The Wrong Road to Senate Reform

If we want serious change to the upper house, we need to take it out of politicians' hands.

Reform of the Canadian Senate is long overdue. A respected, elected second house of Parliament is needed now, more than ever, to ensure that diverse regional concerns are well-articulated and integrated into national action. This is essential if Canada is to deal with critical 21st-century challenges and ensure the presence of a respected Canadian voice in world affairs.

Yet the Conservative government is misleading Canadians into believing that mere tinkering with a Senate structure dating back to the 19th century – establishing nine-year term limits and à la carte elections – is sufficient. The New Democrats and some provincial premiers, on the other hand, are suggesting that outright abolition of the Senate is even better. Both the government and Official Opposition are conspiring to dumb down a very important debate affecting the fundamental nature of the Canadian federation and our coherence as a nation. The choice between a partially reformed Senate and no Senate is really not a choice at all: Both options lead to an increasingly dysfunctional and discredited Parliament.

Senate reform is too important a component of any serious plan for improving the functioning of Canadian democracy to be left to the legislative fiat of shortsighted politicians. Rather, the people of Canada must be directly engaged in the debate over this vital issue, and must ultimately be consulted through a national referendum.

Due to an insufficient amount of democratic legitimacy in Senate, our national leaders have increasingly deferred to provincial premiers on matters of national concern in unaccountable federal-provincial negotiations. The national interest is too often equated with the haphazard sum of disparate provincial-government interests, dependent on highly improbable provincial-government co-operation for even the minimum national standards or actions.

The result is a lack of national action on climate change, an increasing patchwork of health-care policies, the absence of a national clean-energy strategy, a crumbling national infrastructure, and a stalemate on pension reform. This ongoing drift toward national incoherence has not only failed Canadians, but has also led to Canada’s increasing insignificance on the global stage. Among other things, we are ignored during international climate-change discussions, and are no longer considered worthy of a UN Security Council seat. Furthermore, with our recent infamous UN vote blocking the addition of asbestos to the list of hazardous chemicals, we have relegated Canada to the sidelines of history on this issue, further devaluing the Canadian perspective on the international stage.

We need to re-imagine a more robust elected Senate that provides a valuable counterweight to the purely provincialist perspective voiced by individual premiers in current federal-provincial forums. To this end, we have to consider the role of the Senate in representing regional concerns in a more imaginative and truly democratic way. The Senate is not meant to represent the interests of regional economic and political elites as defined by provincial governments.

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Source: The Mark