Grouping senators by region wouldn't work for Quebec anglophones

New system should allow for co-operation according to interests, Bruce Hicks says.

Former senators Mike Kirby and Hugh Segal put out a report in the Public Policy Forum last week suggesting that regional caucuses, based on the four regions in the Senate, should be an alternative to party caucuses, now that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying to eliminate party affiliation in the Senate.

Kirby and Segal were concerned that with the appointment of so many independent senators, the chamber, which is currently operated based on a two-party system of “government and opposition,” might become dysfunctional.

These two distinguished elder statesmen try to draw on the historical record to support their claim, namely that the Fathers of Confederation created a Senate for Canada based on four regions of Canada: Quebec, Ontario, Atlantic Canada and the West.

On the surface, that historical interpretation is correct, but it frankly misses the entire point of “sectional interests” that the Fathers of Confederation were trying to protect in constructing a Senate that had regional divisions, something the Supreme Court of Canada has twice now ruled is central to the body’s character.

In 2012, the Quebec government asked me to write an expert opinion for the Quebec Court of Appeal in support of its challenge to the federal government’s plan to make the Senate elected. I made a number of points to the court, including the fact that in 1867 the Fathers of Confederation agreed that the anglophone minority in Quebec must always have representatives in the Senate.

Alexander Galt, an anglophone cabinet minister in the Macdonald-Cartier cabinet, led the fight on this issue and he insisted that senators from lower (or then eastern) Canada should each represent his province’s 24 pre-Confederation electoral divisions. So it was agreed that Quebec senators must own property in the electoral division that they represent.

In the early days of Canada’s soon to be 150-years, this pretty much naturally guaranteed that a handful of senators were chosen directly from anglophone communities in the Eastern Townships, downtown and the West Island of Montreal and in West Quebec.

Today, the practice of appointing a certain number anglophones is a constitutional convention, not an artifact of property ownership, but the principle is the same.

Anglophones from Quebec have representation in the Senate beyond their statistical numbers ( just as Quebec has representation in the Senate beyond what it has in the House of Commons, where representation is by population).

If Quebec senators were to caucus only as a provincial region, as Kirby and Segal suggest, then the francophone majority would, statistically, have leverage over the views of all Quebec senators. They would determine who gets to sit on committees and will control the allocation of offices and resources.

On the other hand, if all senators are free to caucus as they see fit, one can imagine an anglophone senator from Quebec working with franco-Manitoban, Acadian and Aboriginal senators on cultural and minoritylanguage rights, while simultaneously working with the rest of the Quebec contingent on economic issues like manufacturing and supply-side agriculture.

I understand where Kirby and Segal are coming from. They are men who are used to a parliamentary system where decisions were made not by the entire legislative body, but by the elites who controlled that institution. They worry about how administrative decisions will be made if everyone is acting independently.

Making independent senators less independent by grouping them into regional caucuses and creating new elites in the chamber is not the solution, and it was not what the Fathers of Confederation envisioned.

Bruce Hicks has taught political science at Concordia University since 2009 and is a visiting fellow at the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs of York University. Hicks suggested the current mechanism for selecting nonpartisan senators, here in the Montreal Gazette: “Getting into the Senate: The government should create an advisory committee for appointments like the one it has already for vice-regal positions” (Opinion, May 14, 2014).