Senate Reform: Deletion? Simple Election? or Modified Appointment.

    I have always been a staunch supporter of the Canadian Senate as an integral and important part of our system of government.  I have always felt that we do need a forum of 'sober second thought,' preferably consisting of appointed, not elected, persons who are carefully selected from among the most intelligent, educated, open-minded and respected of Canadian citizens.  Our elected Members of Parliament are too much in the limelight of, and under the thumb of, rapidly changing and often poorly informed public opinion.  Without the check of an intelligent and well educated Senate to slow down the process of lawmaking, to re-think what our parliamentarians put forward as new laws or modifications to our constitution, to recommend vital changes to those laws and constitutional modifications, we would be very much in danger of having what would amount to little more than 'mob rule by proxy.'

    Remember, the Senate cannot stop laws or constitutional changes that Parliament wants, it can only force them to slow down and reconsider the potential ramifications of those bills, if enacted, despite how popular they may be temporarily with the public at large, or because of how unpopular they may be with the public.  To be sure, very few Members of Parliament would ever want to have to function without the Senate there as a potential scapegoat.  It is frequently enough a valuable ploy for an elected Member of Parliament to be able to vote for a temporarily popular bill that he or she knows to be ill-advised or unworkable in some way and to blame the 'killing of the bill' on that nasty old Senate.  What those parliamentarians know, but never talk about publicly, is that the Senate cannot kill a bill.  It can send it back only three times for reconsideration.  Even if the bill had to wait until the next sitting of Parliament, our MP's could send it back to the Senate and force it through then.  The Senate of Canada can delay a bill but cannot stop it from being enacted.

    Although there are ill-advised calls heard now and then for elimination of the Senate, I believe most Canadians understand how vital a role the Senate plays in protecting us from our own impetuousness, or that of our elected representatives.  Laws and constitutional changes, after all, should function and function well, over long periods of time, in order to foster a stable, healthy society.  They are far too important to leave them subject to, or requiring, overly-frequent 'tweeking' in response to temporary changes in the public whim.

    In the last couple of decades, however, there have been increasing calls, especially in my native Alberta, to move to an elected Senate.  I have always been opposed to an elected Senate because I felt it would then become little more than a rubber-stamping extension of our elected Parliament.  Far from enabling better government, this would simply do away with the greatest value of the Senate which, as stated above, is to enable reconsideration of Parliamentary bills by worthy people who are not subject to necessarily impending re-election and, resultingly, rapidly fluctuating public whim.

    Of late I have had to rethink my position on this.  One example of why is the recent appointment of Mike Duffy to the Canadian Senate and his subsequent behaviour as an appointed Senator.  His boorishness, overbearing manner, ultra-partisanship and lack of transparency with regards to his immensely bloated expenditures out of the public purse make him an embarrassment to all well-meaning Canadians of any political stripe.  I hasten to add that, although Duffy is not the model of all of our Senators by any means, neither is he the only example of the depths to which our current system of appointment by the Prime Minister (who himself gains his position through a 'first past the post' party system that leaves huge sections of the Canadian population unrepresented or poorly represented in Parliament) has sunk the nature and manner of our governance.  In fact, in the last year alone Stephen Harper, the most authoritarian, controlling, secretive and ultra-Conservative Prime Minister that Canada has ever had, has appointed twenty-seven new Senators in an unprecedented orgy of partisanship.

    In order to function in a healthy manner for the benefit of all Canadians, Senators must be selected in a  more publicly structured and less partisan way.  After all, even ultra-Conservatives must realize that a time will come, as it has before, when the public psyche will swing to the left again and a more leftish Prime Minister will then be in a position to load up the Senate with patronage appointments of his favourite political hacks.  Elections and Senate appointments are not sporting events to be temporarily celebrated in terms of winners vs. losers and then forgotten (although I suspect many people, unthinkingly, tend to regard them this way).  This is how we are ruled and governed in every public aspect, and in a great many private aspects, of our lives.  IT IS IMPORTANT to every Canadian whether or not he thinks much about it.

