Stephen Harper apparently knows better than Canadian voters. How else does one explain his decision to appoint three failed candidates to the Senate — the one body of Parliament Harper has repeatedly pledged to reform but taken no concrete action to do so? It’s particularly galling considering two of the candidates had resigned to run for a seat in the House of Commons.
It must be nice to work for an organization where total failure is rewarded with guaranteed employment. Larry Smith and Fabian Manning won’t have to worry about looking for work after they stepped away from the red chamber to lose in their respective ridings. Former cabinet minister JosĂ©e Verner also can breathe a sigh of relief instead of pursuing other career opportunities. It’s too bad only three seats were available — there are a few former Tory members of Parliament who lost their jobs on May 2 who could benefit from a favour from the prime minister. Rest assured, the most loyal of those will soon be posted to plum diplomatic postings in Europe.
According to Harper and his camp, this step is another in the prime minister’s long, confusing and ineffective plan to reform the senate into what would ostensibly become an elected house of Parliament. So in order to reform the chamber to make it more democratic, Harper must undemocratically stack the deck in order to bring it into the modern era. Yet it is this prime minister who himself pledged a major reform to the senate but has yet to follow through on its action and instead of taking the blame, has only pointed fingers at the provinces for not playing along.
Taking a page from Alberta, Harper’s bold plan in 2006 to bring reform to the house of sober second thought was to appoint only senators who had been elected in their home provinces. In 2007 Harper followed through on that promise when he appointed senator-in-waiting Bert Brown of Alberta. But to date no other appointees have been named. The last, best chance was in 2008 when there were 18 vacant Senate seats. This was also the December of Harper’s prorogation nightmare and, rather than see a possible coalition government fill the gaps, Harper made appointments of his own, using unelected bums to fill seats.
The argument over Harper’s agonizingly slow pace to Senate reform — effectively undone in that woeful December — centres on when such elections should be held and who should hold them. Should it be the provinces, per the Alberta example, or the federal government? Given the question has gone unanswered, the change has also gone unfunded. The provinces want the federal government to pony up for the cost of holding elections for senators-in-waiting given they will be federal Parliamentarians. But Harper believes the provinces, which the senators represent, should bear the brunt of the cost.
So in the five years since Harper’s proposed reforms, we have seen one senator-in-waiting appointed to fill one of a possible 22 openings while the red chamber has again fallen back into another vehicle of patronage that continues to feature hockey players, entertainers, football players and even former journalists cast as our political elite whose job is to oversee the democratically elected House of Commons.
Rather than falling into the tired routine of rewarding the faithful with government largesse, Harper should follow through on his promises and give the provinces the money they need to hold elections for senators-in-waiting, at least until someone is ready to try tackling the constitution. It was Harper, after all, who constantly blamed the “undemocratic” Senate for holding up several key pieces of legislation during his minority government years. Now that he controls that chamber as well, its seems Harper is inclined to use the Senate as he pleases, just as every other prime minister has done before him. Even with a majority government, Harper has already demonstrated he isn’t ready to follow through on his word.
