Jim found this in the Onion archives - Perky Canada Has Own Government, Laws. I think you’ll enjoy it. 
There’s no realistic chance Harper could reform the Senate even if he wanted to - and I believe he probably wants to, but opening the Constitutional can of worms is just not something he has the political capital to do, majority or not.
His Senate appointments are, IMHO, totally unobjectionable, and the bitching about it is entirely ignorant or partisan. The roles had to be filled, so he filled them. That the fillees were recently defeated candidates is about as original a move in Canadian history as the sun rising in the East. He can’t NOT fill them, and most provinces refuse to cooperate with the “elected senator-in-waiting” idea, so he handed the jobs out to people with experience in Parliament.
It would be nice to have an elected Senate or to just be rid of it already, and I’ve proposed ideas before, but Harper cannot be expected to do the impossible.
I don’t see what the problem would be to get all the Premiers together to open up the constitution just for senate reform and nothing else. No other old grievances allowed.
Seems like an easy win win to me most Canadians would likely agree we need senate reform.
Because the premiers aren’t going to agree on how the senate should be reformed. Sure most Canadians agree we need senate reform. They don’t agree on the details.
And you can’t really open up the issue without re-opening the discussion on Quebec’s position in Canada, since part and parcel of senate reform is the west’s desire for non-proportional representation in the senate. There is no way you can give one region in Canada a disproportionate say in things without re-sparking the Quebec sovereignty debate.
For the record, I’d be happy of adopting a convention of having the PM appoint winners of non-binding provincially held elections. The whole no actual law it’s just the way you do things would fit in nicely with all the other Westminster-style government conventions that aren’t actually written rules. It’s likely also the only course outside of abolishing the thing that has any chance of happening.
By itself, changing the nature of the Senate will change the balance of power in Canada, so by necessity it will bring other debates to the forefront.
Yes, but where they won’t agree is when trying to decide what form the Senate should take.
If that’s what the province wants (as is the case with Alberta right now), I have no objection with it. But I’d be totally against the federal government trying to enforce such a convention against the wishes of the provinces. Having an elected, powerful Senate would drastically change the power balance between the federal and provincial governments, and it’s something that shouldn’t be done without the consent of the provinces.
In other words, if the federal Parliament passes a law mandating provincial non-binding Senate elections without first consulting the provinces, I will boycott such elections.
The Jean Chretien government appointed 75 Senators, og whom 72 were members of the Liberal Party and 3 were Liberal-leaning independents. They appointed precisely zero Conservative or NDP Senators.
Pierre Trudeau appointed 81 senators, 70 of them Liberal.
Lester B. Pearson appointed 39 Senators, all of them Liberal.
Paul Martin was a bit more mild in his rabid partisanship; of 17 appointees, 12 were Liberal.
So from 4 Liberal Prime Ministers spanning four decades, we had 212 Senate appointees, of whom - if we discount Liberal-leaners who identified as independent - 193 were Liberals.
Harper is, so far, 41-for-41 Conservative, which makes him about the same as Lester Pearson and way behind Jean Chretien. I don’t see a change in direction here.
The way Parliament is setup now gives certain regions more power than their numbers warrant in both houses, doesn’t it?
I have no clue how regional representation stacks up in the senate, but in the Commons, yeah, a bit. There’s two things at work - one is that riding boundaries are a bit old resulting in faster growing areas being somewhat under-represented. Ontario and Alberta are the primary losers here, I believe. The other thing is that a few low-population areas have more ridings than they’d otherwise deserve. PEI gets 4 MPs instead of 2, or something like that, and most northern ridings have low populations. This isn’t terribly significant since the number of seats involved is low.
The former issue is supposed to be addressed in the near future using the new census data.
Take a look at the Population per Senator listing just down the page a bit
Yeah, it was mostly Martin I was thinking about here. Of course, he became prime minister at the end of a long period of Liberal dominance, when the Senate was already controlled by his party.
I thought there were more independents appointed to the Senate in the past, though. Many Senators (including some of Harper’s appointments) are people who weren’t in any way associated to politics before they got there. Think of Jacques Demers, for example: did he express any political views before becoming an Ottawa Senator (or since then, for that matter :p)? I would have expected him to label himself as an independent, but no, he’s apparently a Conservative. I wonder what affiliation he’d be using if it’d been Martin who’d appointed him.
What the hell is up with Canada Post and the union of its employees? So it appears that they’ve “negotiated”, but there could still be a strike next week? Just make up your freakin’ minds, people!
The senate problem people have with Harper, I don’t think is so much with the fact that he’s putting Conservatives into those senate seats, but rather Harper said he’d do one thing (abolish/change the senate) and then doing what wile politicians have been doing for decades. So, he’s not really any better than the previous power hungry officials.
Well, for me it’s that he says he’s for an elected Senate but is awarding seats to people who specifically lost the recent election. If he had cast about for some Conservatives who are well regarded within their community but hadn’t just been shown an election defeat, it would have stunk a lot less.