    I too would now like to see the system for the selection of our Senators modified.  My preference would be to maintain the system of Prime Ministerial appointment, but to restrict his or her selection to a pool of elected possibles.  Elections within each Province and Territory could be held at set intervals and a group of several candidates elected by popular vote.  This would require that the candidates be able to convincingly support their own candidacy with public discussions of what their qualifications are, how they think on various issues, and why they feel they are better suited to a position of checking the power of Members of Parliament than to simply running for office as a potential Member of Parliament.  From this pool of elected candidates the Prime Minister would still have the serious input of selecting which of the candidates from each region actually become Senators.  This is not the forum in which to go into the fine details of how this system would work, but it may readily be seen that some such system would better function to satisfy the wishes and needs of the Canadian populace yet still conform to a large degree to the Prime Minister's inevitably partisan desire for wielding some controlling influence on the Senate.  At the same time, it would eliminate the worst excesses of our current system of rewarding unsuitable and even incompetent party hacks with patronage appointments on the public purse.

    I urge all Canadians to think about this seriously.  Don't be blasé about our governance and don't fall into the trap of letting our Senate become just a pack of elected 'Yes Men' (and women) for whatever major political party happens to hold sway at any given time.  I urge you further to talk openly about this with friends and colleagues.  Talk about it, e-mail and blog about it, and let's start pressing our politicians to get more serious, not just about reforming the Senate, but about reforming it in such a way that it becomes more valuable in its intended function, not less so.

Canada's Failing Democracy

    Democracy can be loosely defined as "rule by the people."  We, in Canada, call ourselves a democracy with great self-satisfaction.  Of course, democracy doesn't mean the people have to participate in a referendum on every question or every action taken by the government.  Ours is a parliamentary democracy in which our elected representatives make those decisions for us and we, in theory, can hold them accountable for their decisions at election time.

    This only works well, however, if we do let them know, in no uncertain terms, what we expect, what we like and what we do not want, frequently between elections.  When our politicians make poor or harmful decisions we should let them know immediately through letters, public protests, internet blogs, etc.  Elections themselves occur too infrequently to be the only check and balance tool we use.  In Canada, the system is severely broken and it is our (the people's) fault.

    Politicians continually get away with inaction, where action is required, and with wrongful action where different action is required.  By the time the next election roles around the politicians have, all too easily, distracted most of the population with hand-picked "platform issues", usually couched in the most general (and thereby unaccountable) of terms such as 'fighting poverty' or 'fixing the economy' or 'creating prosperity through jobs."  Following the election, they all too easily get away with simply ignoring their platform promises or watering them down  to some pathetic ghost of their original selves.

    The Harper Conservatives promised to make government more open, but have practiced the most secretive and unaccountable government we have had in Canada since World War II.  They promised to protect Canadian sovereignty in the arctic, but have done nothing concrete to ensure that sovereignty while Russia, Denmark and the U.S.A. have all taken concrete steps to encroach upon our sovereignty. They promised to ensure more jobs and job security, but continue to tie Canada's employment fate too tightly to the plateauing (if not failing) American market and western dirty oil while doing almost nothing to take advantage of the burgeoning behemoths of China and India and the far more secure job creation powers of low carbon energy sources. They promised to set Canadian elections to set dates in order to avoid unnecessary elections being arranged at the whim of some political party or parties for no other reason than the polls' indicating they might increase in parliamentary seats held at that particular time.  Then what does Harper do last fall but ignore his own proposal and call an election nobody but the Conservatives wanted simply because they 'scented' (incorrectly) the possibility of a majority Conservative government at that time.

    Yet, do Harper and his Conservative government face protest from the public for these failings?  No, the response is almost silent complacency, not because everyone, or even some vast majority, agrees with their record on these matters, but because we, by and large, find it too difficult, too time consuming, too embarrassing to speak out clearly and let the government know we are not happy.  It is much easier to sit back and say "we'll have our say in the next election."  Of course, elections themselves are a bother and cost more than ten tax dollars for each citizen so even those who are unhappy with the government tend to say "the last thing we need is another election right now,"  And what do the polls show about what the Canadian populace thinks about their government?  Polls taken just before and just after Mr. Harper's recent public recital, in which he sang a Beatles song and played the piano, indicate a huge upsurge in Harper's popularity as a political leader!!!  He doesn't have to perform well as a leader week by week and month by month, he simply has to perform moderately well, on a particular night, as a stage entertainer?  The answer to this last question is apparently, and to the great shame of all Canadians, yes!  I'll say it again, Canada's political system is very badly broken and it's our own fault.