Patience Needed on Senate Reform

Let's hope the Tories take some time this summer to take a good hard look at whether their reform bill is the right one.

With the House of Commons now on its two-month vacation, get ready for a long, hot summer full of debate over what to do with the Senate. Stéphane Dion, the Liberals' leading voice against the Tories' Senate reform bill, dismantles the legislation in the Edmonton Journal, hinging his case on the disrespect it shows B.C. and Alberta (long-term Liberal planning to breach fortress Alberta, maybe?). Dion points out that, under the bill, New Brunswick, population 750,000, would keep its 10 senators, while B.C. and Alberta, with a combined population somewhere around eight million, would have a total of 12. As it stands, “senators play their constitutional role with moderation, letting the elected House of Commons have the final word most of the time,” writes Dion. But elected senators would surely be emboldened to hold up legislation passed in the lower house. Without giving more seats to the West, this bill is fundamentally flawed if Fredericton carries more weight than Edmonton.

The Globe and Mail's editorialists caution against those who'd want to see the Senate abolished instead of reformed, highlighting their role in reviewing the back-to-work bill passed on Sunday. “'Sober second thought' is not just a slogan – it is a real, ongoing contribution to public discourse and public policy in Canada,” they write. The lower house might have spent 58 hours debating the bill, but quantity doesn't equal quality. In the Senate, though, “the issues got a more complete hearing,” with both Tory and Liberal Senators offering advice and insight to both CUPW and Canada Post that they would never have heard from the House.

Even if the the reform bill passes as it stands now, Jesse Kline of the National Post figures it won't ever take effect due to looming constitutional challenges from the provinces. Kline notes that a constitutional amendment was required to introduce the mandatory retirement age of 75 in 1965. “There’s no reason to believe the government could bring the term down to nine years without doing the same,” says Kline, yet the Tories show no sign of wanting to do so. All in all, it strikes Kline as “odd” that Senate reform would be the Tories' first big-ticket item during their majority mandate. We'd go further and say you'd think that altering the fundamentals of Parliament would warrant a little more respect than a bill hatched just weeks after an election in which they hardly campaigned on democratic reform.