81 senators later, Trudeau has changed the Senate. Is it ready to change again?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made his 81st Senate appointment this week — another Independent senator in a transformed Senate that Trudeau vowed to make less partisan.

That effort began just over ten years ago, when Trudeau gathered his Liberal Senate colleagues together in Ottawa.

«Mr. Trudeau was sitting there with all of the Liberal senators but no MPs,» said James Cowan, who in January 2014 was the leader of the Senate Liberal caucus. The former senator from Nova Scotia spoke with CBC Radio's for an interview airing Saturday.

«He then proceeded to say that a decision had been taken that Liberal senators would no longer be members of the national caucus,» Cowan said.

That announcement shocked those senators and the wider federal political scene. Senate reform was a hot topic at the time, spurred to prominence by an expenses scandal and competing proposals for change. The NDP was calling for the Senate's abolition, while the governing Conservatives sought an elected upper chamber.

"[The Liberals] were third-party status," said Jane Cordy, who was a Liberal senator for Nova Scotia at the time. She now heads up the Progressive Senators Group and is the longest-serving senator in the Red Chamber.

«And I guess from [Trudeau's] perspective, he was looking to make a dramatic change.»

«Some [Liberal senators] were very angry, some were very happy and most of us, I think, were just in a state of shock,» Cordy said of the January 2014 meeting.

Conservatives at the time — including Minister of Democratic Reform Pierre Poilievre — dismissed the move as a meaningless rebranding. But it ended up being the first of two consequential steps in Senate reform.

A new majority Liberal government implemented an independent appointment process soon