V. Peter Harder PC (born August 25, 1952) is a former Canadian senior civil servant who was named to the Senate of Canada to represent Ontario on March 23, 2016, after the Prime Minister had announced his intention to recommend his appointment on March 18, 2016.
[2] A longtime senior bureaucrat in the Canadian civil service, he was deputy minister to the Minister of Foreign Affairs when he retired from the civil service in 2007.
[3] He later became senior policy advisor for Denton's, a Canadian law firm and had a key role on Justin Trudeau's transition team following the 2015 election.
[4] From 2009 to 2016, he served as the President of the Canada China Business Council, before his appointment as a senator.
Explaining his move, Harder said he was concerned that partisanship in the Senate had been replaced by "majoritarianism" as the Independent Senators Group became the largest caucus, and wanted to be "part of a bulwark against that.