Provinces play down Senate reform expectations
Premiers to discuss issue at upcoming retreat
Provincial governments are downplaying expectations about tackling Senate reform at an upcoming retreat of premiers scheduled for next week.
While the Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s office said it wanted the provincial government caucus to debate legislation “calling for the abolition of the Senate,” the premiers from other provinces, including the host, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, have suggested alternative solutions.
“The Premier’s preference is reforming the Senate but looks forward to the discussion next week with her colleagues,” Wynne’s office told Postmedia News in a statement.
Saskatchewan government spokeswoman Kathy Young, responding to a report in the National Post about provincial legislation on the Senate, said its caucus would be given a chance to “provide input” on its own decisions and positions.
Meanwhile, in British Columbia, Premier Christy Clark’s office noted she has previously suggested the Senate shouldn’t be a distraction and the country should either “fix it or fold it.”
The federal minister responsible for democratic reform, Pierre Poilievre, has said this week that Canadians understand the Senate, as it stands today, must either change or “vanish” like the former upper chambers in provinces did in the past.
Other issues will also be discussed at the meeting, scheduled at the end of next week, including jobs training as well as calls for a national energy strategy and tackling infrastructure needs in the wake of devastating flooding that has struck Alberta.
“We’re going to take some fairly big steps, moving forward, to rebuild our infrastructure here, but we certainly want to do it in a way that’s going to prevent something like this from happening again,” said Neala Barton, a spokeswoman for Alberta Premier Alison Redford. “We clearly recognize that what happened in Alberta was certainly devastating, but it is something that all provinces can face.”
She noted other areas of the country, including Toronto and parts of Manitoba have also been affected.
“They’re very traumatic and sad things to go through and they disrupt so many lives,” said Barton. “So there is a large-scale financial cost as well, so we want to talk to other provinces about how we can prevent floods like this from happening in the future and how more co-ordination on mitigation measures might help.”
Wynne’s office, which noted that the meeting would, for the first time, have almost as many women as men around the table, said she also hoped to discuss job creation as well as developing a strategy to convince the federal government to commit to strategic infrastructure investments in transit, roads and bridges.