits at 1:30 p.m. on Thursdays, and those sitting days can sometimes run until late in the night.

The House starts sittings on Monday at 11 a.m. and at 10 a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at 10:00 a.m. Due to morning caucus meetings, the House doesn’t start until 2 p.m. on Wednesdays.

The House usually adjourns by 7:00 p.m. each day, except on Fridays when it rises at 2:30 p.m. During the final weeks of the sitting, the House usually extends its hours to sit until midnight to clear the government’s legislative backlog.

According to the Library of Parliament, the basic annual salary for a senator totals $192,000. The speaker receives an additional top-up of $75,600, in addition to a housing allowance of $3,000 and a car allowance of $1,000.

The leader of the government in the Senate receives an additional $103,800, while their opposition counterpart takes home an extra $49,000.

There are three groups in the Senate that aren’t structured as a caucus, meaning there are no whipped votes. Instead of a leader, they elect a facilitator.

The facilitator of the largest group in the Senate — the Independent Senators Group — takes home an additional $49,000. For the other facilitators, it’s a more modest bump up of $24,200.

The 101 senators who submitted financial disclosures for the first quarter of 2026 collectively reported $2.97 million in office, living, hospitality and travel expenses, working out to just under $30,000 per senator. Travel expenses were responsible for the lion’s share of that amount, totalling just under $1.8 million.

The few non-affiliated senators posted the highest average expenses at $45,611, followed by the Conservatives at $34,196, the Progressives at $33,089, the Canadian Senators Group at $29,632, the five-member Government Representative’s Office at $26,969 and finally, the ISG at $25,337. These numbers can be skewed sharply by travel expenses, with senators representing the territories or other more rural areas typically racking up higher bills.

Changes coming….

Carney announced earlier this week that he was reforming the appointment process for senators, as he named the first picks to the Upper Chamber since taking over as prime minister in March 2025.

Conservative MP Richard Martel and Carney’s principal secretary Tom Pitfield were included in the first wave of appointments, alongside Rodney Ouellette of New Brunswick and Manitoba’s Geeta Tucker.

In a statement, Carney said he was modifying the existing criteria for Senate appointments by dropping the non-partisanship requirement and prioritizing candidates with “expertise in key Canadian strategic industries, regulatory frameworks, and emerging social and economic affairs.”

He said removing the non-partisanship rule recognizes the “valuable contributions made by Canadians who have chosen to serve in elected office or in other partisan roles, including knowledge of the governing and legislative processes, which will contribute to a stronger, more effective Senate.”

For the past decade, Senate appointments were typically based on the recommendations of what the government called an independent advisory board. Most of these appointees came from non-political backgrounds.

Previous experience in partisan politics wasn’t disqualifying, but the process was seen as break from the tradition of having prime ministers name party loyalists to the Senate.

This shift in approach to appointments comes as the Liberals have increasingly clashed with the Senate over the handling of key pieces of legislation.

As iPolitics first reported, government sources objected to the Senate’s unsuccessful push to delay changes to the rules regulating political parties that were supported by the Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats, and delays in passing legislation overhauling bail laws backed by the premiers and police chiefs.

Others have defended the Senate’s pace in handling legislation.

Osler noted that on average in this Parliament, the Senate spent a quarter of the time on government bills that have been passed so far.

“The figures do not support statements that the Senate is responsible for slowing legislation. Rather, the figures reflect the Senate fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to provide careful, independent review after legislation has already undergone consideration in the elected House,” she said.

“Canadians expect the Senate to scrutinize legislation and improve when necessary. That requires sufficient time for debate, committee study, and consideration of amendments. Speed and quality of review are not always equivalent.”

The Liberals said senators should take the time needed to complete their work, but noted that efforts to sit late to finish study of legislation are often rejected. For example, a motion to move up the day of clause-by-clause review on the government’s bail bill to complete it before a two-week break in May was voted down.

BACKGROUNDER: Criticism grows at Senate’s pace handling key bills as spring sitting enters final stretch

Carney’s office said future appointments will be handled by a new advisory board that is set to be established in the coming days.

This board will use a “merit-based criteria” to identify candidates with “diverse experience and perspectives,” and make recommendations to Carney, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

with data visuals by Sydney Ko