And this is exactly why I’m opposed to any kind of piecemeal reform of the Senate. The horrifically uneven distribution of Senators must be addressed before the Senate gains any kind of legitimacy.
The question is though, how should Senators be apportioned? I see three ways:
– By population. This apportionment is implied by the population-per-Senator figures in the Wikipedia link above, but the Commons is already apportioned by population, so doing the same with the Senate might be redundant. In other words, this model might result in the Senate being a rough mirror image of the Commons, where the same debate would occur and the same votes would result.
– By “region.” This is the current state of affairs, and I put “region” in scary quotes, because reform here might require redefining what a region of Canada is. The regions that existed in 1867 (and the subsequent re-apportionment of Senate seats per province, as provinces in different regions entered Confederation) may not work so well in 2011.
– By province. This could be an equal apportionment, for example; which would be similar to the American model, where each state has an equal number of Senators. Thus Rhode Island, for example, despite having two Representatives compared to California’s 53; is California’s equal in the Senate, each state having two Senators. Or it could be unequal, which could return us to a population-per Senator model.
I agree though, that the distribution of Senators must be addressed first. Once that is figured out, we can begin work on how Senators are put in the Senate.
Sure, we can agree we need reform. but the next question is, what reform?
As a starting point, do you think PEI should have the same number of seats as Ontario, which is the US model? That’s the most basic question to ask, and in my experience, as soon as you ask that question, any consensus on the need for Senate reform flies out the window.
And that’s just the most obvious one. What about the powers of the Senate? Right now, the Senate is almost co-equal with the House of Commons. The only differences in their powers are that money bills must originate in the Commons, and the Senate only has a suspensive veto on constitutional amendments.
Of course, the Senate doesn’t use its powers very much, because in a political fight between an elected Commons and an appointed Senate, the appointed Senate will lose out, and the Senators know it. But, an elected Senate will be much more politically legitimate, and would be willing to use its powers. What happens then if you have two Houses of equal authority? To which House is the Government responsible? How do you resolve disputes? Those were the questions which contributed to the Whitlam dismissal in Australia 40 years ago.
Or, do you reduce the powers of the Senate? if so, which powers do the Senators lose? and if they lose powers, does that diminish the will for Senate reform - what’s the point of a reformed, but weakened Senate?
Or, do you reform the Senate in the way proposed by the party which is now the Official Opposition: by abolishing it entirely? That’s the most drastic Senate reform.
It’s easy to say in the abstract that people agree the Senate needs reform. Once you ask questions about “how” and “why”, that consensus disappears.
This may be a sidenote, but to follow up on your “US model” remark, do you think Canadians might support the idea of an equal number of Senators per province if it was also proposed that the Commons is where the people are represented, but the Senate is where the provinces are represented? This is my understanding (and I could be wrong) of how the US Congress was meant to work–and even if it isn’t, do you think such a model could work here?
I recall that in our recent Elections thread, there was talk of provincial interests being represented in the Commons–for example, some of our Quebec friends seemed to feel that the BQ was in the Commons to represent Quebec’s interests. This is almost exactly what Lysiane Gagnon said in her May 16 column in the Globe and Mail (“Quebeckers Have a Mental Bloc”), but as Ms. Gagnon points out, this is a misunderstanding of how federal politics works.
At any rate, I’d be interested in thoughts. Would having a Senate similar to the US Senate, where the states’ (or in our case, the provinces’) interests are represented, satisfy the desires of the provinces to be represented in Ottawa?
One thing that I’ve been thinking about a fair amount in the last few years is getting rid of regional representation in the Senate and going with straight proportional representation. The one condition I’d place is that everybody only votes once in each election, and that vote counts for both the House and the Senate. The goal is to penalize both the regional parties and the single-issue parties, both of which tend to be over-represented in FPtP and proportional voting systems, respectively.
I don’t necessarily endorse the idea, but it’s at least an idea for Senate reform that I personally wouldn’t reject outright.
Edit: Giving all provinces the same number of Senators, on the other hand, is an idea that I am rabidly opposed to. The US is a terrible model to follow.
The HOC has an unequal unequal distribution of seats. Should we stop electing MP’s until that is sorted?
My point being that a journey starting with one step is more likely to be accomplished than trying to leap a distance in a single bound. If Senators were elected and gained some legitimacy because of it, easily doable if the PM makes his selection based upon an election like Alberta is doing, it is more likely that the interested parties would do something to fix the unequal distribution issue (or scrap the whole mess entirely).
That was the theory behind the “each state gets an equal number of Senators” model used for the Australian Senate (copied from the US). In the early years of the Commonwealth the Senate may have operated that way. It certainly doesn’t now. It’s split on party political lines, just like the House.
The same question is often asked here about Tasmania. Despite its tiny population (half a million), it still has 12 Senators, the same number as NSW, with a population 15 times the size.
The case of Ontario and PEI is even more extreme, more extreme than any federal state I can think of offhand; Ontario is about one hundred times more populous than PEI.