Politics in the Upper House

Nobody should be surprised that Harper is appointing partisan Senators. That's the way things have always been done.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper passed an important watershed last week with the selection of five new members to the Senate of Canada. With these appointments, Conservative membership in the 105 member upper house finally trickled past the Liberal complement by one person. The new standings are 50 Conservatives to 49 Liberals. In doing so, Harper has done what every single prime minister has done since 1867, that is, appoint members who will support the agenda of the government of the day, in this case a Conservative government.

While not a mathematical majority, it is, practically speaking, a Conservative majority. Of the remaining six seats, one is vacant (and designated to be filled by a Conservative appointment in a few weeks), two are filled by Progressive Conservatives (and so have at least notional ties with the Conservative Party), three by Independents, and one by a Liberal who has not voted in years due to problems with the law. And if the Conservative government continues in office for the balance of this year, new appointments will take the numbers to majority territory.

So Harper basically has his majority; at least in the Senate. And over in the House of Commons, the Conservatives can basically rule as if they have a majority because the opposition parties aren’t willing to gang up and defeat the government. The Canadian public does not want another election at this time; nor does any party, in spite of some bluster to the contrary.

Is it a big deal that this power shift has occurred in the Senate? The answer is no; it is simply the natural consequence of the election of a Conservative government in 2006. Since then, Harper has been entitled to appoint his followers to the Senate to fill empty seats. That is how it has always happened. It is the way the system is supposed to work.

So why do the uninformed media and a large portion of the public seem to resent the fact that Prime Minister Harper appointed Conservatives to the Senate? What kind of parliamentary system do they think we have? Of course all the appointments are partisan. That is what was set up by our Constitution, the BNA Act of 1867.

In our parliamentary system, the House of Commons is filled by political parties. The election of 1867 and all 39 elections thereafter have produced a government made up of the most successful party and an opposition made up of the unsuccessful one. Similarly, the Senate has been made up of appointees of the prime minister. Senators have always declared their allegiance to a political party and, with one or two exceptions, this has always been the PM’s own party.

The Senate was created to be the chamber of sober second thought. In this capacity, it can slow down legislation and amend some bills. The Senate will do what it deems to be collectively right, even if this means that the party in power is frustrated at every turn for a couple of years due to the holdover power in the Senate of political representatives of a different party.

In 1984, the Progressive Conservatives were overwhelmingly elected in Canada with 211 members. Still, it took many years for the Senate balance to reflect this PC majority, given the many years of Liberal domination of the House of Commons. When Prime Minister Mulroney could not get Free Trade Act through the Liberal dominated Senate, he called an election, which was fought overwhelmingly over the issue. With the return of a PC majority, the Senate yielded and supported the bill. Mulroney had similar difficulties getting the GST passed. He had to take the unusual, but fully constitutional, step of getting Royal approval by the Queen to temporarily appoint an extra eight senators to move it through the Senate.

More recently, the Liberal dominated Senate has managed to frustrate the Harper Government at every possible turn. In recent years, it has been crime legislation that could not move through the Senate. Liberals have controlled the committees, usually chairing them. Senate reform, long a Conservative policy, has languished.

The same thing happened to Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 1993; but within three years, the Senate numbers caught up with the ruling party’s mandate to govern. Before that happened though, the Progressive Conservative Senate numbers frustrated the Liberal party many, many times by not passing bills.

The point is that every time a new party comes into power, they usually face a large blockage in the Senate that takes a few years to straighten out. This is only natural.

However, the Senate is meant to give sober second thought, not usurp the power of the elected House of Commons. The checks and balances of our system are just that, and no more. They are not meant to prevent the will of the House of Commons. The Commons is supreme. What just happened in the Senate is the system correcting itself.

I am a firm believer in the party system, both in the House of Commons and in the Senate. That is how the public holds people accountable. If we do not like what they are doing, we throw them out of office. That’s politics. It is very natural. With our system of partisan appointments to the Senate, at least we know who to blame when Parliament does things we do not like.

If Mr. Harper had not appointed partisan political supporters of his government to the Senate, we would all have wondered if he had gone bonkers. In the last 143 years, there may have been a couple thousand Senators appointed, and almost every one has toed the party line. As former prime minister Mulroney was wont to say: “ya dance with the one who brung ya!”