Canadian Senate reform

Great Debates
1

Well along with fixed election dates, the Harper government is planning to introduce a bill to “reform” the Senate. Basically the push seems to be to:

  1. Remove lifetime terms for Senators
  2. Senate terms become 8 years
  3. Retain PM appointment powers of Senators

And this apparently can all be done without the need to open up the constitution. Neat trick.

From my view this looks like a stepping stone to a legitimate Senate. No PM is going to want to publicly re-appoint 105 Senators and so they’ll have to base the appointments on one of two methods

  1. Recommendations from the various provincial Premiers
  2. Provincial/regional elections.

A Senator appointed by a Premier is hardly anymore legitimate then a PM appointee. Since the Senate membership will be reviewed every 8 years, the public is likely to be more aware of their “representative”. That makes it seem more likely that the federal government could argue for directly elected Senators. Particularly since the Senate is a federal body the federal government could argue that federal level elections, run by Elections Canada, should be held to fill the Upper Chamber.

So an elected, and consequently legitimate, Senate is a possibility. That should make navigating bills through the two Houses much more interesting. It likely also curbs the Lower House’s ability to introduce novel legislation. But more interesting (at least to me) is that directly elected regional representation kicks the feet out from under the Premiers as preeminent voices for the regions. Federal equalization would be debated and voted on from within the Upper Chamber, not at some Council of the Federation or at a yearly first ministers meeting. This is why I suspect that a number of Premiers would prefer if the Senate was simply abolished. It’s also why I think this might sink quickly in Quebec.

2

I think some form of Senate reform is needed, if only to make it easier to prune the deadwood, but I’d like to keep it as a place where “sober second thought” is more important than winning re-election. I don’t know what is the best way to go about this, though.

I definitely think we need to keep the Senate, as it does do some important stuff that the M.P.s are too busy scoring sound bites to be bothered with (including amending badly-written bills passed by the lower House), and it acts as a brake on Mytilene-type hasty decisions by the Commons, hopefully with a less-partisan view of the issues.

3

If Canada is going to reform the Senate, then it needs to look at how the Australian Senate works. (And not just the good aspects, but the bad aspects too).

Like Canada, Australia inherited the Westminster system from Britain, so that governments are made and unmade in the lower house. However, Australia borrowed the US Senate system, so that voters in each state elect an equal number of senators.

The first problem with Australian Senate was fixed in 1949. Before then, a first-past-the-post system was used for the Senate. The ballot paper contained the candidates’ names in alphabetical order, and voters put an X against the condidates they preferred. The problem was that all the Senate seats in each state would tend to go the the same party: if your party got a plurality of the votes, it usuall;y got all the Senate seats. In 1949, they brought in a proportional representation system. (Usually, governments don’t make major changes like that, because they benefit from the status quo. However, in this case, the Labor government saw that it would lose the 1949 election (which it did), and brought in the change so that it would still be likely to control the Senate.)

Now there are two more problems. The first may or may not be a problem, depending on your point of view: it is very hard for any party to control the Senate, and third parties almost always have the balance of power. (However, since the last Senate election, the Liberal-National coalition does control the Senate and the lower house – though, even more oddly, it does not have a government in any of the states).

The other problem is that the Australian Senate is very powerful, having both a mandate from the electors and the constitutional authority to do almost everything that the lower house can. The exceptions are that money bills cannot originate in the Senate or be amended in the Senate (though they can be rejected), and that by convention the Prime Minister is the leader of the party with a majority in the lower house (though in November and December 1975 the PM was the leader of the opposition party in the lower house, between parliament being dissolved an an election being held).

This last problem is a serious issue, which is still unresolved, and led to the constututional crisis of November 1975. In that, the Senate held up an appropriation bill, demanding that the Prime Minister hold a general election. To resolve the crisis, the Governor General dismissed the PM, on the grounds that he could not get an appropriation bill through the Parliament, and appointed the Leader of the Opposition as interim PM until an election could be held.

More than 30 years later, the problem of an upper house having the power and authority to hold up supply has not been resolved – at least in part because it’s a partisan issue, with many holding opinions depending on which party they supported in 1975. (For the record, to show my personal bias, I would just say that I joined the Labor Party in early 1976 because of my disgust at what the Governor General had done).

So, if the Canadian Senate is to become an elected house, you would need to look very carefully at its powers compared with the lower house, so that you might avoid a situation like that in Australia in 1975.

4

Eight years is a pretty long term; election fever isn’t going to grip you very often at that length.

In a democracy, true legitimacy should trump the alleged benefits of “sober second thought.” I see not a shred of evidence that the Senate has served any useful purpose it wouldn’t have served being elected.

Giles provides a lot of very good advice.

5

Exactly. 8 years ago, we were figuring that the Liberals would never be voted out, the NHL based Canadian Olympic team disappointed and Mike Harris was eating babies for breakfast. If a week in politics is a long time, 8 years is a possible eon for sombre second thought.

I am curious just how viable the motion is likely to be to have the federal government simple opt to set terms for the members of the Senate. Not to mention how the premiers will react to a second provincial/regional voice in the federal mix.

6

Our U.S. Senate does a great deal more than that, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth keeping.