Time to hear Trudeau’s Senate plan
You can never be entirely sure how these things will play out with the public, but it will be surprising if next week’s polls aren’t better for the NDP than this week’s are.
The party has been on a roll since its Alberta cousins ended the long reign of the Tories here, and the anyone-but-Harper vote is coalescing around Thomas Mulcair, for now at least.
It is likely that Canadians will have been listening with approval this week as Mulcair denounced the Conservative and Liberal Senate troughers caught with slop on their snouts by the auditor general.
It is galling to think of the senators enjoying their taxpayer-funded trips to family funerals, hockey getaways and wine promotion events, painful to listen to their cries of outraged indignity, and sickening to see bipartisan Senate leadership promising to be open and accountable, while refusing to release basic details on how they are spending our money.
Worse still, this week they failed to do their job, which is to give legislation sober second thought, and passed C-51 unamended, empowering Canadian spies to do all kinds of shadowy things without a proper oversight system.
As a common-sense proposition, it’s hard to argue with the long-standing NDP solution to the problem in the Senate: send security guards into the East Block and keep a close eye on its occupants while they pack up their personal belongings.
It’s getting harder and harder to side with Senate traditionalists.
Shutting it down would save taxpayers $100 million a year. It does good work at committee, producing decent reports, but hardly anybody reads them.
It does occasionally improve legislation, which is really important, but MPs would likely stop relying on it as a backstop if they had to do so.
And while it was designed to provide a regional balance to the House of Commons, to make sure smaller provinces wouldn’t be drowned out by Ontario, I’ve been covering politics here for a decade without observing that happening in a meaningful way.
The only problem is that the Constitution and Supreme Court of Canada say that we can’t get rid of it without the unanimous consent of the provinces, which will not be forthcoming.
If I were premier of Quebec, or any of the smaller provinces to the east, I would never agree to give up on the Senate arrangements my predecessors insisted on as a precondition to entering the federation, not without something pretty good in exchange.
Brian Mulroney tried that, and the resulting failure destroyed the Progressive Conservative party and led to a referendum.
That’s the problem with what Mulcair is proposing. It sounds good, but the premiers won’t go for it, not without a Meech-style round of constitutional horse-trading that would be worse than the Senate status quo.
This provides an opening for Justin Trudeau, who could use an opportunity about now, to provide some details about his proposal to reform the Senate, which he promised at the beginning of last year, when he wisely ejected all 32 Liberal senators from his caucus.
But how will he do it? When Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked the Supreme Court to rule on his plan to appoint senators elected through consultative elections, the justices told him he couldn’t do it without the approval of the provinces because the change would endow senators with a popular mandate, fundamentally changing the Constitution.
Trudeau says he wants to only appoint independent senators, “through an open, transparent and public process,” empowering a committee of worthies to draw up lists for him.
That could be enough. The real problem with the Senate isn’t the petty pilfering, which we can afford, it’s that the whole place is being used, undemocratically, to sleazily subsidize the electoral work of two political parties.
If Trudeau puts forward a sensible way of ending that, that might not be the reform we want but it will be the reform we need.