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.

Potential costs to Abolish the Senate

OTTAWA — Abolishing the scandal-plagued Senate would cost taxpayers $10-$30 million in golden parachute payoffs, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said Monday.

The CTF said the severance payments for $135,200-a-year senators would likely be limited by legislation or regulation, and wouldn’t approach the massive amount discussed by some senators in 1992 — the last time Canada seriously considered getting rid of the current Senate.

Marjory LeBreton, the Conservative government leader in the Senate, raised the possibility Sunday of killing the upper chamber, which will cost Canadians $91.5 million this year to operate.

Read the rest: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Abolishing+plum+Senate+posts+could+cost+estimated+million/8441745/story.html#ixzz2ckqUX8ru

Why Canada needs the Senate

Eugene Lang explains why we need the Senate

A conventional wisdom has emerged that goes something like this: Canada’s Senate is an anti-democratic anachronism stuffed with self-absorbed party hacks who care more about their perks than the public interest. The Red Chamber operates like the worst kind of private club and is rife with corruption and possibly criminal conduct. The Senate serves no useful purpose, costs lots of money, and if it cannot be reformed it should be scrapped.

The outrageous expense habits and grotesque entitlement mentality of a handful of senators lend credibility to such generalizations. Nevertheless, Canadians cannot afford to scrap the Senate because it serves an increasingly important function in our increasingly dysfunctional Parliament.

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Diseased Senate

Michael Bliss would like us to remove our diseased Senate from the body politic.

Senators for Life

Andrew Coyne: Senators are partisans, appointed for life. How could that not go wrong?

 The longer it goes on, and the more people it engulfs, the more it becomes apparent that the Senate scandal — for in truth it is one scandal, not several — really is about the Senate. The Senate’s defenders (there are some) like to say that a few misbehaving senators do not make the case for reform or abolition, any more than a few corrupt individuals would condemn any other institution, in toto. But what if the conduct in question cannot entirely be chalked up to individual fault? What if it’s endemic to the place, part of its very nature?

Like any other crime-ridden public housing project, the Senate is an example of the importance of environment in human behaviour. The observation does not mean everyone inside should be considered a criminal. Nor does it absolve the individuals involved of their own personal responsibility. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t rules that should have been followed, or that conscience should not have sufficed in any event. There are some things you just don’t do, for which the complaint that the rules “weren’t clear” or they were “applied retroactively,” even if true, would be no defence.

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The Senate is a three ring circus

Paul Wells writes more 

They seem so far away now, the days when Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy were just nice people on TV bringing you the news.

Now both of these former journalists are senators embroiled in an expense-account scandal that threatens to end their late-blooming political careers in disgrace. More important, the uproar over the Senate scandal threatens to bring down the entire upper house of Parliament, the stately red-lined chamber of what used to be called “sober second thought.”

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Documents from the coming court battles over Senate reform

From Paul Wells

In my column for the issue of Maclean’s that started to appear on newsstands today, I write about the uproar over the Senate that began with Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau and Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy and is headed straight to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Most Canadians are not aware that the federal government has asked the Supremes’ opinion, via a so-called “reference” case, on a set of reform options. Still fewer are aware that there’s another reference, in Quebec Appeals Court, over the Quebec government’s challenge to the latest (of eight!) bill from the Harper government on Senate reform, C-7. The cases substantially overlap — so much so that the feds sent lawyers to invite the Quebec Appeals Court to drop its reference while the Supremes heard the federal reference. No dice. The Quebec reference will be argued in oral hearings in Montreal on Sept. 10 and 11. The federal reference will be argued at Ernest Cormier’s beautiful Supreme Court building on Nov. 11 to 13.