Senate reform in Canada is not dead, it is merely – as they say in the funeral trade – sleeping. The slumbering giant woke a bit this past week when British Columbia Premier Christy Clark announced that within 12 months her province will begin holding elections for nominees to the upper chamber in Canada’s federal parliament, following Alberta’s 1987 initiative. Saskatchewan passed such legislation in 2009 but Premier Brad Wall later cooled to the idea.
Winners of Alberta Senate nominee elections have a spotty record of subsequently receiving an appointment. Progressive Conservative prime minister Mulroney appointed Alberta’s first elected nominee, but appointed two senators who had not been elected nominees. Liberal prime ministers Jean ChrĂ©tien and Paul Martin appointed eight senators without recourse to the election process. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s two Alberta appointments have been elected nominees.
It happens though that Harper, the heir to the Reform Party triple-E concept, has made no move towards Senate reform beyond the current bill C-7 to limit appointed senators to a single nine-year term. Despite Sir John A. Macdonald famously terming the Senate a chamber of “sober second thought,” as originally envisaged the role of the Senate was to look after regional (not provincial) interests.
The original structure of the Senate reflected the three regions setting up in Canada. Ontario, Quebec (each also a province, but sufficiently large and homogenous to be regarded as a region) and the Maritimes – each got 24 Senate seats. Over time western Canada became a fourth region also with 24 seats. Regional equality was compromised in 1949 when the Maritimes picked up six extra seats with Newfoundland & Labrador entering Confederation. The non-regional territories each have one seat. There never has been a concept of equal representation in the Senate as between provinces (as in the U.S. senate between states), nor of representation proportionate to provincial or regional population.
The Senate’s function as a voice for regional interests was soon gutted by the practice of appointing senators mainly on the basis of their record of service to the party in power, whose interests they were then expected to serve in the red chamber. There was also a change in political perceptions. The concept of appointed senators legislating was acceptable in 1867. Within half a century that acceptance began running afoul of a sense that only elected legislators have a moral basis to enact laws. These factors relegated the Senate to an ineffectual role as largely the stooge of the House of Commons. That can only be reversed by an elected Senate.
Any prime minister so inclined could promote Senate change by announcing that elected nominees will be given preference in future appointments. But nominees elected a while back are not as satisfactory as truly elected senators, and the major federal political parties are a barrier to such change.
Elected senators would have a moral mandate to take their own stance on legislation, rather than dance to the House of Commons’ tune. That would change the basic dynamic of our system of government, and I suspect no federal party wishes to allow a politically potent Senate, such that the will of the governing party in House of Commons would no longer be law and where a system for breaking deadlocks would have to be devised.
St. Albert resident David Haas often comments on political matters.
