Fix, Don't Axe the Senate

Donald J. Savoie of the Institute for Research on Public Policy says

The Senate has few friends left. It has had to struggle for legitimacy almost from birth, and the body blows it has absorbed from the scandals over the past several months have only reinforced the chronic suspicion among most Canadians that it is a legacy of a less democratic era.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Commons has served notice that his party intends to roll up the Senate’s red carpet. Old friends who once called for reform and renewal have either turned on the institution or gone silent. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, for one, no longer calls for reform; he wants the chamber abolished. Wall now says provincial governments can look after regional interests, pointing to his role in stopping a hostile takeover of Potash Corp. Even Marjory LeBreton, the outgoing leader of the government in the Senate, recently declared that “Canadians view the Red Chamber as illegitimate,” warning “it must either change or like the old upper houses of our provinces, vanish.”

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Repairing the House

Most posts so far have been on the Senate. Here's one on the House.

In the fall of 2009, Samara, a Toronto think tank that monitors the state of Canadian democracy, began a series of exit interviews with several dozen former Members of Parliament on their experiences of public life. Summarized in four reports, they make for depressing reading. The interviewees said they were “embarrassed” by the public displays of jackassery that fill so much of the parliamentary day. They were “frustrated” with the control their party exerted over them, the arbitrary demands of their leaders, and the constant pressure to engage in partisan combat. Yet the report found that, for all the experiences they had in common, the former MPs “held often-conflicting ideas regarding the role and purpose of a Member of Parliament.”


They had served, on average, more than ten years in the House of Commons, yet they could not agree on the basic question of “what they were elected to accomplish or what the essential purpose of their role was intended to be.” Some said it was to represent the views of the people in their ridings. For others, it was to advance the interests of their party. A third group insisted it was to provide services to their constituents. Very few, the report noted, thought it was to hold the government to account, one of the traditional first responsibilities of the legislature in a parliamentary system. Perhaps that is unsurprising. These days, the notion that Members of Parliament do any such thing is an acknowledged fiction. A more realistic definition of what an MP’s role has become, at least on the government benches, was offered by Joan Crockatt, MP for Calgary Centre, shortly before the by-election that sent her to Ottawa. “To me,” she said, “the job is to support the prime minister in whatever way that he thinks.”

7/50 majority

British Columbia joins in.

Distraction Obsession

Dylan Jones, President and CEO of theCanada West Foundation talks about The Senate reform obsession.

Obsession with Senate reform is a costly distraction. The true cost of the endless debate over how to modify or eliminate the Red Chamber is how much it has diverted attention from governance reforms that would actually improve the lives of Canadians. The idea that the Senate is an essential forum for representing regional voices reflects the bias that the only government that matters is the federal one. In reality, as has been well argued by Premier Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, it is the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments that actually shapes how our country is governed.

The dominant fact of Canadian federalism is that provinces are strong and important actors. This fact is overlooked by the many academics and journalists enthralled by the political theatre in Ottawa.

If it's the obsession of anyone, I suspect it's only of a few, otherwise the chamber would have been reformed by now, or at least be making some sort of progress.  Most people don't concern themselves with the components of our legislative institutions.  The Senate rarely gets noticed until there's a scandal.

On the Senate Reference

From Colby Cosh at Macleans,

They have always said that the young Stephen Harper admired Pierre Trudeau. A lot. Harper’s original boss at Imperial Oil once told the Edmonton Journal’s David Staples that Harper, having fled the University of Toronto for the frozen prairie, “thought Trudeau was God.” He is even said to have made himself a nuisance at work by insisting on it. This is in a late ’70s Alberta workplace, mind you. It sounds as though he was a bit fortunate not to get dunked in hot bitumen and feathers.

Alberta turned Harper against the Liberal pantheon of his youth, and his rebellion, in time, triumphed. Yet one notices that the new boss has a suspiciously familiar attitude toward the Constitution. Trudeau tried to patriate the Constitution over the heads of the provincial premiers, dismissing the requirements of federalism for the longest possible time as an irritating nullity. Now Harper wants to either kill or emasculate the Senate: his lawyers are arguing that the former could be done with the consent of only seven provinces, and the latter with none at all.