Canada's Senate Needs an Overhaul

PM Stephen Harper is being criticized for appointing defeated MPs to the Senate. But the blame is unfair especially since his efforts for reform have been rejected.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is being roasted these days for appointing a bunch of Tories to the Senate who recently failed to get elected to the House of Commons.

Some find Harper’s move unacceptable and duplicitous, especially from someone who supposedly wants an elected Senate, or at least some sort of Senate reform.

During the five years that Harper headed a minority government, Parliament resisted Senate reform, though everyone more or less agreed that some sort of reform was needed.

The way the Senate works, is that the party in power appoints mostly its supporters to the Senate. Minority governments give token representation to outsiders, but generally it’s a patronage appointment. That’s just the way it is.

Of course, it shouldn’t be that way.

The pity is that our Senate doesn’t work the way the U.S. Senate does, where every state has two elected Senators who fight, argue, wheedle and lobby on behalf of their state. Little Rhode Island has equal representation in the Senate with Alaska, Texas of California. That’s as it should be.

Canada has a Senate – supposedly for sober second thoughts on decisions made in the House of Commons – but Senators owe their allegiance to the party that put them there, rather than the province of region they come from.

As for equality – there is none.

Since 1970 there’ve been more than two dozen efforts in Parliament to reform the Senate – all of which have failed. Harper wants an eight-year term for Senators, but no dice. A Senator is there until age 75, unless he/she commits some breach that gets him bounced.

To blame Harper for appointing defeated MPs or hacks to the Senate when his efforts for reform have been rejected, is silly, misguided and thoughtless.

A Triple E senate is the most reasonable reforms – as Australia discovered in 1901: Equal. Elected. Effective.

Right now Ontario and Quebec each have 24 Senators: each Western province has six Senators, as has Newfoundland. Where’s the equality in that? Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have 10 Senators each – the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunuvat have one each.

Without the appearance of some form of equality, Canada remains a country where Ontarians and Quebecois are more equal than the rest.

Editorially, the Toronto Sun is annoyed at Harper for his Senate appointments that show up the folly of the system. It’s not the least “hypocritical” (as the Sun says) for Harper to play the game as his predecessors ordained – if only to emphasize its grotesque unfairness.

“Harper should reform the Senate or start the process of scrapping it,” says the Sun. “Using it as a daycare centre for aging Tories is a disgrace.”

The Bloc and NDP want the Senate abolished – and they are wrong. Make it the one forum where all provinces are equal — like the Australians and the Americans – and ensure that Senators are elected.

Do that and the Senate will be more effective.

That reality seems so self-evident that the wonder is that MPs dispute it. And that isn’t Harper’s fault. Nor was it Brian Mulroney’s fault when he was PM, and Stan Waters was elected by Albertans to the Senate – but had to wait until Mulroney appointed him to that post.

The Canadian Senate as it is constituted is more useless that it should be, but it’s not Harper’s fault that reforms are rejected.

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