Prime Minister Mark Carney is appointing Tom Pitfield, his chief strategist, to the Senate of Canada. The announcement is expected Tuesday, according to The Globe and Mail.

Pitfield has worked as Carney's principal secretary since March 2025 and helped develop the government's artificial intelligence strategy. He is from Montreal and will fill one of five open Senate seats from Quebec. The Senate — the upper chamber of Parliament — currently has 10 vacant seats across the country in a 105-member body.

What makes this appointment different: Pitfield will be named government leader in the Senate — a title that comes with a cabinet seat. This is unusual. Normally, senators sit apart from the prime minister's inner circle. But Pitfield will have both roles at once.

Why does this matter? In 2014, former PM Justin Trudeau removed Liberal senators from the party organization. He did this after a Senate expenses scandal. The next year, he set up an independent panel to recommend who should be appointed to the Senate. The idea was to make the chamber less political and give it more independence from the ruling party.

Now Carney is moving in a different direction. By putting Pitfield — a longtime Liberal insider — directly in the cabinet while he sits in the Senate, Carney is loosening that separation. A cabinet minister can move laws through Parliament faster because they're right at the table where decisions are made.

Pitfield's connections to the Liberal Party go back a long way. His father was appointed to the Senate by former PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He is a personal friend of Justin Trudeau. In 2014, he started a company that helped the Liberal Party target voters with data — a tool that helped them win a majority government in 2015. He worked on the Liberal campaign again in 2024.

The Senate itself is uncertain what Carney wants for the chamber. Senators are planning to create a sixth group within the body, and members have asked publicly what Carney's actual plan is. A cabinet-level government leader would send a clear message about how the prime minister sees the Senate — as a tool to pass legislation quickly, rather than an independent check on power.

Carney will not fill all 10 vacant seats right now. He has room to appoint multiple senators from Quebec on Tuesday. The other open seats — in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Ontario — will wait for later announcements.

There is one complication: the advisory panel that recommends Senate appointments has no regional members at the moment. So future appointments may need to follow a different process, or wait until Carney changes how the panel works.