The Senate

For the past year or so, the Canadian public have been exposed to the seemingly endless saga of what is wrong with the Canadian Senate. From the over spending and the bending of rules by some senators (an understatement if there was ever one) to the blatant sense of entailment from the rest - it has been hard for any of us who care about how our country is governed to avoid a sense of despair. In addition, the fact that the upper chamber clearly operates along party lines makes the institution simply a rubber stamp for almost everything that is passed in the lower chamber. One could become depressed just thinking about it. It is understandable why so many Canadians, including Tomas Mulcair the leader of the NDP, feel that we should do away with the Senate in its entirety.

The institution however, will not be that easy to get rid of it. The Senate has two critical functions. Without the promise of having a two tiered parliamentary system, there would never have been a country called Canada. The fear of those from the Maritime provinces and later those from the west was that they would become irrelevant. The intent of the framers of the BNA was to ensure that the more populated regions from central Canada such as Ontario and Quebec would not dominate the smaller, less populated regions such as the Maritimes. The very fact that one of the senators is now on trial in part because his alleged place of residence was in fact not where he lived, reflects how far we have drifted from one of the reasons why we have a Senate.

Secondarily, it was intended that the Senate would be a place of "sober second thought"; a place where people would review the legislation passed in Parliament before it became the law. It was never the intent of people such as John A. Macdonald that the Senate would be operate on the party system with the Prime Minister having the sole responsibility of appointing new senators. No one could have imagined a world where senators voted according to the instructions of the person or party that placed them into the Senate. Sober second thought very clearly implies that the proposed legislation is reviewed without bias. Equally as clearly that function in our Senate has long since disappeared.

 Now more than ever we need to have both those protections reaffirmed and made active within our parliamentary system. Fortunately there is already a model in Canada of how a revised Senate could function. Adopting such a system would have the added benefit of paying tribute to, and recognizing the value of Aboriginal forms of government.

The Nunavut government operates under consensus-style government (Nunavat). No one runs for election under a party banner. The leader of the house is chosen by those from and by those who have been elected. Decisions while they are debated, are not voted on - they are agreed to by mutual agreement. While it is no doubt difficult to achieve consensus with 105 members ( the number of Senators), it is not impossible. There are lots of models as to how to do it and lots of folks who would be delighted to give instruction on how to listen and how to participate in consensus-style government.

There are however, two problems. How does one get the senators already appointed until they are 75, to resign and how do we appoint new senators? Looking for possible senators would be easy. There are thousands of bright, well educated and knowledgeable Canadians who would do a great job. Creating a process to pick them would be a challenge but I would guess a committee comprised of equal representation of political parties, regional representatives, universities, unions, the various faith communities and not-for-profit organizations would provide a good working list. Perhaps if we asked nicely, the Senators would resign. Either that or we just ignore them until they die off.

In looking briefly at the  Constitution Act of 1982 (Act) it would seem to me that making changes as to how senators are chosen and how it operates are well within the present legislation. As long as the composition of the upper chamber did not change in terms of regional representation, it would not need to be brought to the provinces for approval. 

I am sure there would be a few bumps along the road to re-formatting the Senate into what it was suppose to be 150 years ago. But we are about to celebrate our sesquicentennial. Maybe we should give ourselves a birthday present.